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An introductory review of SAT solvers via a curated awesome list, covering their evolution from Chaff onwards and key resources including the Handbook of SAT.

A primer on battery technology for software developers: the history, electrochemistry, and key concepts behind how batteries work and why they matter.

A simple model for cost is as follows:

And we have Q_i_subbar and Q_i_superbar, which are the upper production limits of powerplant i so Q_i_subbar <= Q_i <= Q_i_superbar

where

• C_i is the cost of powerplant i
• Q_i is the energy output of powerplant i
• FC_i is the fixed …

Markets II: Properties of electricity and market structure¶

There’s a certain bare minimum of terms related to electricity required to make sense of the economics. This is really a reminder for myself, who hasn’t studied a hard science since year 11.

Electricity must be generated. Further, electricity is very hard to store, so …

Notes on electricity markets: their history, the complexity of generation and pricing, and why they differ from standard economics textbook models.

Examining the limits of Large Language Models: whether they think or understand language, and what the research literature reveals about their capabilities and shortcomings.

Notes on ML approaches to time series forecasting, the M competitions, and why foundation models struggle with the generality of tabular and time series data.

Summary: An introduction to Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR), a supervised dimensionality reduction technique that preserves information relevant to the target variable.

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Sometimes, you read something unexpected. I was looking through this paper on statistical perspectives on representation learning and came across this family of methods: "sliced inverse regression." Sliced inverse regression? What the heck …

A brief riff on stable, mature tools. I've been playing around recently with a little project involving recommender systems. Anyway, for the website, I ended up reaching for Django. Man, it's been over a year since I've done any Django projects, but I forgot how joy it is to use it. The documentation is excellent …

Computer graphics is full of wizardry but the demo scene is populated by arch-wizards. The community has some very talented people and there's lots to learn (like ray marching and signed distance functions). I tried my hand at a couple of dweets, which are tiny demos that fit in a tweet.

This was from just …

There's some wacky stuff in the Jupyter ecosystem. Still, one thing that really stood out for me was the extension of Jupyter notebooks into web development and their interaction with the JavaScript ecosystem. So web assembly is a thing, and you can run C and Rust code inside little isolated JavaScript sandboxes instances, maybe even …

Sometimes I like to write a little js in my blog posts. Here is an example of how to embed a javascript file in a pelican article.

Below the fold, is an example of embedding a js chart into a pelican article. Specifically, we have the crude marriage rates in Australia for 2000 to 2022 …

Reflections on returning to a Pelican-based personal website after years away: what works, what doesn't, and thoughts on static site generation.

I enjoyed this talk introduction by Allison Kaptur - "Bytes in the Machine" which provides easy but insightful introduction to the CPython intepreter. Worth watching if you'd like to know more about how CPython is implemented and what exactly the interpreter is doing.

Could be followed up with this intro by Guido or a very long …