Decided to post a weird column like “read this week, but maybe not fully…

Decided to post a weird column like “read this week, but maybe not fully understood” with a short description of what’s what. Maybe it’ll be useful to someone.

1/
The collector’s problem (https://www.mathnet.ru/links/e36a9d79c107c571b5113dbd78e7aecc/mp978.pdf)
or how many purchases you need to collect a set of n hippos from Kinder. Tons of analogs of this problem.

2/ Sometimes I stumble on
a forgotten tab with an explanation of rating systems (https://logic.pdmi.ras.ru/~sergey/papers/NSS12_RatingsAdditional.pdf)
in online games and whatnot. But I’m always too lazy to read it. Maybe you’ll find it handy, you can skip the math and just get that it’s not that simple and “rigging” in matchmaking is “bullshit”.

4/ I always read
Stratchery. (https://stratechery.com/2024/enterprise-philosophy-and-the-first-wave-of-ai/)

5/ They showed
a neat case (https://talktastic.com/)
of AI dictation

6/ They say (https://mlcommons.org/2024/08/mlc-algoperf-benchmark-competition/)
you can start believing in second order optimizers

If this kind of random stuff was useful, drop pluses/hearts, I’ll share open tabs more often.