Trigger warning: incredibly wonky theoretical cryptography post (written by a non-theorist)! Also, this will be in two parts. I plan to be back with some more thoughts on practical stuff, like clou…

It's an iffy Amazon leadership principle but a great engineering metric

If you’re fed up with Meta right now, you’re not alone. Meta tracks you across millions of websites and apps and its business model relies on your data. If you want to limit Meta’s ability to collect

How Bruin genetic scientists are reawakening hibernating follicles.

In order to thrive in hostile and ever-changing natural environments, mammalian brains evolved to store large amounts of knowledge about the world and continually integrate new information while...

Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic...

The 28th annual Christmas lecture
Thursday, December 5, 2024

A directed graph can often be best understood and used if we partition its vertices into separate components of various kinds. Most important are the strongly connected components, called “strong…

Update – April 29, 2025:
The Answer Assistant experiment has concluded.

Answer Assistant is an experiment in which AI-generated answers are verified, edited, and curated by the community before be...

A deep dive into HTML whitespace collapsing: How it works, why it sucks, how it should work, and how to deal with it.

One of the most inspiring results from DeepSeek-R1-Zero is the occurrence of “Aha moment” through pure reinforcement learning (RL). At the Aha moment, the model learns emergent skills such as self-reflection, which helps it to conduct in-context search to…

Secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world, which if implemented would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to its users.