11 Comments
User's avatar
Alvaro de Menard's avatar

Borges's Library of Babel is my favorite treatment of the “what does it mean to say that numbers really exist?” question.

Expand full comment
Jon Stokes's avatar

I'll check that out.

Expand full comment
Screwtape316's avatar

Jon, the real-ness of numbers reminded me of the twins in Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"... The relevant section is posted here:

https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins.htm

Some are skeptical of the story... But there's got to be patterns we humans don't (yet?) perceive...

Expand full comment
Jon Stokes's avatar

Thanks! Yeah, that's a great story. Someone mentioned it on Twitter, too. That book has been on my list for a while.

Expand full comment
Max's avatar

Just coming back to this piece after a year or two and wanted to say how much this helped me. And the appendix at the end is just icing on the cake. Trying to bend my mind around what latent space entails from a metaphysics standpoint (seems like a lot of good ground to be covered by the Critical Realists here).

Expand full comment
ElliotM's avatar

for those looking for more on the concept of latent space:

detailed:

https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d

and ofc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_space

Expand full comment
Matt Harder's avatar

Thanks, Jon, for the useful framework. I’m stoked for more of the series and to use it as inspiration / guide to get my hands dirty on some of these models. Super relevant content.

Expand full comment
Rick Hull's avatar

Great primer. This might be interesting for you or your readers: https://github.com/rickhull/backprop

It covers the basics of neural nets, backward propagation, and gradient descent, along with minimal and simple ruby code, based on Andrej Karpathy's MicroGrad.

Expand full comment
Jon Stokes's avatar

I actually have this in my Notion db to dig into later :) I'm a rubyist and had been looking for something like this, so I'll definitely have to get into it and maybe write about it.

Expand full comment
Jacob Titus's avatar

Thank you, Jon. I'm eager for the next one.

Expand full comment
Abhijeet Katte's avatar

Great read. I wrote a small piece on the creator economy here: https://clarioncall.substack.com/p/the-book-that-predicted-the-creator

Expand full comment