Physics prof / Tinkerer

My blog about code, physics, and ideas

Flow Where You Want

generative
flows
guidance
diffusion

Adding Inference Controls to Pretrained (Latent) Flow Models

Nov 27, 2025
Scott H. Hawley

Flow With What You Know

generative
flows
diffusion

Basic physics provides a “straight, fast” way to get up to speed with flow-based generative models

Nov 13, 2024
Scott H. Hawley

Understanding Transformers, Part 2: Wee Music Box

nlp
architectures
transformers
music
midi

Toy Transformer Tunes

Dec 18, 2023
Scott H. Hawley

To Understand Transformers, Focus on Attention

nlp
architectures

If you can get this one thing, the rest will make sense.

Aug 21, 2023
Scott H. Hawley

Residual Vector Quantization

compression
ssl

An exploration of the heart of neural audio codecs

Jun 12, 2023
Scott H. Hawley

BYOL - Contrastive Representation Learning without Contrastive Losses

ssl

Now that we understand contrastive losses and what they’re good for – let’s get rid of them!

Nov 17, 2022
Scott H. Hawley

Shell Volumes and Distances in High-Dimensional Spaces

ssl
math

Given enough dimensions, does it really matter which distance norm you use?

Nov 15, 2022
Scott H. Hawley

Likelihood of Vector Orthogonality in High-Dimensional Spaces

ssl
math

Depends on whether you’re using unit vectors or not.

Jan 24, 2022
Scott H. Hawley

Learning Some Geometric/Clifford Algebra

math

Clifford algebra isn’t so scary

Oct 15, 2021
Scott H. Hawley

Handy Bash Functions for ML & Data Science

computer_usage

Once I figure out a complicated command, I make a bash function for it

Sep 15, 2021

Typical (Neural-Network-Based) Classification vs. Zero-Shot, Part 3 - Live Demo of CL Toy

ssl
classification

Triplet Loss kicks butt

Aug 1, 2021

Typical (NN-Based) Classification vs. Zero-Shot, Part 2 - An Example Using FastAI

classification
ssl

With my new data-visualization Callback!

Jun 17, 2021
Scott H. Hawley

Typical (Neural-Network-Based) Classification vs. Zero-Shot, Part 1 - The Joy of 3D

classification
ssl

Visualizations in 3 (and 4) dimensions

May 4, 2021
Scott H. Hawley

Scottergories: Making GPT-3 Generate 3 of a Kind

classification
language_models

In which we test GPT-3’s ability to generate members of a category

Feb 15, 2021

Naughty by Numbers: Classifications at Christmas

classification
foundations

A snarky interactive lesson on classification and surveillance

Dec 11, 2020

Citations in Fastpages via BibTeX and jekyll-scholar

Supporting scholarly blogging by drawing references from your database.

Jul 1, 2020

Mac => Linux Switch Notes

computer_usage

Mac and I aren’t breaking up, we’re just seeing other people.

Jan 13, 2020

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) from Scratch

math
foundations

There are many tutorials on PCA, but this one has interactive 3D graphs!

Dec 21, 2019

Getting Started in ML+Audio

foundations

For audio students interested in machine learning

Dec 6, 2019

My First NN Part 3. Multi-Layer Networks and Backpropagation

foundations

Multi-Layer Networks and Backpropagation

Feb 8, 2019

My First Neural Network, Part 2. Bias and CE Loss

foundations

Bias and cross-entropy loss

Feb 4, 2019

My First Neural Network, Part 1

foundations

First in a series on understanding neural network models.

Jan 30, 2019

Parallelizing Python, Simplified

computer_usage

Basic use of multiprocessing.

Dec 16, 2018

Resolving Mac OS X Aliases in Python

(or “How I Spent Monday Night”)
computer_usage

Mac OSX aliases are not symbolic links. Trying to read one will probably crash your code.

Feb 21, 2018

Notes on Convexity of Loss Functions for Classification

math

Following up on a question that arose in Week 3 of Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course.

Nov 22, 2017

Crash Course On GANs

This post is not necessarily a crash course on GANs. It is at least a record of me giving myself a crash course on GANs. Adding to this as I go.

May 5, 2017

Learning Room Shapes (with Neural Networks)

physics
acoustics

Deep neural network learns (boxy) room shape given mode frequencies, or vice versa.

May 4, 2017

Following Gravity - ML Foundations Part I

foundations

First in a series on Machine Learning Foundations, which applies to much of science and statistics as well. .

Feb 23, 2017

Machine Learning Reference List

foundations
This has been my personal reading list, first compiled ca. February 2016 & updated very infrequently (e.g. Oct 2016, Feb 2017, Sept 2017). The field moves so quickly, much…
Feb 6, 2017

How to Port-Forward Jupyter Notebooks

computer_usage

…to enable efficient remote-working.

Feb 3, 2017
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