Why do we divide by n-1 when estimating the variance? | Two answers to the question every first-year stats student asks

What's grokking good for? | Some intuition on the what, why, and how of delayed generalization

A post-rigorous derivation of the Gauss-Newton matrix | Why take a Hessian when a gradient will do?

Paper review: Auditing language models for hidden objectives | What's in an objective?

Can you train a neural network forever? | Understanding trainability in neural networks

Deep dive into the edge of stability | Making loss landscapes trendy again.

Evaluating understanding in LLMs | It's surprisingly hard.

When do adaptive optimizers fail to generalize? | A case study

Do we know why deep learning generalizes yet? | It depends on your epistemology.

The Importance of Making Mistakes in RL | A tale of two NeurIPS papers

How to Win Scholarships and Influence Donors | All of my thoughts on scholarships in one place

Auxiliary tasks in RL | Maybe the real reward was the representation we learned along the way.

Power to the people, but how? | From muffins to marathons

A Bayesian Perspective on Training Speed and Model Selection | As presented at NeurIPS 2020

Why I'm Learning Biology | And why yoou should too

Causality, Generalization, and Reinforcement Learning | Oh my!

In praise of the logarithm | Why are logarithms so magical?

Causality | If causation isn't correlation, then what is it?

An ImPACtful, BAYESic result | Generalization can be Bayesian, too

What makes the distributional perspective on RL different? | Stuff I did in 2018

Probabilistic Graphical Models | Why I shouldn't quit my PhD to go into the coffee business.

Reflections on my first month in grad school | DPhil life

A semi-coherent summary of set theory pt 2 | Or how set theorists are bad at naming things

A semi-coherent summary of set theory | Or why math really really needs rules

Week 1 in Oxford | I'm in Oxford!

School starts, as do the cool proofs | Infinity is still really cool.

What Work is Worth | Or, how getting grossed out by blood was possibly the most profitable personality trait I ended up with.

First Week at Microsoft | Or how I installed more microsoft products in two days than I had in the last two years.

On Entering the Real World | Or, on getting a job at a big tech company.

A gentle introduction to infinities | Infinity is bigger than you think.

A round-up of my favourite proofs from introductory math courses | I spent a lot of time proving things this year.