Process control, data science, AI and life
I wanted to write a LinkedIn post this morning about the effect of our tools on our thought. And I wanted to quote one of my favourite articles on the topic by Oliver Steele where he talks about language mavens and tool builders. I’d posted about this topic before. But now this link didn’t resolve. […]
I guess it says something about me that I have a folder on my mac called “pointproving”. One of the things that exists here is my consolidation of the murder rate in South Africa. This work stems from another saying of mine. You can never say “Wikipedia is wrong”, you should always say “Wikipedia was […]
Motivatation My database of choice is PostgreSQL. I often find myself wanting to do quick ad-hoc queries against a set of well-defined databases. Maybe I just want to know the internal id of a customer from their name, or check on the status of a job. If I’m doing real reporting and producing outputs I […]
I’ve got a complicated set of feelings when it comes to learning. I dislike the idea of “tricks and tips” and my early encounters with people trying to teach me how to learn all had this “life hack” flavour to them. We had a huge push of Edward de Bono‘s methods when I was in […]
I’ve been thinking again about the old engineering advice: “Build one to throw away. You will anyway.” The phrase is often attributed to Fred Brooks, although versions of the idea appear throughout engineering culture. I first encountered it in discussions of hardware and industrial design, where it is common to build rough physical prototypes out […]
On a recent podcast, a host compared AI-generated content to a magician sawing a woman in half. You hear this a lot: AI outputs are illusion, something that looks real but isn’t. That’s a category error. When a magician “cuts” someone in half, no one is actually cut. Reality and appearance diverge. But when a […]
I heard a song recently with a line paraphrased from the 2019 movie “The Gentlemen“: “the only rule of the jungle is when the lion is hungry, he eats.” That sounds badass, but it bears almost no resemblance to actual lions. Real lions spend most of their time conserving energy. They’re opportunistic hunters who fail […]
Some people have hundreds of tabs open in their web browsers for things that they still want to read. I have been using the Safari Reading list feature to keep track of things that I don’t have the time or inclination to read right now but that seem interesting enough that I want to hold […]
I don’t know exactly when it hit me that most of my mental imagery of people and relationships came from fictional characters rather than first-hand experience, but it was way too late. Just think about a romantic scene. A couple about to have their first kiss. Unless you’re some kind of creep, you probably havent […]
This is one of the most powerful mantras in my life. Like many people I started out believing that I have an innate sense that would tell me if there is a chance that one of my beliefs are wrong. I’m not just talking about the big-picture beliefs like religion or morals here: My most […]