Well, this blog is still alive! Have you ever downloaded an EPUB file too many megabytes too large? The reason is, quite probably, that the images in the file come in high resolution. As an .epub is nothing more than a .zip with a certain structure, it's possible to uncompress it, reduce the image size and leave everything as it was before 1 . I've been doing this by hand for a few months but in…
Credit bureaus are known for their sloppiness and incompetence, but you're forced to deal with them 1 . Recently, a family member tried to freeze her credit score but she was having problems with it. I had recently found again this wonderful link that explains how to write proper complaint letters , so I decided it was a good opportunity to put this in practice. It's a good idea to always deal…
Yesterday, I ran my script to check how many comments on the monthly Hacker News Who's hiring post mention a remote option . Remote jobs reached a level of 75 % - 80 % and stayed there (it doesn't look like that's going to change soon), but what's striking is the drop in the number of comments.
(The Montreal Gazette published this week this piece I sent them. It's part of a larger campaign to bring changes to ID theft laws in Canada that I have started on a separate domain; you can get more information at idtheftreform.ca . If you're interested, please join our mailing list.) On June 20, 2019, millions of Desjardins customers learned that their personal data had been leaked in one of the…
In preparation for February 1st, when Quebec residents will finally be able to place credit freezes with the credit bureaus, I created user accounts with both Equifax and TransUnion so I could manage the freezes from there. As I had already created the accounts, I wanted to access my free credit report, as mandated by law. The process with Equifax was very straightforward, but TransUnion's website…
I'm writing this post just in case the following chain of extremely improbable events take place: a) someone has read one of the articles I published in my prior life as an academic ; b) wants to get in contact with me to ask something or make a comment; c) has tried the e-mail address listed in the paper and has received an error message; and d) has gone to Google to search for the e-mail address…
It never had too many subscribers, but for those of you that are still there, please beware that the feed at shared.xml has stopped updating. As I started a Mastodon account not long ago, I'll share interesting links and articles there instead. Here's my account , and if you prefer RSS access, we have you covered . This only affects the XML file I was using to share articles from time to time.…
The number of employees let go today from this blog is exactly 0. As comments are not allowed, the moderation team (me) is still working as hard as yesterday, at least. You can receive a real time feed here . You can send me your DMs with the information you'll find on this page . All this costs way less than $44bn.
At any given point in time, thousands of people are thinking whether it's worth it pursuing a career in academia. I've created this simple page to help them decide. It doesn't give too many details, but some decisions should be quite clear.
It goes like this (excerpted): Are your production models too big? Would you be interested in getting the same performance out of your LightGBM/XGBoost/Random Forest models but with 80% fewer features/explanatory variables? Kindly click to respond: Yes Maybe No We're approaching what I'd expect to read in a cyberpunk text. Pssst, I have this model here, want to try it?