Rolling my Own Analytics

To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable, but it’s so liberating to escape it that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct. — Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work

Integrating Random Functions on a Cluster with Temporal

In 2020, I read Lample and Charton’s Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics. I had graduated with a math degree less than two years before, and I thought it would be cool to apply neural networks to math. One candidate was the search for Lyapunov functions, which were crucial to my undergraduate research. Finding Lyapunov functions is like finding integrals. The two problems share a tantalizing property: solutions are easy to verify, but hard to compute. I tried to reproduce some of Lample and Charton’s work on my own, but I wasn’t a great programmer. I was also distracted with my day job—I spent 260 days at sea in 2020.

A few weeks ago I decided to give it another shot. I’ve changed a lot since 2020, and now programming is my day job. I experienced success this time, but I chose to write here about the parts I found hard, and what surprised me about this project.

How to Remember Everything with Jrnl and Semantic Search

I am bad at taking notes, and I want to get better. There are two main obstacles that I face when I write down things that I want to remember.

Seeing Underwater with Neural Networks

Nothing in this article is classified. Where I refer to Navy sonar and TMA data, I have cited official DoD sources in which the data has been publicly released. If you think I’ve made a mistake, you can email me at the address on my homepage.

I was lucky enough to deal with a lot of interesting problems during my time in the Navy. Today I’d like to share one that many Submariners encounter on a daily basis, and an unconventional way that I found to solve it.

Submarines employ sonar constantly to track targets, surface safely, and avoid detection. Sonar is a pretty famous technology, and you’ve probably heard that there are two principal types: active and passive. The following image is helpful.

Thoughts on Leaving the Navy

It’s fitting that I spent my last day in uniform only steps from where I first put it on.