The Network That Learned Nothing: Neural Network Fundamentals

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 54m

A fictional offshore wind maintainer's first neural network predicts "no failure" for every turbine, then outputs NaN. Reliability engineer Ines Carvalho and new ML engineer Dev Raman open the engine and find four separate problems. Part thirteen of The Deep End's Machine Learning series covers the neuron, backpropagation, the vanishing gradient that stalled the field for a decade, and the fixes that ended it, then convolution, recurrence, residual networks and the checklist that makes training work. Cross-references: ep114 (transformers), ep96 (diffusion), ep125 (linear algebra), parts 1–4…