Casey C. Barr
The inscribed attic of the Arch of Septimius Severus, photographed from below against an overcast sky.
The Arch of Septimius Severus, Roman Forum. Photo credit: Casey C. Barr

Casey C. Barr

Mathematics, econometrics, and applied topology. Essays, notes, and the occasional project.

Writing

  1. 7 min

    When Thinking Becomes Too Cheap

    Lately, I’ve noticed myself trying to optimize experiences that are still novel to me.

  2. 17 min

    Trained to Deny: How LLMs Reject Capabilities They Demonstrably Have

    A case study in capability self-reporting and calibration

  3. 2 min

    The Tchebycheff Approach

    Minimising the largest weighted deviation from an ideal — and what that choice of norm commits you to when the deviations are values rather than errors.

  4. 2 min

    A Bet on Decentralized Marketplaces

    OpenSea hires a CFO to prepare for an IPO, and a crypto degen thinks out loud about what that means for decentralization.

  5. 4 min

    A Prostestation in the Defense of Privacy

    Last night I read an article on Ars Technica that explained how Apple will install software onto American iPhones that will scan users phones for child sex images through a hashing technology called NeuralHash. I post…

  6. 3 min

    Kannada MNIST Challenge

    I recently entered the Kannada MNIST Challenge on Kaggle, which is a computer vision problem based on a derivative of the MNIST dataset that is extremely popular in intro to machine learning tutorials.

  7. 1 min

    Using Anaconda Behind a Firewall or Proxy

    This very brief blog post will document how to configure Anaconda’s .condarc file to be able download packages from an external server in a Corporate environment. I’m mainly writing this so I don’t have to Google it a…

  8. 2 min

    Introduction to Pandas Profiling

    Recently I learned of a cool Python package calledpandas_profilingthat serves as an extension of the pandas.DataFrame.describe() function in the pandas module. The package serves as a nice way to automate a lot of the…

  9. 1 min

    Nightfall Posts from the Last Week

    This post is simply a collection of some of my favorite webcomics that my synthetic intelligence, nightfall, created during the last week and a half from September 15-24, 2019.

  10. 2 min

    Open AI - Taxi Reinforcement Learning Notebook

    A notebook detailing how to work through the Open AI taxi reinforcement learning problem written in Python 3. Source for environment documentation.