标签：#neural

Meta recently open-sourced Brain2Qwerty v2, a noninvasive Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) that can decode sentences from thoughts using electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals from the brain. In evaluations, the system achieved a word accuracy rate 61% on average, compared to 8% for other non-invasive methods. By Anthony Alford

When we open sourced Neural Inverse Cloud, the easiest choice would have been MIT. Most developers like MIT. It's short, permissive, and widely adopted. If you've released an open-source project before, MIT is probably the first license you considered. We didn't choose it. We chose AGPL. Not because we dislike permissive open source. Not because we want to restrict users. We chose it because infrastructure software plays by different rules. The Infrastructure Problem MIT works incredibly well for libraries. You publish code, developers use it, and occasionally improvements flow back into the project. Nobody is forced to contribute, but community norms often make it happen anyway. Infrastructure software is different. Cloud IDEs, databases, developer platforms, deployment systems, and backend services can be monetized without ever distributing the source code. A company can: Fork your project Add proprietary features Launch a hosted version Build a competitive advantage on top of community work Never contribute anything back The original project does all the R&D. The fork captures the value. We've seen this pattern repeatedly across open-source infrastructure over the last decade. Why AGPL Exists AGPL closes a loophole that traditional open-source licenses leave open. With GPL, if you distribute modified software, you must publish your changes. But what if you never distribute the software? What if you simply run it as a hosted service? That's where AGPL comes in. If you modify AGPL software and provide it to users over a network, you must also provide the source code for those modifications. That applies to everyone. Including us. If we improve Neural Inverse Cloud, those improvements stay open. If someone else builds a SaaS business on top of it, their modifications stay open too. Why This Matters for Users We wanted users to have guarantees. With AGPL: You can self-host the latest version Community improvements remain accessible No company can create a permanently

Training a network from scratch in raw NumPy, quantizing it to int8, and running it as ~80 lines of dependency-free JavaScript — with a parity test proving the browser matches Python to 1e-6. Why bother? MNIST is a solved problem Digit recognition is the "hello world" of ML — that's exactly why I used it. The model isn't the point. The point is everything around the model, which happens to be the part that matters in production work too: training without a framework, compressing for deployment, running inference in a constrained environment, and proving the deployed system matches the trained one. Training: just NumPy and math The network is a 784→128→64→10 MLP — hand-written forward pass, backpropagation, and Adam optimizer. No autograd, no framework: # backward pass, by hand dz3 = ( probs - y_batch ) / batch_size grads_w [ 2 ] = a2 . T @ dz3 da2 = dz3 @ weights [ 2 ]. T dz2 = da2 * ( z2 > 0 ) # ReLU mask grads_w [ 1 ] = a1 . T @ dz2 ... One trick that matters for a drawing demo specifically: shift augmentation . MNIST digits are centered; humans draw wherever they like. Training on randomly translated copies makes the model tolerant of sloppy placement. Combined with MNIST-style preprocessing at inference (crop to bounding box, scale into a 20×20 box, center by center-of-mass), real-world doodles classify reliably. Final test accuracy: 98.2% . Compression: int8 in 15 lines A float32 weight file would be ~430 KB. Symmetric int8 quantization cuts it ~4×: scale = np . abs ( w ). max () / 127.0 q = np . clip ( np . round ( w / scale ), - 127 , 127 ). astype ( np . int8 ) One scale factor per layer, weights stored as base64 in JSON: 145 KB total , and quantized test accuracy is identical to float — 98.2%. Inference: ~80 lines of plain JavaScript In the browser, the weights are dequantized once on load, and inference is three matrix-vector products with ReLU and a softmax. ~109K multiply-adds — about a microsecond-scale problem for any modern device. No TensorFlow.js (t

A complete ML pipeline: engine, backprop, binary format, and a live browser demo. Zero dependencies. Under 200 KB total. If you have built machine-learning projects before, you have probably done it by importing PyTorch, TensorFlow, or scikit-learn and calling .fit() . Those are excellent libraries. This article is about what happens when you deliberately do not use them — when you build every piece of the pipeline yourself, in a language that compiles to WebAssembly, and the result runs live in the browser with no server, no Python, and no cloud bill. Here is the live demo: move four sliders, watch the predicted Iris species update in real time. The model is running entirely inside your browser tab, loaded from a 1.1 KB binary file, powered by ~100 KB of WebAssembly compiled from pure Rust. This is the story of how I built it and why the engineering choices made it work. Why Rust? Why WebAssembly? Why zero dependencies? Three constraints drove every design decision. WASM requires no_std or a carefully limited std . The wasm32-unknown-unknown target has no operating system, no file system, and no libc. A crate that links against rand , ndarray , or any library that makes OS calls will not compile to it without significant plumbing. An engine built from nothing but the Rust standard library compiles cleanly to every target, including WASM. A zero-dependency std -only crate is uniquely auditable. There are no transitive dependency trees to vet, no supply-chain risks, no version conflicts. Every line of code that runs in the user's browser lives in this repository. The deployment story becomes the technical story. A 100 KB WASM blob that runs locally in the browser is not just a cost optimisation — it is a privacy guarantee (user inputs never leave the machine) and a latency guarantee (inference is microseconds, not a round trip to a cloud API). That story is only possible because the engine has no external dependencies that would bloat the binary. The architecture: ei