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What is Simplicity?

These disagreements are notoriously hard to resolve because we lack the language to talk about our preferences when it comes to simplicity, and simplicity is not a single concept or direction, but a set of competing priorities and trade-offs.

I recently relaunched tablecloth.time with version 1.00-alpha-6 — a composable extension for temporal analysis in Clojure. The new direction favors explicit operations over index magic.

Nan Da on Ethics of AIs as Engines of Transductive Inference

How curious that these very different applications have all become similar tasks in the world of AI, approached through similar pieces of engineering. Comprehension questions are treated as translation questions, and translation models are further simplified into language models — essentially, predict the next word, given previous words. How could this interchangeability possibly work? How could next-word prediction approximate moral judgement?

This post is the second regular update for my “Column for Tablecloth” project, which has been generously funded by Clojurists Together. The goal of this project – explained in more detail in my fir...

For a few years now, I have been working with a unique, global group of people associated with the SciCloj community, many of whom are interested in promoting the use of Clojure for data-centric co...

Automatic keyword extraction is a frequently encountered problem in natural language processing that poses some interesting challenges. The task of an automatic keyword extractor is to extract set ...

Managing Python development environments can be confusing. Tools like pyenv and virtualenv, while powerful, have a steep learning curve. I encountered this recently while trying to find a sensible ...

Recently, I attended PolyConf (#PolyConf) in Poznan, Poland. The conference was organized around the idea of polyglot programming, a philosophical approach to programming that stresses the value of...

In the last few years, the field of digital humanities has emerged to some prominence. “Digi Labs” are suddenly appearing all across the academic landscape, and one now meets graduate students who ...