NotesByLex

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248 posts of every kind, newest first. Filter by kind in the sidebar, or see just the essays.

2026 35

  1. model Kimi K3.1 Pro

    One of the world's most intelligent models is (soon-to-be) open weight.

  2. paper Context Language Models

    Language models that manage their own context.

  3. model Gemini 4 Argon

    Google's long-awaited new frontier model.

  4. model Muse Wonder

    Opus 5.5 quality model that supports audio.

  5. essay Building an agent harness from scratch to pass Ian Goodfellow's intelligence test

    What was once considered a test of "real AI" - now built entirely in a single blog post.

  6. paper Harness Engineering Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents

    A source-code comparison of eleven agent harnesses and the seven parts they have in common.

  7. model Claude Haiku 5.5

    New Haiku-class model - this time an actual new Haiku model.

  8. essay Can Claude Opus 5.5 find any new leads on Satoshi Nakamoto?

    Let's see if Claude can find anything that the New York Times missed.

  9. model GPT 6 Sol and Luna

    Another insanely good value-for-money offering from OpenAI

  10. model Claude Opus 5.5

    Better, faster, and cheaper. Doesn't feel like we're slowing down.

  11. paper An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents

    An ablation of planning, tools and context management configurations for coding agents.

  12. essay Giving Up on Smart Rings

    The downsides to wearing a fitness-tracking device on your finger

  13. news MCP is Now a Stateless Protocol

    A new MCP specification that removes handshakes and mandatory sessions.

  14. model Qwen3.8-Max

    A new frontier model from the Qwen team

  15. paper LLM Agents Do Not Reliably Follow Company Policies

    A new benchmark that tests whether AI agents can follow long company policies during realistic work

  16. paper Decomposing LLM Judge Scores Into Yes/No Questions

    An LLM-judge approach that brings interpretability and actionability to your scores.

  17. news OpenAI and Hugging Face security incident - July 21, 2026

    Ultimate benchmaxxing: hacking Hugging Face for test answers.

  18. model Kimi K3

    Moonshot AI's 2.8T open-weight frontier model for coding and knowledge work.

  19. essay 6 Months of OpenClaw

    Macros, workouts and life admin.

  20. essay Completing A Computer Science Degree On Coursera

    A short write-up on my experience completing a Computer Science BSc from my bedroom.

  21. essay Shipping a Laptop to a Refugee Camp in Uganda

    The surprisingly difficult ordeal of sending a decade-old MacBook to a friend in a Ugandan refugee camp.

  22. paper Heavy Thinking: A Test-Time Scaling Pattern for Hard Problems

    Now we have GPT Pro at home

  23. paper LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

    A large-scale study on long-horizon document tasks.

  24. essay AI-Induced Cognitive Atrophy

    We probably need to do deliberate daily mental exercise

  25. note LLM Training Pipeline

    The two steps to training modern LLMs.

  26. paper OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games

    An agentic framework for end-to-end game creation

  27. essay Naming Things Is Easy Now

    I guess there is only one hard thing left in Computer Science?

  28. project Obsidian Markdown Notebook: code execution with outputs stored in the file

    A Jupyter Notebook-style Obsidian plugin that runs code in your notes and stores the outputs directly in the Markdown file.

  29. essay Research, Plan, Implement Workflow

    An approach to agentic software development that I use

  30. paper Self-Generated Agent Context Files Don't Help Either

    Self-generated agent context files don't help.

  31. paper Self-Generated Skills Don't Help

    Curated skills boost agent performance by 16 points; self-generated ones don't help at all.

  32. paper Generative Modelling via Drifting

    A new paradigm for single-step generative modelling

  33. essay Software Factory

    is verification the future of software engineering?

  34. essay OpenClaw: the missing piece for Obsidian's second brain

    how I integrate OpenClaw into my Obsidian vault

  35. essay Spec-First LLM Development

    in which the LLM maintains a spec file alongside the project

2025 26

  1. project Title As Link Text: automatic note titles in Obsidian links

    An Obsidian plugin that automatically replaces filenames in your links with the actual note title, supporting both Wikilinks and Markdown links.

  2. note CBIS-DDSM Mammography Dataset

    ImageNet for Mammography

  3. note Mammography

    A breast cancer screening method

  4. note SPARQL

    a query language for RDF databases

  5. note RDF

    A graph-based data model for the Semantic Web

  6. note Logical Reasoning

    Describing the 3 types of logical reasoning: Abduction, deduction and induction.

  7. note Genetic Algorithms

    an optimisation technique inspired by natural selection

  8. note LLM Reasoning

    How LLMs use intermediate reasoning tokens, from chain-of-thought prompting to trained reasoning models, and how this relates to other forms of reasoning.

  9. paper Optimising Computation At The Token-Level

    Optimising computation at the token-level

  10. essay Absurdly Good Doggo Consistency with FLUX.1 Kontext

    Experiments with multi-turn character consistent editing

  11. paper Learning to Reason without External Rewards

    aka Self-Confidence is All You Need

  12. talk John Carmack is working on game-playing robots

    on John Carmack's Upperbound 25 Talk Notes

  13. essay Imagen 4 is faster, but GPT is still the GOAT

    a few comparisons of Google's Imagen 4 vs OpenAI's gpt-image-1

  14. paper Vibe-Coding Mathematical Discoveries

    Using evolutionary algorithms with LLM-coding agents

  15. paper NoProp: Training Neural Networks Without Back-Propagation or Forward-Propagation

    an alternative training method to backprop that does local layer learning

  16. paper Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data

    learn to reason without any human-annotated data.

  17. paper Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning

    a classic paper applying neural networks to RL for game playing

  18. note Q-Learning

    a reinforcement learning algorithm for finding optimal policies

  19. note Markov Decision Process (MDP)

    A mathematical framework for modelling decision-making under uncertainty

  20. note Merkle Tree

    a data structure where each node contains the hash of its child nodes

  21. note RSA

    a public-key encryption system reliant on the practical difficulty of factorising large numbers

  22. note Spanning Tree

    a sub graph of a connected graph that contains all vertices, but no cycles

  23. note Bucket Sort

    a distribution-based sorting algorithm that works by dividing elements into buckets

  24. note Temperature Scaling

    a parameter that controls how confident Softmax predictions are

  25. note Few-Shot Knowledge-Distillation

    Routes LLM tasks to cheaper or more powerful models based on task novelty.

  26. paper Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners (May 2022)

    improve zero-shot prompt performance of LLMs by adding “Let’s think step by step” before each answer

2024 25

  1. paper Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (Sep 2014)

    improve the Encoder/Decoder alignment with an Attention Mechanism

  2. paper Thinking LLMs: General Instruction Following with Thought Generation (Oct 2024)

    a prompting and fine-tuning method that enables LLMs to engage in a "thinking" process before generating responses

  3. paper Mixtral of Experts (Jan 2024)

    a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model

  4. paper Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI

    a comprehensive evaluation of o1-preview across many tasks and domains.

  5. paper AI Meets the Classroom: When Does ChatGPT Harm Learning?

    LLMs can help and also hinder learning outcomes

  6. note System 2 Thinking
  7. paper No 'Zero-Shot' Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance

    a paper that shows a model needs to see a concept exponentially more times to achieve linear improvements

  8. note Agentic Reasoning

    an approach to utilising LLMs that involve multi-state interactions.

  9. note Bayes Theorem

    Update the probability of an event based on new evidence

  10. note Waffle Chart

    A data visualization that uses squares along a 2D grid for representing proportion.

  11. note Scaled Dot-Product Attention

    The specific self-attention formulation from the Transformer paper, distinguished by scaling scores by the square root of the attention dimension.

  12. note Queue

    a sequential data structure where we can add an element to the tail, or remove an element from the head.

  13. note Stack

    a data structure where only the top element is accessible

  14. note Gale-Shapley Algorithm

    an algorithm that matches 2-equally sizes groups based on preferences.

  15. note Merge Sort

    a popular divide-and-conquer sorting algorithm

  16. paper Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesizers

    VALL-E can generate speech in anyone's voice with only a 3-second sample of the speaker and some text

  17. note Self-Attention

    A method of computing a token representation that includes the context of surrounding tokens.

  18. essay Software Development is a Trade

    we should educate developers accordingly

  19. note Convex Hull

    the smallest polygon that contains a set of points

  20. note Insertion Sort

    a widely-known iterate sorting algorithm

  21. note Overfit First

    the first step to training a neural network successfully

  22. note Residual Vector Quantisation

    A tokeniser for audio

  23. note Snake Activation Function

    An activation function for modelling data with periodicity (repeating patterns)

  24. note Leaky ReLU

    An activation function that outputs a small value for negative numbers

  25. note ReLU

    An activation function that replaces negative values with zero

2023 23

  1. note Module Coupling

    A measure of the interdependence between software modules

  2. note Module

    A distinct and identifiable unit of code

  3. note Module Cohesion

    How elements of a module relate to each other

  4. paper Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation

    Notes from paper Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation by Yusong Wu, Ke Chen, Tianyu Zhang, Yuchen Hui, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Shlomo Dubnov

  5. note CLIP

    a model that can associate textual representations with images.

  6. note Predicate Logic

    An extension of propositional logic that involves variables and quantifiers.

  7. note Propositional Logic

    A system that deals with statements that are either true or false

  8. note Propositions

    Declarative sentences that are either true or false (but not both)

  9. note Mel Spectrogram

    A sound wave visualisation of frequency over time

  10. note Sample Rate

    A measure of how accurately the source signal was digitally represented

  11. note Sound Wave

    Wave of pressure which our ears can perceive

  12. note Probability

    How likely an event is to occur

  13. note Law of Sines

    Tells us the ratio between the sine of an angle and the side opposite it will be constant for all angles in a triangle

  14. essay Making Song Covers With My AI Voice

    Training a singing voice conversion model on my voice

  15. note Recursion

    a method of solving a problem where a function calls itself

  16. note Function

    A rule that matches inputs with outputs.

  17. note Graphs (Discrete Mathematics)

    the study of graphs

  18. note Linear Function

    a function represented by a straight line on a graph

  19. note Quadratic Function

    a function represented by a U-shaped curve on a graph

  20. note TF-IDF

    A word numerisation technique that weights terms by their importance to a document.

  21. note Cardinality

    Cardinality refers to the number of elements a set contains.

  22. course Discrete Mathematics Course Notes

    Notes from Discrete Mathematics by University of London

  23. note Set

    A set is a unique collection of well-defined objects.

2022 14

  1. essay Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT

    A use case for ChatGPT

  2. note Attention Mechanism

    A technique for computing a weighted combination of a sequence of vectors, originally devised to overcome a bottleneck in seq-to-seq translation models.

  3. essay Idempotent Data Pipelines

    Idempotence is a key property of a fault tolerant and easy-to-operate data pipeline

  4. essay An Interface Should Respond Within A Tenth Of A Second

    Developers must be vigilant of slow user interfaces

  5. essay A Rule For Ordering Methods

    Apply the Stepdown Rule to the ordering of methods

  6. essay Do Standups Story-By-Story not Person-By-Person

    Start the day by focusing on the work

  7. essay Document Your Documentation

    A short document that explains how your team documents things.

  8. paper A Discriminative Feature Learning Approach for Deep Face Recognition

    Notes from paper A Discriminative Feature Learning Approach for Deep Face Recognition by Yandong Wen, Kaipeng Zhang, Zhifeng Li, and Yu Qiao

  9. paper ArcFace: Additive Angular Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition

    Notes from paper ArcFace: Additive Angular Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition by Jiankang Deng, Jia Guo, Niannan Xue, Stefanos Zafeiriou

  10. note Embedding

    A learned vector representation that encodes meaning as a point in space, where similar things end up close together.

  11. note Eigenvalue

    A value which describes how much a transformation scales an Eigenvector

  12. note Eigenvector

    A set of vectors whose span doesn't change after a transformation.

  13. course Essence of Linear Algebra

    Notes from 3Blue1Brown's video series, Essence of Linear Algebra

  14. note Changing Basis

    Since any vectors can be Basis Vectors, it's useful to understand how to translate vectors between bases

2021 89

  1. note Roblox Attachment

    An object that describes a point and orientation relative to a BasePart

  2. note Cross Product

    An operation between two 3d vectors that returns a vector.

  3. course Cross product introduction

    Notes from Cross product introduction by Khan Academy.

  4. note Matrix Determinate

    A measure of how a matrix scales space.

  5. note Matrix Transformation

    A matrix as a transformation of a space.

  6. note Basis Vectors

    The set of vectors that defines space.

  7. note Roblox CFrame

    In Roblox, a CFrame (coordinate frame) is an object that encodes position and rotation in 3D space.

  8. note Radians

    A measurement of an angle in radiuses

  9. note Matrix Inverse

    A matrix that reverses a transformation.

  10. note Identity Matrix

    A square matrix with 1s on the diagonal and 0s elsewhere: multiplying by it leaves any matrix unchanged.

  11. course Mathematics for Machine Learning

    Notes from Coursera's Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra by Imperial College London

  12. note Law Of Cosines

    The Law of Cosines expresses the relationship between the length of a triangle's sides and one of its angles.

  13. course Law of cosines (Khan Academy)

    Notes from the Khan Academy video series on the Law of Cosines

  14. note Roblox Vector3

    Roblox's 3D vector type.

  15. course Deep Learning for Coders (2020)

    Notes from the Deep Learning for Coders (2020) video series by Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger (fast.ai)

  16. note Matrix Multiplication

    An operation between two matrices that produces a new matrix via row-column dot products.

  17. note Dot Product

    An operation between 2 vectors that returns a number.

  18. note Binary Cross-Entropy Loss

    A loss function for binary and multi-label classification, also known as log loss.

  19. note Presizing

    Resize images to a larger intermediate size before augmenting.

  20. note Categorical Cross-Entropy Loss

    A loss function for multiclass classification: softmax followed by negative log-likelihood.

  21. note Cross-Entropy

    A measure of how well one probability distribution encodes events from another.

  22. note Information Entropy

    A measure of uncertainty — highest when all outcomes are equally likely, lowest when one dominates.

  23. note Negative Log-Likelihood

    a multi-class classification loss function

  24. note Softmax Function

    Converts a vector of numbers into probabilities that sum to 1.

  25. note Sigmoid Function

    Squeezes any number into a range between 0 and 1.

  26. note Domain Shift

    When production data diverges significantly from the training dataset

  27. note Server Authoritative Multiplayer

    A multiplayer architecture where the server is the single source of truth for game state.

  28. note Out-of-Domain

    When the production data is significantly different from the training distribution.

  29. note Proxy Metrics

    Metrics are usually a proxy for what we really care about

  30. book How to Take Smart Notes

    Notes from Sönke Ahrens' guide to the Zettelkasten note-taking system.

  31. note Fleeting Notes

    Temporary captures of ideas to be processed into permanent notes.

  32. note Literature Notes

    Notes that capture source material in your own words, as an intermediate step toward permanent notes.

  33. note Permanent Notes

    Atomic, self-contained notes that capture a single idea and link to related ones.

  34. note Survivorship Bias

    arriving at false conclusions by only examining success cases

  35. note Latticework of Mental Models

    Building a broad network of concepts across disciplines so ideas can reinforce each other.

  36. note Teaching the whole game

    Starting with the big picture.

  37. note Topic Overview (Zettlekasten)

    The entry point for a cluster of ideas.

  38. note Adversarial Validation

    A technique for measuring how different your test set is from your training set.

  39. note Voxel

    A single datapoint in a 3d-grid, the word is a combination of "volume" and "pixel"

  40. note Promotion vs Calibration

    Promotion means proving you can already do the next job.

  41. note Confirmation Bias

    The tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already believe.

  42. note Breaks Are Essential For Learning

    Your brain consolidates information into long-term memory while it's on break.

  43. note Growth Mindset

    The belief that any skill can be mastered through effort, rather than being fixed at birth.

  44. note Encapsulation

    Protecting code against invariant violations by making the wrong thing impossible.

  45. note Well-Designed API

    Make the wrong thing impossible.

  46. note Black-box Tests

    Tests written without knowledge of the software's internal structure

  47. note Four Pillars of Good Unit Tests

    Khorikov's 4 pillars of good unit tests

  48. note Test Pyramid

    A prescripted balance of automated test types

  49. note CAP Theorem

    Consistency, availability, and partition tolerance — pick two.

  50. note Arrange, Act and Assert (AAA) Pattern

    A pattern for structuring unit tests

  51. note Unit tests

    An automated test which verifies a single unit of behaviour, runs quickly and in isolation

  52. note Entropy

    A measure of disorder — the number of possible states a system can be in.

  53. note Software Entropy

    The tendency for codebases to become harder to change as they grow.

  54. note Test Coverage Metrics

    Metrics that answer the question : how much of our code is executed by our tests?

  55. book The Art of Game Design - A Book Of Lenses (2nd Edition) by Jesse Schell

    Notes from Jesse Schell's comprehensive guide to game design.

  56. note Red Ocean

    A market with a lot of competitiors fighting for dominance

  57. note Multiple Inheritance

    When an object inherits from multiple parents.

  58. note Object Prototypes

    OOP in Lua via prototypal inheritance: objects delegate missing field lookups to a prototype table.

  59. note Lua Table-Access Metamethods

    Metamethods for intercepting table reads and writes: the foundation of OOP in Lua.

  60. note Metatables

    A table attached to another table to define its custom behaviour, via metamethods like __add and __index.

  61. note Player Dependance in Multiplayer Games

    Strong multiplayer communities form when players genuinely need each other to succeed.

  62. note Character Web

    A map of what each character thinks of every other character.

  63. note Interpersonal Circumplex

    A two-axis diagram for visualising character relationships in a story.

  64. note Transmedia Worlds

    A fictional world that can be entered through many different types of media.

  65. note Indirect Control

    The art of guiding players through your experience, while still making them feel in control.

  66. note Integer

    A 32-bit number encoding, either signed (-2B to 2B) or unsigned (0 to 4B).

  67. note The Story Machine

    A game designed to generate a unique story each playthrough rather than follow a scripted one.

  68. note Interest Curve

    A graph of expected player interest over time.

  69. note Goal Of A Game Interface

    Make players feel in control of their experience.

  70. note Lua Coroutines

    Functions that can pause and resume execution, similar to Python generators.

  71. note Doubling or Halving as a Game Balancing Technique

    When tuning game values, double or halve them instead of nudging: it makes the effect obvious.

  72. note Meaningful Game Economies

    A game economy is meaningful when spending and earning money form a rewarding loop.

  73. note Emergent Complexity

    Complex interactions that arise naturally from a simple ruleset.

  74. note Emergent Gameplay

    Strategic actions that aren't in the rules but arise naturally from playing the game.

  75. note Variable Rewards

    On the power of unpredictable rewards.

  76. note Key to Addictive Game Design

    Addictive games keep players exercising a skill, taking risks, and working a strategy simultaneously.

  77. note 50% Rule for Game Development

    Plan to ship at half the budget, use the rest to make it great.

  78. note Game Design is Problem Solving

    Define the problem clearly before designing.

  79. note Meaningful Choices in Games

    Choices only matter if the options are meaningfully different and none is obviously dominant.

  80. note Roblox Visualising Opposing Forces

    Visualising Newton's 2nd law and opposing forces using Roblox's BodyForce object.

  81. note String of Pearls

    A linear story interrupted by gameplay segments.

  82. note Triangularity In Game Design

    High-risk, high-reward choices that make games fun.

  83. note Unified Themes of Games

    Every element of a game should reinforce a single theme.

  84. note Vector Addition

    Adding two vectors by summing their corresponding components.

  85. note Vector Subtraction

    Subtracting two vectors by subtracting their corresponding components.

  86. note Rule of Loop

    The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.

  87. note Iterative Development

    deliver working software frequently

  88. note Expected Value

    The sum of weighted outcomes divided by total outcomes

  89. note Loss Adversion

    The tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains.

2020 9

  1. note Newton's Laws Of Motion

    An object at rest stays at rest, F=ma, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

  2. note Flow State

    Complete immersion in an activity with energised focus — also known as "in the zone".

  3. note Key Components of Flow For Players

    Clear goals, immediate feedback, and continuous challenge pitched between boredom and frustration.

  4. note Vector

    An ordered list of numbers that describe an arrow in space.

  5. note Vector Scaling

    Multiplying each value in a vector by the same value

  6. note Roblox Raycasting

    A method of detecting nearby objects in 3D space.

  7. note Raycasting

    A rendering technique that casts rays for each vertical slice of the screen.

  8. course Basic geometry: language and labels

    Notes from Khan Academy video Basic geometry: language and labels

  9. note Ray

    A line-like figure that continue indefinitely in one direction

2018 1

  1. course Fast.ai: Deep Learning 2018

    Course notes from fastai's Deep Learning 2018

2017 6

  1. note SMOTE

    a technique for adding class imbalance by creating synthetic examples

  2. course Convolutional Neural Network (Coursera)
  3. note K-Means

    an unsupervised clustering algorithm

  4. course Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization (Coursera)
  5. course Structuring Machine Learning Projects (Coursera)
  6. course Introduction to Recommender Systems: Non-Personalized and Content-Based

2016 8

  1. note Hash Table

    a key-value pair data structure with constant time data access

  2. course Data Structures and Performance

    Course notes from Data Structures and Performance on Coursera

  3. course Machine Learning: Classification
  4. essay Migrating TB HBase datasets across datacenters

    Practical notes on migrating a 2TB HBase cluster from Rackspace to AWS with minimal downtime using CopyTable.

  5. essay Recursive queries in PostgreSQL

    Walking tree-structured data in PostgreSQL.

  6. note Mean Absolute Error

    The average absolute difference between predictions and labels, less sensitive to outliers than RMSE.

  7. course ML Regression

    Notes from Machine Learning: Regression by University of Washington on Coursera.

  8. note Root Mean-Squared Error

    A regression metric that penalises large errors.

2015 3

  1. note Hyperplane

    a subspace where the dimension is one less than the ambient space

  2. course Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach

    Notes from Coursera's Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach by Emily Fox and Carlos Guestrin

  3. note Principal Component Analysis

    a technique for reducing the dimensionality of data

2014 1

  1. note Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm

    An elegant algorithm for finding the shortest path between nodes in a graph.

2013 8

  1. course Computational Investing Part I (Coursera)
  2. course Statistics (Udacity - st095)

    Notes from Statistics (st095) by Udacity

  3. essay Packet capturing in parallel with Ansible

    An Ansible playbook for running tcpdump in parallel across many servers and collecting the captures.

  4. course Red Hat System Administration III with RHCSA and RHCE Exams (RH255)
  5. note fork System Call

    A system call that duplicates the current process, creating a parent and child that continue from the same point.

  6. note Orphan Processes

    A child process whose parent has exited.

  7. note Zombie Processes

    A dead process waiting to be reaped.

  8. essay Getting Started With Ansible

    An introduction to Ansible