All posts

latest writings and other thoughts

London Crime Dashboard
18 min
Thoughts
Open Data
London

a dashboard about London crime, as reported by the Metropolitan Police.

Apr 19, 2025
Dear Apple, Why Does Universal Control Suck?
1 min
Thoughts
Apple
Universal Control

i love the idea of Universal Control, but it doesn’t work as well as it should.

Mar 28, 2025
Deblurring, a Classic Machine Learning Problem
29 min
Experiments
Machine Learning

train a variational autoencoder to deblur images

Mar 20, 2025
Mondrianiser: Image Inpainting with VAEs
40 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Deep Learning

an example of generative models using a variational autoencoder

Mar 17, 2025
Adam’s Apple
the Adam optimisation algorithm
23 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
A key component of training deep learning models is the choice of optimisation algorithm. There are several approaches, ranging from :link simple…
Mar 14, 2025
Maps and More Maps
sometimes a map and a few lines of code are all you need
10 min
Experiments
Software Engineering
Recently I was trying to figure out sun exposure for a specific location, except I was a couple of thousand kilometers away, and needed to get a…
Mar 10, 2025
Getting Things Right: How Engineering Teams Scale and Achieve Great Things
21 min
Thoughts
Software Engineering
Scaling

larger doesn’t always mean faster or better

Mar 4, 2025
Moving to Quarto
why i think quarto is better
1 min
Thoughts
Publishing
I’ve been using JupyterBook to create this site for a while, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. But I’ve recently started using Quarto, and I think…
Mar 3, 2025
France, AI and Back to Nuclear for Germany ?
were the french right all along ?
2 min
Thoughts
AI
Politics
Europe
President Macron has just signalled that France is about to announce €109 billion private sector investments in AI. This is a significant amount of…
Feb 10, 2025
How GPU’s work, an explainer using the Mandelbrot set
mandelbrot sets and parallelism
18 min
Experiments
GPU
Every day pretty much all of us either uses or hears about the mythical GPU, the Graphics Processing Unit. It’s the thing that makes your games…
Feb 9, 2025
Reinforcement Learning - a Primer using Connect Four
the basics of reinforcement learning using connect four as an example, with the gymnasium and baselines libraries
16 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Reinforcement Learning
One of the mainstay algorithms in machine learning is reinforcement learning (or RL for short). RL is an approach to machine learning that is used…
Feb 9, 2025
Regularisation in Machine Learning
a practical guide in overfitting prevention
24 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Regularisation is a technique designed to prevent models from overfitting. In other words, it helps your model generalise better to unseen data by…
Feb 4, 2025
Reasoning Models for Fun and Profit
deepseek r1 and the chinese room
8 min
HowTo
AI
Language Models
Since the advent of GPT-3, foundation models have rapidly progressed from single pass transformer models, to multi-step models that can reason over…
Jan 11, 2025
Model Fine-tuning with the Hugging Face transformers Library
the basics of traditional fine-tuning
21 min
HowTo
AI
Language Models
Previously, we learned how to use Apple’s MLX framework to fine-tune a language model. This is an Apple specific framework and is not available to…
Jan 5, 2025
Fine-tuning an LLM with Apple’s MLX Framework
fine-tuning pre-trained language models in apple silicon
10 min
HowTo
AI
Language Models
Modern GPU’s come with inbuilt memory, which is separate from the CPU’s memory. This means that when training large models, the data has to be…
Dec 11, 2024
Model Management with MLflow
how to log, compare, and deploy machine learning models consistently with mlflow
13 min
HowTo
Machine Learning
Model Management
As you develop machine learning models, you will find that you need to manage many different versions and variations as you move towards the desired…
Nov 12, 2024
Will Artificial Intelligence Ever be More than Fancy Curve Fitting ?
ai is just hyperdimensional regression
7 min
Thoughts
AI
Machine Learning
One of my favourite books from my late 20’s was Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, where he argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic…
Oct 11, 2024
A Classical Machine Learning Problem: Predicting Customer Churn
using machine learning to solve a common business problem
28 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Customer churn, where customers stop using a company’s services, is a major concern for businesses as it directly impacts revenue. Traditionally…
Jul 9, 2024
Text Tasks without Neural Networks
random forests and embeddings for sentiment analysis
19 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
NLP
Natural language processing (NLP) is often associated with deep learning and neural networks. However, there are efficient methods for text…
Jun 19, 2024
The Basics of Unsupervised Learning: Segmenting an Image
a quick primer on what unsupervised learning means and how it can be used for image segmentation
22 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Unsupervised Learning
Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning that looks for previously undetected patterns in a dataset without pre-existing labels and with…
Jun 7, 2024
Exploring the Impact of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks in Machine Learning
a new dawn for machine learning, or just another fad?
13 min
Thoughts
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
AI
Machine learning never sleeps, and its latest wake-up call is the cutting-edge Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), as detailed in this NSF paper.…
May 25, 2024
On Scaling AI: Are we Hitting the Limits of our Current Approaches?
the data problem and the chinchilla scaling law
5 min
Thoughts
AI
Scaling
There’s been a lot of speculation on whether we’re hitting the limits of our current approaches to scaling AI. Will OpenAI and others be able to…
May 20, 2024
The Connundrum of European Tech and Artificial Intelligence
why Europe is lagging behind in ai investment and innovation
8 min
Thoughts
AI
Europe
Politics
The European tech scene is a curious one. It is a region that is home to some of the oldest and most representative companies in the world, yet it…
May 20, 2024
Machine Learning and Predictive Maintenance
using machine learning for a common industrial and engineering application
14 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Predictive maintenance leverages machine learning to analyze operational data, anticipate potential failures, and schedule timely maintenance. This…
May 11, 2024
Caching long running jobs
how to cache the results of long running computations in python
6 min
In any data science or machine learning pipeline, one often has to re-try and experiment with long running computations. For example, maybe you will…
Apr 27, 2024
Time Series Forecasting with Prophet
predicting the future with machine learning
10 min
Experiments
Time Series Analysis
Machine Learning
Forecasting future trends is a common application in time series analysis. In this experiment, we will use Meta’s Prophet library to predict trends…
Apr 20, 2024
Understanding Random Forest Classification and Its Effectiveness
why random forests and ensemble methods are the underrated heroes of machine learning
14 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
A Random Forest is a versatile and robust machine learning algorithm used for both classification and regression tasks. It builds upon the concept…
Mar 7, 2024
Instance vs Model Learning
a comparison of two machine learning approaches
11 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Instance-based machine learning and model-based machine learning are two broad categories of machine learning algorithms that differ in their…
Mar 2, 2024
Which Car is Best ? Analysing and Predicting MOT Test Results
dive deeper into data analysis using a real-world dataset
38 min
Machine Learning
Data Science
Experiments
In this experiment, we will be analysing the MOT test results of cars in the UK. The MOT test is an annual test of vehicle safety, roadworthiness…
Feb 20, 2024
A Wine Quality Prediction Experiment with SKLearn Pipelines
pipelining in machine learning, for fun and profit
12 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
In this experiment, let us use the Wine Quality Dataset from Kaggle to predict the quality of wine based on its features. We will investigate the…
Feb 18, 2024
Evaluating Dimensionality Reduction - PCA vs t-SNE
reducing dimensions for better insights
6 min
Experiments
Machine Learning
Evaluating the effectiveness of dimensionality reduction techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t-Distributed Stochastic…
Feb 11, 2024
Basics of Word Vectors
understanding what word vectors are, and what they mean in modern natural language processing
7 min
Experiments
NLP
Machine Learning
Word vectors are a mainstay of NLP, and are used in a variety of tasks, from sentiment analysis to machine translation. In this experiment, we will…
May 22, 2023
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