Notes

I recently1 discovered ugrep, and I have benefited a lot in using this to search my logseq journals. But recently I noticed I was getting fewer results and also confirmed some misses. My specific strange issue was that if I pointed directly to my miss, ug found it but not otherwise. I was consulting with microsoft copilot about this mystery. running into a weird ugrep issue where, ug -%% 'some blah' /some/foo/path , comes up dry , but if I am specific ug -%% 'some blah' /some/foo/path/more/specific/file.py , then I get results. Is there some index that needs to be poked for rebuilding? ...

This person [1] discussing gping for a walk and breathing to combat overthinking. Also harnessing the Tim Ferris “how can this be if it were easy?” What I also like, for a close relative to over thinking, over-emphasizing, over-valuing , the impact , of not a decision say but a upcoming event. The trick I find, is to discount its importance or better just pretend it has already happened. I know it is similzr to what Michael Phelps was known for doing, mentally viewing the tape literally linearly of a swim meet. I think focusing specifically at the end , and how good that feels, helps me to keep myself in that state even before it’s over. ...

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. ...

I had a crazy issue where a databricks job was taking over 13 hours and failing which had tzken just over 1 hour previously on another workspace. Turned out after a bit of staring at logs I had a face palming moment because yet again I got bit by spot instances/spot workers. I found in my logs Spark UI these weird errors, “Executor 1 removed” “Executor 2 removed” ,.. thinking memory issues or asymmetric shuffle issues but then hovered my mouse and saw ...

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. ...