apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 03/05/2026cheap, fast local embeddings for lookups. Then again based on your ability to instantaneously recall things this might not be a big bump relative to your own head github.com/tobi/qmdgithub.comGitHub - tobi/qmd: mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all localmini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local - tobi/qmd 140
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 18/04/2026but the whimsy grant! would you think of all the whimsy of a lobotomized jester dead behind the eyes 230
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 14/04/2026true; i think this was just path of least resistance. i don't think the hansen material sets it up with XX' and potential p>n cases [that's for Bach or Wainwright, you go try that; too rich for my blood] 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 14/04/2026⅟ (Xᵀ * X) being the inverse operator applied to XᵀX is such a cursed combination of programming and math idioms it is kinda amazing. 030
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 14/04/2026extremist static typing and proofs are a match made in heaven - check out how we get OLS 200
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 14/04/2026been trying to get my claw to teach me Lean - send PRs cuz misery loves company github.com/apoorvalal/l...github.comGitHub - apoorvalal/lean-hansen-econometrics: formalizing econometricsformalizing econometrics. Contribute to apoorvalal/lean-hansen-econometrics development by creating an account on GitHub. 282
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 10/04/2026arxiv.org/abs/2401.12143 forgot why i read this but i didarxiv.orgAnisotropy Is Inherent to Self-Attention in TransformersThe representation degeneration problem is a phenomenon that is widely observed among self-supervised learning methods based on Transformers. In NLP, it takes the form of anisotropy, a singular property of hidden representations which makes them unexpectedly close to each other in terms of angular distance (cosine-similarity). Some recent works tend to show that anisotropy is a consequence of optimizing the cross-entropy loss on long-tailed distributions of tokens. We show in this paper that anisotropy can also be observed empirically in language models with specific objectives that should not suffer directly from the same consequences. We also show that the anisotropy problem extends to Transformers trained on other modalities. Our observations suggest that anisotropy is actually inherent to Transformers-based models. 151
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 06/04/2026Nice, yeah pretty funny it settled on quite similar ui too (codex likes its pastel backdrop html). I think with appropriate metadata scouring gh for different variations on the same idea should be feasible, although licensing etc could be a minefield. In this case, parallel branches+merge would do 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/04/2026to kick the tires, poke around with my edits of the cars dataset figure here and mangle it some more lalten.org/vega-ui/char...lalten.orgVega UI 000
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/04/2026quite nice prototype built over telegram: apply finishing touches on your figures in a web-ui using the magic of vega json graphics and get back json/code that you can put back in your source-code [thereby maintaining reproducibility of output - usually my biggest bugbear with wysiwyg fig edits] 140
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/04/2026prototype seems to work; source here github.com/apoorvalal/v... and deployed here lalten.org/vega-ui/ 1) get starter plot from altair and extract json; then paste into vega-ui 2) edit [fig1:every 'apply' button mutates the vega json directly] 3) when done, extract python/json [fig2] 151
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/04/2026this is a nice idea, although i wouldn't use matplotlib but altair [since it has vega underneath and that fully contains the data + code so editing it can probably permit a clean round trip back into source code]. Set off a job on my openclaw; will report back with a link if promising. 130
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/04/2026github.com/apoorvalal/m... Demucs + basic pitch might help with what you want; I glued things together here for my own ear training and it works surprisingly wellgithub.comGitHub - apoorvalal/mlodies: glues pretrained models to do stem separation and transcription to help learn music by ear.glues pretrained models to do stem separation and transcription to help learn music by ear. - apoorvalal/mlodies 020
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 04/04/2026modal.com/blog/resourc... linear programming done wellmodal.comLinear Programming for Fun and ProfitHow we use an eighty-year-old algorithm to find arbitrages in the cloud market. 161
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 29/03/2026ha Zellij way to spook the normies. Ghostty tabs are fine. 150
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 27/03/2026Making sense of Power-tweets is a pretty good case for reasoning models. chatgpt.com/share/69c609... is HCR an OG minimax result? I‘d seen the Loewner order version of CR and the associated ellipsoid claim is natural. HCR as ’a secant body in chi-squared space’ makes my head hurt. 210
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 26/03/2026the aristotelian method is when you are such a boring teacher and wont shut up about rocks having pneuma that your ideal student runs away and conquers most of the known world 020
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/03/2026ha yeah the least squares solver is blazing fast [which came as a surprise to me - rust libraries rely way less on BLAS/LAPACK and perf opts from mkl]. 000
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/03/2026Painstakingly detailed documentation; this is a good intro to binding rust apoorvalal.github.io/crabbymetric...apoorvalal.github.ioMechanics: OLS – crabbymetrics 100
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/03/2026Codex is great at Rust, i am not. I have strong preferences and tests for what a lean statistics package should do, it does not. I'm not crazy enough to try to patch out numpy deps but that really is it. Solid collaboration, now on pypi (uv add crabbymetrics) github.com/apoorvalal/c... 260
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/03/2026allpoetry.com/colonel-faza...allpoetry.comColonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast by Charles Causley - Famous poems, famous poets. - All PoetryComments & analysis: Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast / Bought an old castle complete with a ghost, 000
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 16/03/2026now you have to write the paper. Mondrian Orderings for Interactive Sequential Tests using Sequential Hierarchical Additive Regression Trees 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 15/03/2026based on recent history i think it would be called something wonderfully juvenile like "deezNUTS" or "YUTS" 110
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 15/03/2026agree it's tricky; i think for SEs the standard GMM style sandwich representation should be valid [Conley is written with generic moment conditions in mind IIRC]. Optimal bandwidth for RD is harder because the MSE representation in sth like CCT is specific to local linear. 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 15/03/2026no super clean solution i'm afraid; pandoc-ing the tex->markdown conversion and then getting an LLM to iterate on the conversion has reasonable odds of success but tex is too messy to reliably automate bsky.app/profile/apoo... 111
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 14/03/2026Apropos of econometrics discourse du jour, people are often trying to model a multiplicative shift in the rate of some event, and OLS really is just bad for this. Poisson is good. lalten.org/pages/counti... (Aside, quarto papers are better than pdfs, esp for our clanker assistants)lalten.orgDifference in Differences for Event Data: The Temporal MAUP and Solutions 3232
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 12/03/2026Flip the (now somewhat hack) metaphor for human-AI augmentation. AI used well with human in the lead: Centaur AI used poorly with prose and code smells: horseface Same ingredients and proportions, very different outcomes. 070
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 10/03/2026apoorvalal.github.io/pyensmallen/ Pyensmallen now has a nice website with benchmarks (it is very fast!) and API docs. An LLM agent also helped me figure out how to patch a weird BLAS error that cropped up on older mac metal; should now work out of the box.apoorvalal.github.iopyensmallen 020
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 10/03/2026This looks cool. But also reminded me of a jab I've been meaning to make at methods land: All of interference: Cai et al 2015 Panel data: California Prop99 IV: Card 1993 Unconfoundedness: Lalonde, 401k 220
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 08/03/2026Stanford. This covers material from Hainmueller, Grimmer, Imbens, Wager, Rivers, Athey, Owen and a lot of self-study 210
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 07/03/2026alternate timeline is better youtu.be/_90HLJ_DYS8youtu.beThat Mitchell and Webb Look - Medical DramaYouTube video by 48bytes 020
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 07/03/2026conversion workflow for long context-management and automating hill-climbing on latex<>katex rough edges that might help with your own big tex docs apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...apoorvalal.github.ioConversion WorkflowThis documents the workflow used to convert the LaTeX methods notes into Quartz chapter notes, plus a debrief of what was required in practice. 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 07/03/2026LLMs are finally good enough at latex that codex helped me port over my gigantic (150+pg 2col) grad school methods notes into an obsidian vault that makes upkeep considerably easier. Read, refer relevant sections to your favourite clanker, enjoy! apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...apoorvalal.github.ioMethods RolodexA structured set of methods notes migrated from the LaTeX source in 00_methods_notes. 3412
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/03/2026Yeah I'm an early adopter but it fits a small subset of what I want from a scientific notebook interface (esp that it should export to static html and not need to be spun up by readers). Great for interactive notebooks and dashboards though. 010
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/03/2026side-by-side code snippets for a variety of standard figures in 4 python libraries I like a lot [altair is my most used lately for aforementioned tooltip reasons] lalten.org/pages/py_viz...lalten.orgData Visualization Comparison 030
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/03/2026viz with tooltips are a great way to quickly verify that your agents aren't dropping data or doing weird shenanigans, and are considerably less clunky with embedding loads of info than static plots. eg: matplotlib on left, altair with a tooltip on the right. 140
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 05/03/2026things i use a lot more often in our agentic age - uv init + uv add + uv sync everything - quarto markdown instead of jupyter - hidden state is especially cursed now - interactive viz libraries that generate tooltips - tmux splits with different agent instances playing generator-discriminator 2241
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 24/02/2026Lol same dank room sold me on it bsky.app/profile/apoo... 011
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 24/02/2026Subtract off socarxiv and biorxiv as control series given lower tech adoption and you have a diff in diff 030
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/02/2026Written primarily over telegram with Krusty the Krabs, who trained SideShowSpongeBob during the course of doing this project 000
apoorva lal @apoorvalal.com · 22/02/2026Squeezing more performance out of small models by algorithmically "asking nicely". apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...apoorvalal.github.ioOptimizing tiny LLM programs: EuroSAT + DSPy MIPROv2gist This note documents a small end‑to‑end experiment: run a local Qwen3‑VL multimodal model via llama.cpp’s llama-server, use it as a VLM classifier on EuroSAT (satellite land‑use classes), and then... 130