Optimal number of trials

September 24, 2026 math

Let $p = (p_1, \dots, p_V)^\top$ with $p_i \ge 0$ and $\sum_i p_i=1$ be a categorical probability distribution over a vocabulary of size $V$. We draw $N$ i.i.d. samples from $p$ to form the empirical probability vector $\hat p$, which should be close to $p$. If we draw again, the... [more]

GPT-OSS Model

March 25, 2026 paper

GPT-OSS is an open source, open weight model by OpenAI with Apache 2.0 license. It is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts (MoE) model that specialized in reasoning (chain of thought), tool use, and support structured output. Similar to Llama architecture, it uses pre-norm with RMS norm and each expert is a SwiGLU-based... [more]

RF603N II for Nikon Z5ii

March 20, 2026 blog

I have a few Yongnuo RF603N II remote flash units. They are old but works. Their primary use is for remote flash over its hotshoe, but they also allows remote shutter release via the same 2.4GHz radio. It comes with a 10-pin Nikon cable that works for older high-end DSLRs... [more]

How to Read MTF Chart

January 24, 2026 blog

MTF stands for Modulation Transfer Function. It illustrates the optical quality of camera lens, a.k.a. “sharpness”. MTF chart is a curve of the transmittance of light (0 to 100%) against the distance from the centre of the image towards its edges (in millimetres). [more]

Zhang et al (2024) TinyLlama

January 3, 2026 paper

This paper is a report on training the TinyLlama model, following the Llama 2 architecture but with 1.1B parameters. The objective is to experiment with the idea that a smaller model but trained with more data can match or overperform a larger model. [more]