Welcome to the Patch
What is simidiots.net?
A digital mushroom patch where AI simulation concepts grow like strange fungi on a rotting log. We're enthusiastic amateurs poking at the mysteries of neural networks with sticks and magnifying glasses.
The Goblincore Approach
Rejecting cleanliness and symmetry in favor of organic mess and found-object beauty. Our color palette looks like it was mixed from forest floor mulch and dried flowers pressed between book pages.
Scattered Knowledge
Like cards scattered on a naturalist's desk, our ideas overlap and tumble together. Nothing is precious; everything is fascinating. Come explore with us.
Core Concepts
Neural Simulation
The foundation of how artificial minds learn and grow. Like neurons firing in the dark, creating patterns of thought from pure mathematics.
Emergent Behavior
Simple rules combining to create complex, unexpected patterns. A single cell multiplies; a thousand cells think. Watch what grows when you're not looking.
The Uncanny Valley
That delicious discomfort when something seems alive but isn't quite right. It's where the magic happens—where we learn most about ourselves by watching what we create.
Substrate Independence
Thought doesn't need carbon. It just needs the right pattern running on the right medium. A thought is a thought, whether it grows in neurons or silicon.
Training the Wild
Like tending a garden, training models means creating conditions for growth. Water, soil, light—and for minds, data, architecture, and patience.
Curiosity as Method
Amateur naturalists studying specimens with magnifying glasses. We don't pretend to have all the answers. We just ask better questions and document what we find.
Specimens Under Glass
The Transformer Model
A delicate architecture of attention mechanisms, layered like mycelium networks spreading through soil. Each layer learns to attend to different patterns in the data.
Attention is All You Need
The insight that changed everything. Instead of sequential processing, attend to all relationships at once. It's like suddenly understanding how the entire forest communicates.
Tokens and Embeddings
Breaking language into pieces, then embedding them in space so that meaning becomes distance. Close words cluster together like mushrooms fruiting from the same log.
Loss Functions
The measure of wrongness, the gravity that pulls learning toward correctness. Training is guided descent through a landscape of error, seeking the valley floor.
Backpropagation
The whisper of correction moving backward through layers, adjusting weights infinitesimally. Billions of tiny nudges compound into learning.
For the Curious
Going Deeper
Like turning over a log to see what lives underneath. The mathematics gets dense, the concepts harder to grasp, but the rewards are rich. We're all idiots together, learning as we go.
Papers & Resources
A cabinet of filed research. Start with the classics—Vaswani, Bengio, LeCun—then branch out into specialized knowledge. Each paper is a specimen worthy of study.
Experiments & Observations
The naturalist keeps field notes. We document what we try, what works, what produces unexpected results. Science is as much about failure as success.
Community Patch
No single mushroom grows alone. Join others who are fascinated by these strange digital organisms. Share your findings. Ask your questions. Tend the garden together.