I had a classic Bayesian statistical education throughout my undergraduate and grad years and I’ve come to conclude that the plethora of books offered are pretty bad. For me personally statistics is intuitive if illustrated properly. A great example is … Read more
SpaceX filed confidentially for an IPO on April 1, 2026, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a June listing. If completed, it would be the largest IPO in history. I found this valuation interesting because SpaceX is a conglomerate now, … Read more
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like “prefer composition to inheritance” is near-universal. I love finding the rare situations where these principles don’t hold, like where you … Read more
Introduction McHire is the chatbot recruitment platform used by 90% of McDonald’s franchisees. Prospective employees chat with a bot named Olivia, created by a company called Paradox.ai, that collects their personal information, shift preferences, and administers personality tests. We noticed … Read more
Around 2012-2013 I started to hear a lot in the sysadmin community about a technology called “Borg”. It was (apparently) some sort of Linux container system inside of Google that ran all of their stuff. The terminology was a bit … Read more
posted Mar 25 @ 03:57 PM by Aaron Cohen · gift link Imagine you own an ice cream shop and the thermostat on your dipping cabinet, which is the freezer ice cream is dipped (scooped) out of, is set to … Read more
Fri, 24 Nov 2023 11:50:56 -0700 (home) (other posts) Landing Boats Wernher von Braun’s Das Marsprojekt envisioned a flotilla of 10 ships, operated by not less than 70 men, that would depart Earth orbit for Mars. Once at Mars, the … Read more
Enlarge Matthieu Spohn The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the … Read more
I resent AI. Not AI itself–that’s just code, despite what tech guys with flashlights under their chins tell you. I resent the imposition, the idea that since LLMs exist, it follows that they should exist in every facet in my … Read more
My first brush with mailroom censors came when I was in a county jail in upstate New York in the winter of 2010. After almost a decade of struggling with heroin addiction, I’d gotten arrested just a few days before … Read more