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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Like any occupation, it’s a long story, and I’m happy to share more details over DM. But basically due to indecision over my major I took an abnormal amount of math, stats, and environmental science coursework even through my major was in social science, and I just kind of leaned further and further into that quirk as I transitioned into the workforce. bear in mind that data science as a field of study didn’t really exist yet when I graduated; these days I’m not sure such an unconventional path is necessary. however I still hear from a lot of junior data scientists in industry who are miserable because they haven’t figured out yet that in addition to their technical skills they need a “vertical” niche or topic area of interest (and by the way a public service dimension also does a lot to help a job feel meaningful and worthwhile even on the inevitable rough day here and there).


  • My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.


  • I find it very funny that people are so concerned about false positives. Models like these should really only be used as a screening tool to catch things and flag them for human review. In that context, false positives seem less bad than false negatives (although, people seem to demand zero error in either direction, and that’s just silly).


  • If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to see the images you used. The broad validation tests I’ve done suggest 80-90% accuracy in general, but there are some specific categories (anime, for example) on which it performs kinda poorly. If your test samples have something in common it would be good to know so I can work on a fix.








  • Yes, and I loved it at first sight–it’s the only version of Firefox that feels modern and delivers competitive performance in terms of resource efficiency. I’m backing the project via Patreon and really hope it develops into something even better… though I have to admit that I’ve mostly switched back to Vivaldi because of its greater customization ability and mobile browser (Zen is desktop only) as well as its built-in adblocker, which even works in iOS, unlike uBlock Origin.