The now-hit column “Read, but not fully understood.” 1/ A paper from Duolingo…

The now-hit column “Read, but not fully understood.”
1/
A paper from Duolingo (https://research.duolingo.com/papers/yancey.kdd20.pdf), about how the guys built an algorithm for push notifications to keep engagement up and all that (bandits and that sort of thing).
2/
Some old course on ads (https://minqizhou.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lecture-03.pdf) and the models used there (obviously old, but I like how old courses lay out the basics, skimmed it, seems nothing too hard).
3/
A pretty fundamental work (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cs15-892F15/AuctionMechanismOptimallyTradingAMEC03.pdf) about the point of auction algorithms, or what you pick: money or efficiency (in short, clickbait or actual benefit from the product/target action). Highly recommend for understanding how advertising works in general and where the problems are.
4/
On how to calculate your costs (https://blog.eleuther.ai/transformer-math/#activations-and-batch-size) when you’re about to host/train your own models.
5/
Something by Kurt Gödel (https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.21.447) on solving the equations of general relativity and the early works on the structure of the universe and time in it, why — I don’t know, but they say the work spawned an entire movement in this area, which one — also won’t say
🙂
6/
An old blog with problems (https://susy.page/2024/07/01/expectation_of_random_summands_number), this time a popular one: On average, how many random natural numbers, uniformly distributed on the segment from 1 to n, do you need to take for their sum to exceed n?
7/ For now I’m not doing anything, just reading a book about the history of Blizzard (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Nice-Future-Blizzard-Entertainment/dp/1538725428) (game people be like), and you can straight-up feel the stench of trash drama there.
8/
And the classic of French “thinkers” on law (https://libertarium.ru/lib_law.html), I think it’s one of the strongest works, and there’s a solid book by the same author Frédéric Bastiat too.