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alexalexyang.bsky.social
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@alexalexyang.bsky.social
13 followers 32 following 150 posts
New media artist, programmer, immigrant, PTSD, on the spectrum, Southeast Asianist, and lazy. Let's grab a coffee if you in Stockholm.

I want a new job in something cool and fun and can pay my mortgage. Hire me please! ❤️
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alexalexyang.bsky.social
Statistical Rethinking, Richard McElreath
"The strategy of using epicycles might seem crazy, once you know the correct structure of the solar system. But it turns out that the ancients had hit upon a generalized system of approximation. Given enough circles embedded in enough places, the Ptolemaic strategy is the same as a Fourier series, a way of decomposing a periodic function (like an orbit) into a series of sine and cosine functions. So no matter the actual arrangement of planets and moons, a geocentric model can be built to describe their paths against the night sky."
October 15, 2025 at 9:15 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
what a nice diagram. thoroughly enjoying this book by mcelreath even if i wish he were more explicit about stuff. using an llm and the accompanying ipynbs to break down and double-check what he says a lot.
"At the top, the posterior distribution is shown, with 10 unique parameter values highlighted by the vertical lines. The implied distribution of observations specific to each of these parameter values is shown in the middle row of plots. Observations are never certain for any value of p, but they do shift around in response to it. Finally, at the bottom, the sampling distributions for all values of p are combined, using the posterior probabilities to compute the weighted average frequency of each possible observation, zero to nine water samples."
October 12, 2025 at 9:08 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
we went to the royal museum of ugly babies in brussels and learnt that this is how women breastfeed. by squirting milk all over the child's face. even the peacock flying by is like, what the hell?
old master painting of mary feeding jesus by squirting milk from her breast all over his face while two peacocks flying by and one of them turns its head to look at her like, wtf are you doing, woman.
September 28, 2025 at 7:26 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
am i gaslighting copilot or is copilot gaslighting me?
screenshot of dialogue between me and copilot: me: in statistical rethinking, mcelreath says winnie the pooh goes down the mines of moriah. do the transformers appear before or after this incident in his book? copilot: In Statistical Rethinking, Richard McElreath uses playful references and metaphors, including Winnie the Pooh and the Mines of Moria, to illustrate statistical concepts. The "Transformers" metaphor (referring to mathematical transformations, not the robots) appears after the Winnie the Pooh/Mines of Moria story. The Pooh story is used in Chapter 2 to introduce grid approximation and Bayesian updating, while the "Transformers" appear later when discussing transformations of variables and distributions, typically in Chapter 3 and beyond.
September 20, 2025 at 11:04 AM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
what a great way to describe statistical work in science.
text: "When we don’t know what caused the data, potential causes that may produce the data in more ways are more plausible. This leads us to count paths through the garden of forking data. We’re counting the implications of assumptions."
September 14, 2025 at 7:08 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
i like how mcelreath writes about the "bayesian gambit" so far.
Excerpt from book: "More generally, Bayesian golems treat “randomness” as a property of information, not of the world. Nothing in the real world—excepting controversial interpretations of quantum physics—is actually random. Presumably, if we had more information, we could exactly predict everything. We just use randomness to describe our uncertainty in the face of incomplete knowledge."
September 13, 2025 at 9:33 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
Still life (2025). I am an artist.
Topological view of bamboo tray on wooden surface. Two oranges on it as eyes. Big mango as nose. Banana as smile.
August 31, 2025 at 10:31 PM
alexalexyang.bsky.social
lol. i asked qwen3-8b if it were my unborn child why would it not want to be born.

it's ollama in docker. i'll write a little thing to track this llm's resource usage soon. just for funsies.
August 15, 2025 at 8:31 PM