Moshe Sipper’s Cat-a-log of Writings

Academia — Artificial Intelligence — Artificial Life — Better Humans — Bio-Inspired Systems — Cellular Automata — Comics — Deep Learning — Evolutionary Algorithms — Fiction — Machine Learning — Math — Middle Grade Fiction — Organizations — Poems — Song — The Peaceful Affair — Website Management

Cat-a-log (AI-generated image — craiyon).

Last updated: July 10, 2024

Academia

• Impact Factor(y): The Bad, the Bad and the Ugly [Cantor’s Paradise Lost]
• Life in Academia is Straight Out of a Movie [At least if you change the script a bit…]
• Pee Review: The Enshittification of Science? [A scatological rumination]
• Tips for Approaching a Prospective Academic Grad Advisor [Dos and don’ts]
• University #Hashtag Degree: A Proposal for a New Approach to Academic Studies (and Faculty Structuring) [“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.” — Sir Isaac Newton]
• We Need a New DEI [I’d like to humbly put forward a proposal for one.]

Artificial Intelligence

• AIPaL: AI as Part of Life [Your friendly neighborhood AI.]
• “A” is for Alien: Analogies Between Modern AI and Richard Feynman’s “The Character of Physical Law” [What I learned from my research into adversarial and generative deep learning: AI is not Artificial Intelligence — it’s Alien Intelligence.]
• Artificial Intelligence: Death (Life) by a Single Cut? [A tortured matter.]
• Artificial Intelligence: Gini or Genie? [All or one?]
• Artificial Intelligence is Able, but is It Willing? [Free Will, Free Won’t…]
• Hey AI, What’s On (In) Your Mind? [Let one model ask another.]
• Overparameterization, Backpropagation, Alimentation: Them and Us [Some fundamental differences between humans and deep networks.]
• Please Explain Yourself, AI [“Just because” is not an answer…]
• Superintelligence: Supergood or Superbad?
• Turing Test, Chinese Room, and Large Language Models
• When AI Lacks Morality [And humans will be humans]

Artificial Life

• A Life of its Own [“He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.”]

Better Humans

• Better and Better and Better Humans [They’re getting better — but so are we.]

Bio-Inspired Systems

• Biologic or “By Ole Logic” [Engineers and Nature have usually taken distinct routes in their creation of complex objects.]
• Embryonic Electronics: The Embryonics Project [The final objective of the Embryonics Project was the development of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits capable of self-repair and self-replication.]
• The POE Model of Bio-Inspired Hardware Systems [A Phylogenetic, Ontogenetic, and Epigenetic View of Bio-Inspired Hardware Systems.]
• The Scigineer [… a combination of both scientist and engineer, holding a test tube in one hand and a proverbial slide rule in the other.]
• Who’s the Boss? [… by definition, that would mean … removing the designer from the equation! Then who controls the design process — who’s the boss?]

Cellular Automata

• Go Forth and Replicate: Self-Replication in Cellular Automata [Can a machine can self-replicate, that is, produce copies of itself?]

Comics

• Comic Sip [Take a picture. Add Words.]
• Picture + Words = Funny (Hopefully…) [Just everyday objects, with some words thrown in.]

Deep Learning

• A Basic Variational Autoencoder in PyTorch Trained on the CelebA Dataset [Pretty much from scratch, fairly small, and quite pleasant…]
• A Minimal Example of Face Recognition and Facial Analysis [Using Deepface, with an accompanying Colab notebook.]
• A Tiny Large Language Model (LLM), Coded, and Hallucinating
• Building Activation Functions for Deep Networks [Veering away from standard activation functions.]
• Evolutionary Adversarial Attacks on Deep Networks [Imperceptible changes to input can fool a model.]
• Fortify the Guardian, Not the Treasure [Resilient Adversarial Detectors.]
• I See Dead People, or It’s Intelligence, Jim, But Not As We Know It [Fooling image-to-text models and object detectors.]
• Jailbreaking Large Language Models: If You Torture the Model Long Enough, It Will Confess! [Duping LLMs into giving up their secrets.]
• Loss is Boss [A short piece with a demo, on the importance of defining a good loss function for your deep network.]
• Real, Fake, Attack? [When deepfake detectors are attacked.]
• Realtime Object Detection On Your Phone [It’s even a game!]
• Somewhere Over the Gradient [When a model’s gradients are unavailable or costly.]

Evolutionary Algorithms

• Coevolutionary Computation [Cooperation, competition, and perhaps a bit of GAN ancestry.]
• Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic Programming, and Learning [lock, stock, and barrel…]
• Evolutionary Art [Producing artwork using evolutionary algorithms.]
• How to Build a Genetic Algorithm from Scratch in Python with Just 33 Lines of Code [There’s also a 3-line version.]

Fiction

• 37 [A random story.]
• About Luck [If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.]
• AI Meets Science Refereeing: A Glimpse of Things to (Maybe) Come [Publish and Perish.]
• A Matter of Perspective [Manly.]
• A Quantum Tale [I’ve always found the double-slit experiment fascinating.]
• Are There Gas Stations on Mars? [Had I written it today, would I have opted for a Tesla?]
• A Tale of Tenure, Alien, and #Finger [On academic tenure.]
• Cycle [A story of domestic terror.]
• Dating a Physicist [A story with many dimensions.]
• Don’t Be Weevil [The bug in the system.]
• Dragon in Distress [meets a lovely girl from Brooklyn.]
• Elections Have Consequences(?) [Damocles and his sword.]
• Evolution… But Backwards [Them monkeys got me thinking…]
• Game of “Throwns” [A song of price and wire.]
• Gaze Upon The Stars [Every scientist has their motivation…]
• Gem and I [If AI hands you lemons — make lemonade.]
• HOSPIC-E [A story of sentience and senescence.]
• Non-Binary Galore [If we’re going beyond two… Then we’re going beyond two!]
• Monstrum [Don’t be that guy.]
• Pigmentum [“… then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”]
• Profit or Usefulness? [Rubin’s Vase.]
• Recycle, Recycle, Recycle! [Recycle!]
• Swashbuckling Buccaneer of Oceanus Verborum [A definite article.]
• The Café at the Top of Mount Everest [An honest review.]
• The Sound of Sy Lentz [Homage to a beautiful song.]
• Waiter, There’s a Verb in My Soup! [Please affix it.]
• When You Have Eliminated the Impossible… [“… whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”]
• Woman, Man, Snake, Apple [A story about a garden.]
• W, W, W [A story of woe.]

Machine Learning

• A Minimal Example of Machine Learning (with scikit-learn)
• Data Leakage Basics, with Examples in Scikit-Learn [Oops, you can’t use that during training]
• Evaluating Hyperparameters in Machine Learning
• Linear Regression vs Logistic Regression in a Nutshell [With a bit of code to demonstrate]
• Some Pros and Cons of Basic ML Algorithms, in 2 Minutes [2… 1…]
• Strong(er) Gradient Boosting [What would happen if we used strong models in a boosting context?]
• Two’s Company, Three’s an Ensemble [Some new ensemble algorithms.]

Math

• The Permutation Test: A Data Scientist’s BFF

Middle Grade Fiction

• Xor: The Shape of Darkness [Excerpt from my book.]

Organizations

• Organizational Emotional Intelligence [Does an organization have feelings?]

Poems

• Fountain [A poem about aging.]
• Runner’s Monologue [Adapted by me from Hamlet’s soliloquy.]
• Walk in the Park [A nursery rhyme about abuse.]

Song

• Who By Prior: A Machine Learning Song

The Peaceful Affair

• Complete Novel

Website Management

• Pressing words: How I migrated my website to WordPress [So long, Weebly, and thanks for all the fish]

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash