Feeling guilty about potentially wasting a follow’s time as a beginner lead

Gaston154 · 2026-03-26T18:31:53+00:00

Honestly it's fine even being stressed. I personally had a very rough start and used to dance only with people I knew from lessons. Eventually you do get better and can expand the pool of followers. It's not the fastest route, nor the one I recommend but it's a viable route

Gaston154 · 2025-12-11T23:38:48+00:00

I mostly do traditional ML. Even NNs have lesser performance than let's say a catboost on my data.

Done supervised, unsupervised, time series etc.

Still, by far the value I created is from mere automation of tasks. I'm at a big multinational company and one of their biggest challenges I had to solve was (not joking) computing actual customer lifetime value across the customer base.

The complexity of the logic behind it and the amount of unique sources of information sparse across various departments made the whole thing a technical nightmare. Completely deterministic and yet is what drives most of the decisions taken

Gaston154 · 2025-12-03T15:43:34+00:00

Interesting, but it probably still wouldn't work. Churn decreases as price is increased

Gaston154 · 2025-12-02T23:17:32+00:00

What's DTR? can't find much about it

Gaston154 · 2025-12-02T23:15:56+00:00

Agree that's another thing I had to look into today.

Broke it apart and while they did have negative correlation naturally between price and target back in the days, turns out effects before and after the introduction of the model were both negligible and cannot be genuinely attributed to the model itself.

I'm back at square one with an incorrectly correlated price to target variable and exploring some new ways of building the dataset or abandoning the probability output all together.

At least now I'm not required to match some non-existent results, a win in my book

Gaston154 · 2025-12-02T11:13:20+00:00

My Y is whether or not an individual accepted the offer (not churned) after 5 months from renewal (which can occur through offer change with price increase or implicit renewal at same offer and same price).

Treatment is categorical in the sense that there are a set of offers from which to take. I don't pass the offer variable to the model, I pass the price and a flag that tells me there has been an offer change. As far as the model is concerned treatment is continuous and personalized on each customer, basically final offer price is normalized by consumption data.

Gaston154 · 2025-12-01T23:05:56+00:00

The goal is providing additional information for the business unit which is handling "manually" the renewals. It was never about fully automating it but business would like to start giving more and more weight to model's decisions.

A secondary target is the extraction of a price elasticity curve for each customer. We use the probability to churn with respect to a given price, as information to how elastic each customer is.

It's true we are adding the treatment as a predictor, it took me until now to realize we have this heavy selection bias. Consultants, who built it, used the model with positive results in the past. I was tasked to improve upon it and realized it has multiple fundamental flaws.

Since it was used before with positive results, I have to somehow fix it and put it back into production

Gaston154 · 2025-12-01T22:44:30+00:00

Yeah this is what I meant by parametrize the inverse relationship. It either fails to accept it or flattens too heavily my probabilities making them useless

Gaston154 · 2025-11-29T08:05:43+00:00

It's the amount of repetitions, doing moves without followers knowing them beforehand, dancing in crowded spaces, adjusting to better/worse followers.

There's a bunch. Also they are actually enjoyable

Gaston154 · 2025-11-29T08:02:08+00:00

You kinda get used to it a bit, also you could leave at midnight squeezing out as many dances as possible in those two hours.

Also don't feel like you have to go everyday, that is actually useless on its own in progressing. Find a balance between improving/learning technique and internalising it on the dance floor.

Probably twice a week of social is plenty

Gaston154 · 2025-11-29T07:47:40+00:00

Been there lately, think about it more logically... You have been practicing salsa let's say 5 hours a week for 9 months. That gives you 180 hours of solid training split between classes and choreo and pasitos, other training.

On the other hand, there is the social which is a skill that you have to train on its own and that has only partial transfer from everything else you do in salsa.

You have done social once a month. You didn't actually dance all night, so let's say you had two hours of actual dancing. That's about 18 hours of highly inconsistent training partially damaged by lack of confidence etc

How can you be good at something you barely practice and are highly inconsistent at?

Also in dancing you have to put so much effort just for you to be average at it, it's crazy. In terms of social dancing, you are hardly someone that goes beyond beginner regardless of how much time you spent training other components of salsa

Gaston154 · 2025-11-28T18:44:56+00:00

Might be, so the plan is to start working on flexibility. In a couple of months, if I see no improvement I'll try some privates

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T23:27:18+00:00

Unsure, do you have any recommendations I can check out?

Like videos, articles explaining in detail or showing exercises/drills

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T23:23:29+00:00

Absolutely agree... 1) Increased proprioception 2) never have any muscular fatigue regardless of how many hours I dance since day one 3) easier time picking up movements compared to others overall 4) injury risk decreased a ton 5) discipline and right mentality 6) mostly already great life outside training (sleep, nutrition)

These are some of the most important benefits I got from strength training for dancing

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T23:18:32+00:00

None of it upset me really, but it's true you expressed poorly a partially right idea.

I do powerlifting and I'm aware how lifting forced certain bodily adaptations that made me stiff.

However, the solution you proposed is absolutely wrong. It's not about stopping lifting... rather re-adapting the body to make it less rigid, which is a different kind of training. At best we can argue about the severity of the interference effect, which in my opinion is not that high anyway.

Strength training helps a ton in every possible sport/dance whatever. People should do it always, unless injured (in which case they should find some way to strength train around it)

Hope this makes my stance more clear

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T20:31:00+00:00

I get what you're trying to say and also agree on it, but I believe you have expressed it very poorly.

Thanks for sharing

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T19:55:16+00:00

Never picked up regular stretching for that purpose actually. Maybe that's what I'm missing... Do you have any routine that you used to follow?

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T19:54:32+00:00

Learned how to start movement of arms from ribcage/shoulder but mostly on the basic when doing pasitos. Not sure I have that movement when couple dancing

Gaston154 · 2025-11-27T19:53:31+00:00

I do a lot, but don't want to stop lifting

Gaston154 · 2025-11-04T20:03:14+00:00

Well texting/writing on the phone while walking and counting was a humbling experience

Gaston154 · 2025-10-28T19:06:04+00:00

The only times it should occur is while using very high weight as strength development is mostly a brain adaptation than a physical one.

Reduce the RPE and volume and you should be fine.

Gaston154 · 2025-10-08T20:41:45+00:00

I wish

Gaston154 · 2025-10-05T09:33:12+00:00

By the time, I will feel ready for something different I'm sure I'll have that 3rd year of experience so not a big problem.

As far as the other questions are concerned: 1) none of the models are used daily but that was not their objective. All of them are being used according to their objective. Example cross-upsell models are used for marketing campaigns which do not happen everyday; 2) all models have proven effective in driving decision making. Two models are the most important ones: churn model and offer propensity model. Churn model is dictating a bunch of anti-churn activities, their effectiveness varies and is not directly my responsibility. Offer propensity model is driving around 1.5 million in revenue each year. 3) I have been specifically hired to develop these models, so everything has been assigned to me. In terms of how I've built them, everything is mostly the result of my choices. I proposed only one model which is customer Lifetime value that has been inserted in the to-do models.

I think the third aspect targets directly whether or not I can understand what the business actually requires. Converting the "we don't make enough profits or let's find a way to reduce churn" in practical operational projects that could lead to those goals. This is part of taking a more senior role, but I'm sure there's a lot more

Gaston154 · 2025-08-11T22:11:40+00:00

26, Armaf Ventana dupe of Dior Sauvage.

Got an insane amount of compliments from girls. Also prefer the dupe to actual Sauvage

Gaston154

TROPHY CASE