References
the roots · a living document
We always cite and reference — to honor the root and protect the branch off main. We don’t care what corporations or lawyers think of our work, unless they’re helping us. We care what the artists who inspired it think, and we’d love, more than anything, for all of them to see it.
A living document — it grows when we’re directed to add to it, or whenever we make an important citation. We cross-link to the source wherever we can. Take us to the root.
Methods & Code
- chess.js — Jeff Hlywa (BSD-2). The real engine inside the Washington Square chess chamber.
- Attention Is All You Need — Vaswani et al., 2017. The transformer; the spine of The Opaque Box.
- Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate — Bahdanau et al., 2014. The roots of attention.
- Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units — Sennrich, Haddow & Birch, 2016. Byte-pair encoding.
- Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners — Radford et al., 2019 (GPT-2).
Books & Ideas
- Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell, 1949.
- All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — Richard Brautigan, 1967. The lineage of the mission.
Philosophy & the Existential
- Søren Kierkegaard — the individual before the infinite; the leap.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — create your own values; amor fati.
- Jean-Paul Sartre — existence precedes essence; condemned to be free.
- Albert Camus — the absurd, and the revolt that answers it.
- Simone de Beauvoir — freedom is always situated; the ethics of ambiguity.
- Viktor Frankl — meaning as the last freedom we keep.
Music
- Ben Harper — a conscience with a slide guitar.
- Radiohead / Thom Yorke — saved for last.
- Rival Consoles — the anchor of the soundtrack that was, and is, the project.
Minds & Makers
- Nikola Tesla — built the modern world out of electrons, and gave it away.
- Hayao Miyazaki — craft as devotion.
- Vincent van Gogh — unseen in his own time.