http://programmer.ie/tags/nearest-neighbors/ Recent content in Nearest Neighbors on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:10:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/books/embeddings-from-first-principles/06-chapter/ Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:10:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/books/embeddings-from-first-principles/06-chapter/ <p><em>Part II — Inside the Space</em></p> <h2 id="the-question-a-vector-cannot-answer-alone">The question a vector cannot answer alone</h2> <p>Hand someone a single embedding vector and ask what it means. They cannot say. Hand them the vector <em>and</em> its ten nearest neighbors and they can usually tell you the topic, the register, and roughly what it is.</p> <p>Meaning, operationally, is <em>locality</em>: a vector is characterized by what it is near. So the honest object of study is not the point — it is the neighborhood.</p>