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Browse all topics covered across the notebook
Writing Knowledge Down
October 03, 2026
Tweety is a bird, and birds fly, so Tweety flies. Fine. Opus is also a bird, a penguin, and he does not fly. Write down one rule and one fact, ask a machine…
Read moreFinding the Needle: How Retrieval Ranks Documents
September 29, 2026
Nobody finds “photosynthesis” in a biology textbook by reading the book. You turn to the index at the back, find the word, and read the page numbers beside it…
Read moreHow a Convolutional Network Sees
September 24, 2026
Take handwritten digits, each a grid of 28 by 28 pixels. Here are two networks that could learn to read them. The first is plain. It flattens the picture into a…
Read moreThe Naive Assumption That Works Anyway
September 20, 2026
All models are wrong, but some are useful. George Box The statistician George Box is remembered for that line, and it has been quoted so often that it has gone…
Read moreHow Machines Learn to Read
September 11, 2026
Here is a sentence you read in a second: Don’t buy it, it’s NOT good! Now here are three short programs reading it. The first sees six pieces, and two of them…
Read moreMemorising Is Not Learning
September 07, 2026
Twelve points, and one curve that passes through every one of them. The error on the data it was fitted to prints as 0.0000. By the only measure the curve was…
Read moreBackpropagation: Learning by Assigning Blame
August 09, 2026
When I first studied neural networks, the sentence I met for how they learn was this: the error is fed back and the weights are adjusted. It sounds like an…
Read moreOne Neuron, One Line, and the Problem That Froze a Field
August 08, 2026
Take four points at the corners of a square and label them with a rule a child could follow: a corner gets a 1 if exactly one of its two coordinates is 1, and a…
Read moreEvolution as an Algorithm
August 03, 2026
The first genetic algorithm I studied closely solved the wrong problem, and it solved it perfectly. It was a small program for six cities and a table of the…
Read moreWhat a p-value Is Not
August 02, 2026
Here is a machine that finds effects. Each time it runs, it makes up two groups of 30 numbers, compares their averages with a standard t-test, and reports…
Read moreThe Shape of Data
July 31, 2026
The mean is the first number most of us reach for, me included, and the standard deviation is usually the second. Together they feel like a description of a…
Read moreWhy Data Is a Matrix
July 30, 2026
Put three things side by side on a desk. A photograph. A spreadsheet of customers. Three one-line film reviews: “movie is fantastic”, “dumb movie”, “movie is…
Read moreDrawing Uncertainty: Bayesian Networks
July 21, 2026
You are at your desk on an ordinary afternoon when your phone lights up with a call from your neighbour John. He says your burglar alarm is going off. Do you…
Read moreBayes' Rule, or How to Change Your Mind
July 18, 2026
A test for a rare illness catches 80 per cent of the people who have it. It also raises a false alarm for 10 per cent of the people who do not. The illness…
Read moreA*, and the Art of the Honest Guess
July 11, 2026
Here is a sliding puzzle. Eight tiles and one gap on a three by three board, and you may only slide a tile into the gap. The aim is to turn the board on the…
Read moreHow a Machine Searches
July 10, 2026
Picture a courier standing at junction A with a parcel for junction C. Her phone is dead. All she has is a laminated card that lists the roads between six…
Read moreWhy Python Won AI
June 24, 2026
Here is a small experiment. Take a list of a million whole numbers and add 1 to each. First do it with a Python list comprehension, which is plain Python doing…
Read moreAn Agent and Its World
June 18, 2026
There is a wasp, the sphex, whose routine is so tidy it has become a famous story about minds. The female paralyses her prey and drags it to the mouth of her…
Read moreThe Off-Switch and the Objective: What the Fable 5 Shutdown Reveals About Capability Control
June 13, 2026
All that is needed to assure catastrophe is a highly competent machine combined with humans who have an imperfect ability to specify human preferences…
Read moreWhat Are We Actually Trying to Build?
June 12, 2026
In 1950 Alan Turing published a paper that opens with the most famous question in artificial intelligence: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines…
Read moreHe Asked for Water. His Son Threw Him in the Sea. This is an AI Problem.
June 10, 2026
السؤال نصف العلم The question is half the knowledge. A problem well stated is a problem half solved. So said Charles Kettering, inventor and engineer, long…
Read morehusainalghasra.com
May 13, 2026
What question started it? I wanted a place to think in public. Not a blog with perfectly edited posts. Not a portfolio. A notebook. Somewhere ideas could live…
Read moreAI Traceability: The Gap Between Answer and Trust
January 15, 2026
The question How do we build AI systems that can explain where their answers came from? Not just with a citation pasted underneath. Not just with a confidence…
Read moreOn Learning in Public
November 20, 2025
There is a version of learning in public that is performance. Tweet threads about everything you are working on, daily updates, follower counts going up as the…
Read moreData Is Not Information
June 01, 2023
When I first studied this, I wrote myself a lesson on the difference between data and information. It had a tidy example. The raw data was . The information…
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The Twitter Data Breach: What You Need to Know and How to Protect Yourself
January 06, 2023
On January 1st 2021, Twitter suffered a data breach that resulted in the exposure of over 200 million email addresses. Recently, these exposed credentials…
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Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner (Part 2)
February 17, 2022
In the first part of this article, we discussed the origins and emergence of the theory of multiple intelligences, the types of intelligences according to Dr…
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Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner (Part 1)
February 08, 2022
Intelligence has always been a rich topic for debate and comparison. We often hear people saying that someone is smarter than someone else or that a child shows…
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CoinMarketCap Data Breach
October 22, 2021
The most recent data breach happened to CoinMarketCap , and almost 3.1 million user emails (including mine) were compromised. Mozilla’s Firefox Monitor added…
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The New One Minute Manager
October 15, 2021
If I learned one thing from this book, that would be: To become a one minute manager, deal with your team the way you deal with your dog. I always hated…
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What Start With Why Actually Changed in How I Think
August 14, 2021
Few days ago, I reviewed the book “Start with Why” by the author and public speaker Simon Sinek. This book is based on a TED talk titled “How Great Leaders…
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Start With Why: Simon Sinek
August 10, 2021
I had this book on my Kindle for years and never got the time (nor the desire) to start reading it. Not until the beginning of this year, when I was traveling…
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Exploring the Strange Beauty of The Appointment by Herta Müller
February 19, 2021
The Appointment is one of the most well-known novels by Herta Müller. It has a unique charm and a strange atmosphere that makes it stand out. The story’s…
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Diving into Philosophy: My Experience with Josiah Royce's The World and the Individual
February 08, 2021
This book marks my first foray into the world of philosophy. It delves into various interpretations of the meaning of the world and the individual, and it is…
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What is Relativity? by François Vannucci: A Disappointing Exploration
January 14, 2021
What is Relativity? by François Vannucci promised an accessible introduction to one of the most profound theories in physics. Unfortunately, the book falls…
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A Review of Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich
March 25, 2017
Listen, Little Man! is more of a letter than a traditional book. It feels as though the author, Wilhelm Reich, needed to pour out his thoughts and frustrations…
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The Thirst for Freedom: A Review of Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water
March 24, 2017
I needed a moment to absorb what I had just finished reading. Like any other great work, I hesitated to accept the reality of the events or my desire for more…
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Understanding Modern Politics through Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception
March 16, 2017
“State of exception makes people feel that they have been turned into expendable beings, defenceless bodies, stripped of their identity and their right to…
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A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Story of Love, Loss, and Survival in War-Torn Afghanistan
January 31, 2017
That moment when you finish reading the last word of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is indescribable. It is often followed by a deep silence as you…
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