technocracy

I am thinking about becoming a research engineer, and want to ask your advice on how realistic it is, and which strategies make sense in my situation. About myself: I am in the US, have extensive experience as a Software Engineer (including Staff+ position at one of the top companies), have a math heavy CS degree, and have taken additional ML courses from one of schools offering them to outsiders. I also had applied ML work some time […]

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I finished the Motion Planning course from Robotics this week. It was expected, since the material was quite in line with data structures and algorithms that I have studied during my undergrad. The next one, Mobility, seems to be a notch tougher than Aerial Robotics, mainly because of the focus on calculus and physics (neither of which I have touched heavily in years). Heres the articles this week: Neural Networks: Software 2.0 In this article from Medium, the […]

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Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited gains for perception and can even degrade performance. We propose Reinforced Attention Learning (RAL), a policy-gradient framework that directly optimizes internal attention distributions rather than output token sequences. By shifting optimization from what to generate to where to attend, RAL promotes effective information allocation and improved grounding in […]

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The $25 million video call The finance officer did everything right. He joined the Zoom call. He recognised the CFO’s face. He heard the familiar voice, the same cadence, the same informal tone from dozens of previous meetings. The CFO explained that the acquisition was moving faster than expected. The wire needed to go out before the end of business. Confidentiality was important. Move quickly. He transferred $25 million to an account in Hong Kong. But the bitter […]

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arXiv:2603.06251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rise of high-dimensional correlated data, multicollinearity poses a significant challenge to model stability, often leading to unstable estimation and reduced predictive accuracy. This work proposes the Single-Parametric Principal Component Selection Operator (SPPCSO), an innovative penalized estimation method that integrates single-parametric principal component regression and $L_{1}$ regularization to adaptively adjust the shrinkage factor by incorporating principal component information. This approach achieves a balance between variable selection and coefficient estimation, ensuring model stability […]

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How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies […]

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:::info Astounding Stories of Super-Science October 2022, by Astounding Stories is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD – FLORA ACKROYD Astounding Stories of Super-Science October 2022: THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD – FLORA ACKROYD By Agatha Christie ::: As I was returning from my round the following morning, I was hailed by Inspector Raglan. I pulled up, and the inspector mounted on the step. […]

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arXiv:2601.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm relies solely on stochastic gradient information and does not require function value evaluations. The trust-region radius is adaptively adjusted based on a radius-control parameter and the stochastic gradient estimate. Under mild assumptions, we establish that the algorithm converges in expectation to a first-order stationary point. Moreover, the […]

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