Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education

Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education

@mikexcohen.bsky.social

Check out my longer posts on Substack (mostly detailed tutorials about data science and LLMs). mikexcohen.substack.com Explore my video-based courses and books ➔ sincxpress.com

355 Followers 187 Following 184 Posts Joined Nov 2024
2 weeks ago

Thanks for the shout-out! I'm glad you liked the post :D

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1 month ago
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I'm almost finished my new book, titled "50 ML projects to understand LLMs".

I call this figure the "mitten plot."

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3 months ago
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How to live a happy life, according to the most elegant equation in humanity. (Hint: it's the math version of "omit needless words.")
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/eulers-ide...

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4 months ago

Thanks :) Your paper is great! But more sophisticated than what I'll show in part 2. I'll show how to manipulate embeddings vectors as they pass through the residual stream to normalize the bias. So it's not actually fixing the bias, it's correcting one example. And learning about mech interp.

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4 months ago
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In my latest substack post, I show how to measure gender bias in open-source LLMs. The post comes with detailed explanations and a Python notebook file that you can easily adapt to any other biases.

Curious? Come check it out :)
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/gender-bia...

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4 months ago

And thank you, Paolo!

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4 months ago
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No comment.

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4 months ago
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EEG synchronization workshop part 1: bivariate phase synchronization Learn neuroscience EEG signal processing and brain connectivity analyses

ps, if you liked that joke, then you will absolutely love my recordings of the two-day workshop I taught on EEG synchronization in time, frequency, and space.
Here's part 1: mikexcohen.substack.com/p/eeg-synchr...

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4 months ago

Statistician: Someone who has their head in an oven, their feet in an ice bucket, and says "on average I feel fine."

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4 months ago
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DDC-15: Two-samples t-test A data challenge a day helps you master machine learning

If I had a million euros (that's 1.170686 million USD), I would do Daily Data Challenges to master machine-learning. Like this one, which involves running a t-test in Python to compare two random samples.

Act like a millionaire. Solve Daily Data Challenges.

mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-15-two...

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5 months ago
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"King - man + woman = queen" is fake news On analogies and arithmetic inside LLM embeddings spaces.

“King – man + woman = queen” sounds smart until you actually check the math.

Spoiler: it’s fake news.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/king-man-woman-queen-is-fake-news

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5 months ago
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Do straight lines exist? Do lines even exist outside our imaginations?

Do straight lines exist?
open.substack.com/pub/mikexcoh...

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5 months ago
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I don't know what's going on in this AI image.

But I do know this: Daily Data Challenge #25 is short and very practical for data science. You'll get to create a symmetric matrix and extract its unique elements.

Can you solve it in less than 6 minutes?
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-25-uni...

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5 months ago

Awesome.

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5 months ago
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Here’s a picture of Thalorion The Destroyer reading my calculus textbook. I hope he likes it! Otherwise he might unleash doom on humanity.
www.amazon.com/dp/B0DX6BPPZ8

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5 months ago

Interesting perspective. I think peer-review is imperfect but does more good than harm. I've published >100 papers and reviewed... dunno, many 100s of manuscripts. My thinking is that the incentive structure is the root of the problem, although I could be wrong. I agree with your suggestions though.

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5 months ago

Fair point. I suppose the question is whether the entire system needs to be revamped (I'd find that unlikely to happen, given that too many people are too vested in it) or whether relatively small changes can have meaningful impact.

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5 months ago

I'd love to see the evaluations in academia based on one paper every five years. Not a perfect solution, but it would increase scientific publishing signal-to-noise-ratio by encouraging researchers to put more effort into a smaller number of papers.

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5 months ago
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Mike X Cohen | Mike X Cohen, PhD | Substack Former neuroscience professor, current independent educator. I help people understand applied math and AI, machine-learning, deep learning, LLM mechanisms, etc. My motto is "you can learn a lot of mat...

Hehe, yep, although I'm not so active here. I'm mostly building up content (tutorial posts on data science and LLM mechanisms) on mikexcohen.substack.com.

Nice to hear from you, Luiz!

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5 months ago

That was definitely part of my decision, although I wouldn't call it a "problem." More that I was (and still am) in an extremely fortunate situation, and decided to spend my time in a career that had higher positive impact for more people, and that was also more personally satisfying.

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5 months ago

Thank you for taking the time to share you lucid and honest opinion.

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5 months ago

Thank you kindly, Thomas. My feelings, reactions, and motivations are definitely not unique, but ex-academics have an unfortunate habit of reticence.

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5 months ago
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DDC-23: Distributions of MNIST pixel values A data challenge a day helps you master machine learning

Karl Gauss (yeah, *that* Gauss) sent me a fax this morning to say that he really enjoyed working through today's Daily Data Challenge.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-23-dis...

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5 months ago

You earned them.

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5 months ago

That is a fantastic title and topic. Congrats!

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5 months ago
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Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Why I left academia and neuroscience.

This post on Substack has gained a lot of traction. I think many people identify with it.
(Most of my posts are technical tutorials on machine-learning and LLM-mechanisms.)
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

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5 months ago

Thank you, Felipe :)

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5 months ago
YouTube
Daily Data Challenge 8: Test for Pythagorean triplets YouTube video by Mike X Cohen

Daily Data Challenge 8: Test for Pythagorean triplets
A data challenge a day helps you master machine learning.
More exercises and solutions at mikexcohen.substack.com

youtube.com/shorts/LlqS2...

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5 months ago
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Confidence intervals 2/3: bootstrapping methods Learn computational statistics in the second part of this three-part series.

Bootstrapping: because sometimes asking “what if?” 10,000 times is a valid math strategy.
open.substack.com/pub/mikexcoh...

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5 months ago
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genAI never fails to deliver the laughs.

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