https://zhubert.com/writing/Recent content in Writing on zhubertHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usMon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://zhubert.com/writing/intro-to-transformers/Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://zhubert.com/writing/intro-to-transformers/I’ve been interested in Artificial Intelligence, through many different lenses, for quite some time. As a science fiction fan and one time author, it’s obviously a subject that’s been treated thoroughly from every angle. It’s good! It’s bad! It’s going to end humanity! But it (“actual” AI) felt incredibly far away even just a few years ago. At that point in time, I did a bit of work in Text Classification and Object Detection and the results were definitely mixed.https://zhubert.com/writing/a-little-bit-of-slope/Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://zhubert.com/writing/a-little-bit-of-slope/Years ago, I stumbled across a lecture by John Ousterhout. (You might know him as the creator of Tcl, or just as a general computer science luminary.) It was part of his weekend thought series, and one line has stuck with me ever since — straightforward, but the kind of thing that you see echo in many applications: A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. By way of reminder, picture two lines on a graph.https://zhubert.com/writing/the-power-of-incremental-work/Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://zhubert.com/writing/the-power-of-incremental-work/Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics. What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is: Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year.https://zhubert.com/writing/an-amazon-story/Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://zhubert.com/writing/an-amazon-story/This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1.