Slate

Interactive notes I write while teaching myself the math behind computer vision. Each article pairs the equations with live visualizations you can drag and tweak. All articles are written with the help of Claude.

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LLM Inference — From Tokens to Claude

How does typing a prompt produce an answer? Covers everything from scratch: tokenization (BPE), embeddings, RoPE positional encoding, scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention, transformer blocks (RMSNorm, SwiGLU, residuals), autoregressive decoding, KV cache, GQA, sampling strategies (temperature, top-p), context windows, scaling laws, and current trends — speculative decoding, MoE, Flash Attention, quantization. All interactive.

Transformers Attention KV Cache Sampling Speculative Decoding Claude
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Video Encoding & Decoding — I/P/B Frames, GOP, Quantization & FFmpeg

How raw pixels become a compressed bitstream from first principles. Covers YCbCr color space, block partitioning, intra/inter prediction, I/P/B frame construction (encoding and decoding), GOP structure, the DCT, quantization (QP, rate-distortion), entropy coding (CABAC), and how FFmpeg ties it all together — with 5 interactive visualizations.

H.264 H.265/HEVC I/P/B Frames GOP DCT Quantization FFmpeg
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3D Shape Representations — From Points to Neural Fields

A guided tour of every major 3D representation: point clouds, meshes, voxel grids, KD-trees, and tri-planes. Then: surface normals, signed distance functions, Chamfer & Hausdorff distances, explicit vs. implicit rendering, and eikonal regularization — all with live interactive visualizations.

Point Cloud SDF Chamfer Hausdorff Eikonal Three.js
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Triangle Deformation: Local Frames, Jacobians & UV Parameterization

How does a 3D triangle become a 2D UV face — and how much is it distorted? Build intuition from local coordinate frames to the per-face Jacobian, SVD, and ARAP/ACAP energies, with interactive visualizations throughout.

Jacobian SVD UV Parameterization ARAP Plotly
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Singular Value Decomposition — The Geometry of Linear Maps

Every matrix is secretly rotate → stretch → rotate. SVD reveals those three steps visually: an interactive 2D transform explorer, eigenvalue vs singular value spectrum comparison, live image compression with a rank slider, and a PCA scatter plot — all with the full math.

SVD Eigenvalues Low-Rank PCA Image Compression
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PLCC, SROCC, KRCC & RMSE — Correlation Metrics for IQA/VQA

How to evaluate whether a quality model agrees with human perception. Covers Pearson linear correlation, Spearman rank correlation, Kendall concordance, and RMSE — with interactive visualizations, Q&A format, and failure case analysis.

PLCC SROCC KRCC RMSE IQA/VQA
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Neural Networks from Scratch — Layers, Activations & Loss Functions

Build every piece of a neural network using raw PyTorch tensors — no nn.Linear, no autograd. Covers the Linear layer forward/backward pass with full complexity analysis (O(BMN)), seven activation functions with their gradients, five loss functions from MSE to Softmax-CE, and a complete MLP training loop. Three interactive visualizations let you explore activations, watch forward-pass activations flow through a live network, and compare loss landscapes side by side.

PyTorch Backprop Activations Loss Functions From Scratch

Source code of this website is credited to Dr. Jon Barron