Notes

Originally posting1, here are some thoughts from reading this article2, on random variables on how they are not. The author addresses this quote , “Why random variables are neither random nor variables” Summarizing, the author would prefer I think “random variables” were renamed as “probabilistically deterministic functions”. or maybe more verbosely, “probabilistically deterministic functions mapping uncertainty to known possible outcomes”. The argument being, that, “random variables” are not variables because they are not single numbers but really intended to describe how a probabilistic distribution , say, maps to outcomes. I like that the author refers to these outcomes as “shadow numbers” 🙂. (And by extension I like the point that, just semantically, a number, “14” , is not random even if it was generated through a quantum event, because by definition the mapping function is what is random and not the numbers they produce). ...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood I was reading Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, because I’ve been looking into writing about my whys. I have a document penning down whenever inspiration hits. It has the “path of mastery”, like Dan Pink might add , the “path of impact”, where I see Andrew Ng in my mind whenever I write that, the “path of curiosity”, which is a pet I have that must be fed or else we have Jack a dull boy. There’s also the “path of making others go ooooh thats cool or thats funny” , which I can never really help myself not visiting if I trip into it. ...

Just perusing Gayle’s [1] intro. I am wondering about will Gayle write about when is a good time to transition from thinking about and designing a solution to a problem, and writing some code to test things out. i Think this interview style does actually relate to what lately i think about that design skills are really important to save time. But also, to be specific sometimes you can write some quick code that can really be faster than white boarding. but agree that your compute in your head can save you lots of time from going down the wrong path just by your intuition and not because you have actually worked out why. ...

At a recent team meeting , we discussed the merits of voting on story pointing efforts for story cards. Already yawning! A colleague shared a recent study looking back on jarring counting, and the Wisdom of the Crowds phenomenon. You know, the one where a bunch of people stare at an ox and influence each others votes about how the ox is heavier than it really is. At least thats what this royal society paper studied. That if you are given information about your peers assessmwnts of the ox’s weight, you are more likely to discount smaller guesses than larger ones. And they captured a correction factor , which might be handy the next time you are in a situation where you and other people around you are counting gumballs in a jar or group shaming chunky four legged herbivores. ...

Making a mental note, today I encountered what is referred to as the spark small file problem [1]. Well, though I did not realize it initially anyway. I was running a pretty complicated feature engineering notebook, trying to reproduce the results of a colleague. I set up a databricks workflow DAG on a recent evening, looking forward to seeing what happened a following morning. The result surprised me. I woke up to a job that ran for 13 hours and crashed with a shuffle flavored error. ...

Listening to this Cory Doctorow interview . [1] I like his hypothesis for why the foundation model companies are valued so disproportionately highly, that the aristocratic class really really really doesnt want to depend on the working class and they see a way out to finally do without them. That makes sense! But yea reality is , the current models are really really really good at giving you what you “say” you want, which is far from what you need most of the time. ...

lack of clarity what to do next? write it out as if you were to prompt a LLM tool like ChatGPT , but instead the prompt is for you . Prompting seems to have rewired my brain , over the past three years, to focus into words, into highly descriptive narrative, what I want , knowing my words need to be free of noise. This is to the point now Ill often start writing a prompt in a Chat window or a message to a friend or colleague at work, and Ill stop, realize that writing helped me organize my thoughts and I no longer need to even ask the question. ...

Reading the on bullshit paper. author saying in old days craftsmen did not “cut corners”. looking this up , think that was literally about the road you took, per reading [2]. paved road vs over fields. but hmm, shortcuts are kind of organic rosds not necessarily sloppy. like, we have, planned vs actually useful question here ? Idea can be extended maybe , what are we building anyway. You will not do it perfectly from your first idea. ...

Just had some first try humidifier debugging results! Daily yay! Hah, debugging stories like this that I have, rarely get resolved quickly. My vornado fan heater that downgraded into just a fan had an issue where I found a workaround that ultimately stopped helping and lucklily the staff at Vornado sent me a replacement so I guess I was under warranty. But for my Honeywell humidifier, I had a pretty lucky result just now. I usually fill the tank in the evening, for a mist to counter the evening dryness from the winter indoor weather. But this morning the tank was full and the orange panic light was on. This light only comes on when the water runs out. So that was weird. ...

I was trying to use chat gpt codex to save myself a few minutes, to add two new vimeo rest api parameters, name and description , to my upload script I mentioned earlier3. I encountered a 500 and so I could not create a PR. however the cool thing is that I learned about the git apply capability, which somehow I did not realize existed . But it worked seamlessly, with just taking the patch and git apply codex.patch. ...