📜 Archive

A post-rigorous derivation of the Gauss-Newton matrix

Why take a Hessian when a gradient will do? || May 17, 2025

Paper review: Auditing language models for hidden objectives

What's in an objective? || March 30, 2025

Can you train a neural network forever?

Understanding trainability in neural networks || December 27, 2023

Deep dive into the edge of stability

Making loss landscapes trendy again. || October 15, 2023

Evaluating understanding in LLMs

It's surprisingly hard. || August 27, 2023

When do adaptive optimizers fail to generalize?

A case study || January 29, 2023

Do we know why deep learning generalizes yet?

It depends on your epistemology. || July 30, 2022

The Importance of Making Mistakes in RL

A tale of two NeurIPS papers || December 18, 2021

How to Win Scholarships and Influence Donors

All of my thoughts on scholarships in one place || September 25, 2021

Auxiliary tasks in RL

Maybe the real reward was the representation we learned along the way. || April 3, 2021

Power to the people, but how?

From muffins to marathons || November 5, 2020

A Bayesian Perspective on Training Speed and Model Selection

As presented at NeurIPS 2020 || October 30, 2020

Why I'm Learning Biology

And why yoou should too || October 5, 2020

Causality, Generalization, and Reinforcement Learning

Oh my! || July 11, 2020

In praise of the logarithm

Why are logarithms so magical? || April 20, 2020

Causality

If causation isn't correlation, then what is it? || August 9, 2019

What makes the distributional perspective on RL different?

Stuff I did in 2018 || February 8, 2019

Probabilistic Graphical Models

Why I shouldn't quit my PhD to go into the coffee business. || November 11, 2018

Reflections on my first month in grad school

DPhil life || November 10, 2018

A semi-coherent summary of set theory pt 2

Or how set theorists are bad at naming things || May 25, 2017

A semi-coherent summary of set theory

Or why math really really needs rules || May 20, 2017

Week 1 in Oxford

I'm in Oxford! || May 14, 2017

School starts, as do the cool proofs

Infinity is still really cool. || September 6, 2016

What Work is Worth

Or, how getting grossed out by blood was possibly the most profitable personality trait I ended up with. || August 21, 2016

First Week at Microsoft

Or how I installed more microsoft products in two days than I had in the last two years. || June 6, 2016

On Entering the Real World

Or, on getting a job at a big tech company. || May 25, 2016

A gentle introduction to infinities

Infinity is bigger than you think. || May 16, 2016

A round-up of my favourite proofs from introductory math courses

I spent a lot of time proving things this year. || April 28, 2016