Richard Barlian

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

I'm Richard, a 16-year-old from Bali, Indonesia. I'm currently living in Singapore on an ASEAN scholarship at Zhonghua Secondary School. I don't fully trust myself to implement these architectures correctly -- I've had my fair share of patching sketchy code with sketchier fixes, like slapping on a tighter gradient clip and praying training magically goes smoothly.

Not everyone knows what I'm doing too. People either think I'm Jimmy Neutron himself or a 16-year-old who spends their entire day messing around prompting ChatGPT to do their homework.

But I think the message is still important. So this blog is me trusting myself anyway, working through deep learning from first principles, with all the shape errors and brutal mid-training Kullback-Leibler divergence blow-ups. I hope you can learn something useful from my journey too.

Reach Out

Richard Barlian

🎵 the song that inspired the name of this blog