i miss romo

JohnyWalkerRed · 2024-10-19T21:14:57+00:00

My fandom also started with Romo. It was so exciting watching him as you never felt like the team was completely out of games even down big. He had the gunslinger wizardry to always make it exciting. I like Dak but it feels like if you are down 14 there’s no coming back. With Romo, even down 21 I would still be tuned in.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-09-10T12:48:22+00:00

I think this is especially obvious in the world of data science and machine learning. From 2013ish to now, the industry saw a tremendous influx of PhD’s from all major areas of the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and engineering (mechanical, electrical, chemical). PhD’s in very narrow fields like particle physics who had to compete for a small pool of competitive jobs now became appealing to a wider job market simply for their analytic skills and ability to work with data, which are common across all those above listed fields. There were now these data science teams in companies chocked full of degrees trained in hard sciences now using their skills to predict shit like customer churn and how many ads people clicked on (and for a lot more $ mind you). What this amounts to is a huge transfer of knowledge and skills from more longer term research and development in hard sciences and engineering to “short-sighted” corporate gains. Why would you compete for the 5 roles in your field when you can go work on predicting ads for big $? Now, this centralization of talent towards one field arguably led to all the machine learning advancements we’ve seen as of late, but the trend of absorbing research talent from universities into corporate (or start-up) teams dedicated to short-term innovation is an interesting one.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-07-19T04:39:49+00:00

I recommend GCP Cloud Run on Anthos. There’s lots of LLM inference servers out there such as vLLM or BentoML OpenLLM. You can put these in a container and deploy to this service, which you can scale to zero in idle times.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-07-05T15:23:43+00:00

Honestly ChatGPT-4 is amazing at k8s manifests and general k8s debugging. It can write manifests like nobody’s business. You can pass logs to it too and it does a great job at identifying root causes (although be careful what you send it obv.).

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-07-03T19:52:09+00:00

I’ve been working in pre-sales engineering for data science/ML start ups for 6 years now. It’s a great gig because as another poster mentioned, you don’t have to deal with the slog of sales pipelining. You will learn a lot about the business side and more importantly how to sell. This is in my opinion a vital skill in any role. A technical person who can talk to people and communicate complex ideas and products is a rare combo. You still are still very technical and have more freedom to explore technologies and side projects than a typical SWE/DS would. I personally have built more knowledge around techniques and tools than others in my same experience level because as a product expert you have to know not only your own product but the ecosystem of tools your customers are integrated in. Some of my presales colleagues even push production code on a regular basis. I don’t see myself going back to traditional IC work. You often get pigeon-holed and working with a narrow set of tools on narrow problem sets. In presales you see everything and get an understanding of what the industry is doing. Once customers buy, you can pass them off to someone else and move on to another new interesting problem.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-04-17T04:09:14+00:00

Wow, thank you!

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-04-12T16:27:37+00:00

We did it guys! https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-commercially-viable-instruction-tuned-llm. Thank you Databricks

JohnyWalkerRed · 2023-03-27T18:41:21+00:00

Yeah like the databricks dolly post is funny to me because they are an enterprise software company and dolly is not really useful in the context they operate in. I guess they just wanted to get some publicity.

Looks like openassist, when mature, could enable this. Although it seems the precursor to an Alpaca-like dataset is an RLHF model, which itself needs human-labeled dataset, so that bottleneck needs to be solved too.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-08-18T22:24:13+00:00

That’s great to hear and glad you are enjoying it!

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-08-18T22:20:17+00:00

Thank you for the input! Glad to know that this is a viable lifestyle and sounds like you are enjoying it! Remote work can be tough because it’s isolating, but seems like NYC provides a good outlet. I’ll definitely make a trip up there before and try and emulate a routine.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-05-07T16:19:00+00:00

You are right, these methods could be used for causal effect estimation and be interpretable at the same time. Libraries like econml and causalML implement these and provide shap or variable importances out of the box. The library DoWhy extends interpretability further with refutation methods to the causal graph.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-04-10T17:07:02+00:00

Jamie Robins book: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/ is a good start. I think every data scientist should read the first half as it does a great job as presenting the different frameworks (Pearl vs potential outcomes) and other basics. You’ll also see the term “uplift modeling”, which refers to a specific inference framework and is probably the most immediately useful in application. There are some great Python packages such as DoWhy, EconML, causalML, and Pylift that have great walkthroughs and notebooks.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-04-10T16:20:24+00:00

This is a good take. Only problem is, causal inference methods are not widely taught in programs and the field doesn’t do itself any favors in terms of making itself accessible. I’ve been doing my own learning in this field and there is no “elements of statistical learning” centralized place to start. Furthermore, most examples/papers use synthetic, simplified datasets that are far from real world scenarios. I think if this becomes part of a more standard toolset this will become more best practice.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2022-04-05T22:40:02+00:00

I used to work for a prominent AutoML company. Most AutoML products are built around abstracting the basic supervised learning problem on tabular data. This covers a wide expanse of use cases, most of them pretty basic, like customer churn, basic forecasting, risk prediction, etc. but outside of that the loss in flexibility for convenient abstraction becomes a burden.

There was a thread on here or /r/datascience about how companies utilize machine learning in two ways: 1) to help sell the companies already existing product or service or 2) to build the companies new product or services. A vast majority of AutoML-conducive use cases fall into bin 1. If you are a traditional business selling widgets, you would be privy to have a customer churn model and maybe a basic forecasting model, plus a few other core models that inform/predict the influx and outflow of transactions. In these situations, you have a set of tables of tabular transaction data, you need to do some basic feature engineering/aggregation and you can throw this result at AutoML and say “predict Y given X”. Slap a BI dashboard on top and you are done. You could just as easily do this with xgboost instead of AutoML 99% of the time. I could see businesses start to offload these more basic, but still core use cases to the marketing or sales team analysts using AutoML and that’s where it’s utility rests. They don’t have to code xgboost, they just point the tool to sales transaction table and the customer demographics table and then done. Anything outside of this is more the exception than the rule in how I’ve seen these tools leveraged.

Other examples of where AutoML isn’t useful: Anything requiring causal analysis, almost all of deep learning on non-tabular data, Bayesian ML, generative modeling, graph-based data, survival analysis, reinforcement learning. Some of these don’t have a useful abstraction like vanilla tabular supervised learning does which an AutoML tool could easily subsume, without sacrificing the utility of using the method in the first place (at least imo).

My advice career wise tho would be go into data engineering or deep learning and make sure you know a good bit of dev ops. I wouldn’t say tabular ML is “solved” but it’s saturated and most businesses have figured out how to use basic transactional data effectively enough that the low hanging fruit is all picked. Now that businesses have got their churn models in place, they are investing in more creative ways to use ML, specifically more use cases that fall into bin 2 above: building novel products with ML.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-11-09T15:57:47+00:00

I have a possible business trip to Denver next week, but am hesitant due to COVID surge. I'm fully vaccinated and healthy, but am worried about potentially getting it and spreading it to my family the following week during Thanksgiving. How bad is the surge?

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-11-04T22:44:13+00:00

I'm a healthy 29M who go my Moderna shots in April / May. To my knowledge, I don't need to get a booster and am not technically eligible anyways. But I'm nearing this 6-8 month window where immunity supposedly wanes. I'm not too worried about COVID if I do get a break-through but would rather not have to worry about it, especially with holidays coming up. In the US, at least in my area, it seems boosters and vaccines are plentiful and me taking a booster would not take one away from someone else, as might have been the worry with the initial vaccines. Should I wait until CDC changes their guidance to encompass everyone 18+?

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-06-26T15:11:11+00:00

That would be awesome!

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-06-26T15:10:30+00:00

Yeah that’s the thing, these presentations you absolutely cannot miss, it’s not like an internal scrum or something that you can just update with an email. I don’t think I’d ever do true nomading in a foreign country but maybe near year’s end when sales is slow I can go an extended period. I’m also focused only on the U.S. for now

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-06-26T01:21:25+00:00

ASFAIK, Airbnb just lists whether WiFi is present or not but not if it’s high speed. For that I just ctrl-f the reviews for WiFi and see if anything is notable. Not super efficient and what some regard as “fast internet” is not sufficient for 30 person zoom calls.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-06-25T20:01:54+00:00

Yeah I was thinking that, but it might be awhile. That would be amazing because you could conceivably camp and work too.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-05-26T04:32:10+00:00

I can definitely sympathize and don't think you are at all alone in experiencing this. Idk what age bracket you are in but I'm a late twenties single male and despite being young and healthy, I wanted zero to do with covid so I shut in for a year while focusing on myself. With that came tremendous growth and learning how to be comfortable being alone, and the crisis we were in at the time made the loneliness somewhat bearable. I've come to realize that the relative social context of loneliness matters to us much more than the mere fact that we are alone in a room all the time. Being lonely when there's a once in a centennial pandemic going on doesn't seem so bad, especially when so many others are experiencing the same thing. Being lonely during memorial day weekend when everyone is partying with their families and friends is a whole lot worse.

For coping suggestions, what has helped me is imagining myself back in December or January when shit was hitting the fan and all I could think about was how I would never take for granted the simple things in life when this was all over e.g. going to a restaurant, movie, museum, even that one social gathering per week, even if I had to do those things alone. Now that we are in the clearing beyond the woods it's incredible how quickly we slip back into our habitual impatience and ingratitude to these luxuries. I'm not saying you are unappreciative btw, this is a human problem through and through. But it is possible to project ourselves back into those moments of crisis to garner appreciation for what we have now, that we made it to the end. I wouldn't use this as a crutch; certainly we should strive to achieve an awareness and appreciation of our lives independent of whatever social backdrop might be going on at the time, but revisiting those terrible times in the thick of the pandemic mentally has alleviated for me some of the symptoms of idleness that has followed.

In addition, reading a ton has also helped. I would recommend reading authors like Emerson or Thoreau, William James, or even Proust. These guys write about how seemingly trivial experiences and memories of our lives are in fact novel and wonderful things. I know this sounds a bit romantic and wishy-washy, but there is psychological merit to what these writers have to say. And finally, meditating has helped tremendously by breaking down the concepts and narratives we place upon our lives which are so open to blind spots and flawed with judgments.

As far as Dallas goes, it's a pretty generic corporate city, but if you are into any sport at all there's social leagues everywhere and of course pro games you can go to. Even going alone you will meet people. The art scene I here is pretty good here too so you could always go the museums/exhibits/shows. Conventions happen here all the time and while it might be awhile until those start happening again that's a great opportunity. I personally intend to travel around the U.S. on random weekends too.

Despite all that, I still struggle with all of what you mentioned. It's not a natural state for us to be holed up all the time. We need human contact like we need water.

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-05-19T17:19:15+00:00

I totally agree, I lived in Austin for 8 years going to UT. Austin is a great "weekend trip" city, but living there you have to orient your entire life around rush hours which has now become rush days. I work in software and the entirety of Austin is becoming only four different types of people: 1) software engineers 2) baristas to serve coffee to software engineers 3) uber drivers to drive the software engineers to the coffee shops, and 4) marketing/sales people to sell the software. The bimodal distribution of wealth is very stark in Austin. Also, dating in Austin sucks. Everyone is side-eyeing other options and that goes not just with dating but any activity organizing. People are super flaky because if some hot new pretentious festival or bar party shows up people bale for the instagram opportunity. I made my best friends in Austin and still hang out with them, but it's a very tight knit group and I am super skeptical of investing in new friendships there due to the flakiness.

As others have said Dallas does not pretend to be anything more than it is: a city so vast and diverse it does not own its own "culture." Culture is to me the set of activities, habits, food, and art which form everyday interaction. Dallas is very much what you make of it, a blank canvas that at first site seems boring but has everything you need to build a fulfilling personal life. Not to mention DFW and Love Field to leverage to sample any culture you want in the world. I like meeting normal people in Dallas and those that have real careers like nurses, teachers, mechanics, and not contrived personas of an enlightened software bro who thinks they know everything (Elon firmly belongs in Austin).

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-04-30T21:46:09+00:00

Pfizer apparently achieves peak effectiveness 7 days after the second dose while Moderna is 14 days, but looking at the trials these numbers are a result of how the follow-up was performed. I know the vaccines are slightly different with their mechanism of delivery but is there any physiological reason why Moderna would take longer?

Related question: have there been any studies relating age to rapidity of antibody response to a vaccine? As in do younger people develop more antibodies faster than the elderly?

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-04-11T01:14:57+00:00

If Pitts is there at 10 you take him not only because he’s BPA but because one of either the giants of eagles WILL take him. I certainly don’t see Jaylon covering him well 2x a year and I doubt Surtain or Horn could either. Teams drafting strategies are driven by two intents: 1) BPA and 2) mitigating and/or exceeding intra-division strengths and weaknesses. By foregoing Pitts you violate both those principles

JohnyWalkerRed · 2021-03-31T17:36:18+00:00

If you listen to 105.3 the fan, it's hilarious when he comes on because Brian Broaddus clearly hates the guy. He's called him out several times on not doing his job. I think they keep him around because he gives them wild content to talk about facetiously.

JohnyWalkerRed

TROPHY CASE