Boyd R. Kane

(aka BRK aka b r k aka be-yar-kay)

I like combining robotics with machine learning

Currently I'm a MATS 9 fellow, working on AI safety to reduce the existential catastrophic risk due to AI systems smarter than you or I.

Previously I worked full time as an Embedded Systems Engineer at CubeSpace Satellites (I wrote the code to spin satellites in orbit).

Message me on Twitter (fast reply) or LinkedIn (business-related)

I enjoy exploring different tools, so have dabbled with a fair number of things over the years. Here's an approximate list:

• Rust, Python, Typescript, Java, Haskell, HTML/CSS, Arduino, C++
• Tailwind, Teloxide, Svelte, TensorFlow/Keras, BeautifulSoup, Godot, Shuttle.rs

Here are some ideas/concepts that I think are cool

• Regex
• Bloom filters
• bitboards, smaller bitboards
• gregarious catterpillar motion
• how to communicate the presence of nuclear waste repositories to future generations
• Shamir's secrets sharing scheme
• blue LEDs
• charlieplexing
• the remarkably simple mechanism behind knobs and dials
• Using logarithms to do multiplication without doing multiplication (à la this Welsch Labs video) (also slide rules and analogue computers)
• The idea of the Infinite Game 1 2

  There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength.

• Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown
• Colour Spaces and human colour perception (okLAB, Subtleties of Color)
• Byte Pair Encoding
• How diffusion models generate images from noise
• How generative adversarial networks pit two models against each other
• How autoencoders perform dimensionality reduction
• the work by antithesis on a bug-finding system that is automated and reproducible by running your entire codebase on a deterministic hypervisor
• This count-total-zeros algorithm:

function count-total-zeros (x)
    if x = 0 return 32
    n ← 0
    if (x & 0x0000FFFF) = 0: n ← n + 16, x ← x >> 16
    if (x & 0x000000FF) = 0: n ← n +  8, x ← x >>  8
    if (x & 0x0000000F) = 0: n ← n +  4, x ← x >>  4
    if (x & 0x00000003) = 0: n ← n +  2, x ← x >>  2
    if (x & 0x00000001) = 0: n ← n +  1
    return n

If you reach out to me, please include a Dune reference in your first message to indicate that you've read this page.

This helps me figure out who's sending a million cold calls to random people online and who's actually interested in what I have to offer.