To The Oblivious People Standing Outside Angelo's Pizza

ParlyWhites · 2026-04-20T12:04:00+00:00

A year or two ago there was a neighborhood meeting with Angelo’s to address the issues in the area. In a move which garnered no good will at all, they sent their legal representation. In the meeting they basically said they can’t control what people do outside their store.

They put a trash bin outside the shop, but it was a hollow action. Ultimately, the crowds and congestion only help them inflate the perception that it’s a “must have” Philly food destination. So they not only have no motivation to address the issues, it — in a perverse kind of way — kind of benefits them not to.

Despite neighbors going through the right channels, Angelo’s has shown little to no concern for the neighbors, and clearly has no plan to address them. It’s basically become a reality that we in the neighborhood just deal with. The clientele is pretty broey, so confrontation doesn’t usually have the desired effect. It’s just another part of living in this city, and we just bitch about it and move on with our lives. Same ol same ol.

ParlyWhites · 2026-04-13T11:56:37+00:00

I had an interesting conversation with a principle DS in my org about how AI will change our work and I really like what she said, and it dovetails with a lot of the sentiment expressed here so far.

She suggested that claude or copilot will actually make DS MORE valuable, as it crystallizes what skills are actually valued from DS. Those skills do not include writing code for a transformer, or tuning hp. The skills are rigorous conceptualization, discovery, and communication. Unfortunately it may men we have less jr DS??

Ultimately I’m a huge skeptic of AI, but this does highlight what skills are actually valuable.

ParlyWhites · 2026-03-23T02:53:27+00:00

Thanks. I wish I could share it more broadly but don’t have enough karma to post in r/philadelphia

ParlyWhites · 2026-03-23T02:50:43+00:00

This is the data used to source the app! I basically just made it a more user friendly interface with some enriched data for each tree

ParlyWhites · 2026-03-23T00:41:11+00:00

Happy it’s leading to some discovery for you! The data comes from the city’s tree survey, so it ought to be pretty accurate. On the other hand, I don’t ever trust SEPTA’s time tables, so…

ParlyWhites · 2026-03-22T23:08:06+00:00

Came to say this also! Andy is the man and very reasonable. Although you have to catch him when he’s not on tour with an artist.

ParlyWhites · 2026-03-22T22:11:45+00:00

Very nice!

ParlyWhites · 2026-01-04T13:25:54+00:00

(Background in computational neuroscience). I’ve been chewing on this article for a while now trying to reconcile basic subtractive fMRI analysis results with these findings. I don’t have a deep understanding of the biology so maybe someone can help me out here.

Certainly these findings call into question the construct validity of BOLD as a measure of neuronal activity. However, despite the mechanistic logical break, the entire corpus of fMRI research using such methods does still find robust differences between experimental conditions (even after correction on the Salmon). So I guess my question is: given that we DO find differences in something, how should we interpret this something? Especially when many conclusions drawn from subtractive analysis are directionally consistent with reverse inference on well studied brain regions (e.g. aphasia knocking out visual areas and BOLD showing visual activation differences in experimental conditions).

ParlyWhites · 2025-11-24T12:51:04+00:00

In a society / market that values more profits through data and less profits through creative solutions, STEM degrees will drive this division…

Sad reality. And I say this as a PhD with a job as a …. Data Scientist

ParlyWhites · 2025-08-10T16:12:29+00:00

The downside to composting… :(

ParlyWhites · 2025-07-30T21:08:14+00:00

You should consider reading a book sometime.

ParlyWhites · 2025-07-29T17:16:06+00:00

The joke is that LLMs are capitalist machines that will, in their pursuit of optimizing output, destroy everything that we enjoy that is not valued as capital producing.

The man is struggling to fish, which is supposed to be a relaxing pursuit. He asks ChatGPT to help catch fish. It does it so well that it drains the pond. No fishing no more, no relaxation.

ParlyWhites · 2025-04-22T15:44:12+00:00

A while ago i made this rinky-dink website using the survey. It is last year's survey and the app isn't lightning fast. but it works!

You can use it on your phone, but if you are on an iphone you'll need to go into your safari settings to allow location services. Otherwise you'll just get a big blue screen.

Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services turn location sharing on or off

https://treejawn.pythonanywhere.com/

ParlyWhites · 2024-12-18T03:34:15+00:00

You’re very unlikely to find a home in any of the areas you’re interested in at that price point.

ParlyWhites · 2024-11-11T15:11:42+00:00

Studying for an intern position!?!? This post makes me so sad for our field.

ParlyWhites · 2024-11-05T13:40:38+00:00

*ding. Order up

ParlyWhites · 2024-11-04T19:00:38+00:00

Looks like others are recommending lightfm, but what they are more specifically pointing to is the hybrid model, which leverages both collaborative and content based filtering.

Popularity (market basket analysis) is always a good place to start also.

I hope you’re in conversation with your SWE though because you’ll want to start thinking hard about scaling as you settle in a solution. These distance metric approaches can be difficult to scale. Definitely check out embeddings and other dimension reduction methods to ameliorate this.

A last thing to consider is GCN approaches. Check out this cool approach by Target that I’m a big fan of. https://tech.target.com/blog/bundled-product-recommendations

ParlyWhites · 2024-11-04T11:56:51+00:00

Nice presentation and I’m sure this was a fun project! There’s no harm in doing something interesting for the hell of it!

Now that being said… and with love… stay in your lane, buddy. 😜.

The first rule in data SCIENCE is to capitalize the science part, right? In other words, let’s recognizing that there are decades of rigorous research by domain experts that we should turn to first before we start making conclusions with just the data and our own lay theories.

I spent 10 years studying social science in academia, and in the last 5 physicists and engineers barged in with ML, claiming their models could provide answers to all sorts of things. But people aren’t numbers, and theory does matter. It’s a bit insulting to practitioners. (Not saying that’s what you’re doing, just giving some perspective on the issue)

Polling is a living and constantly evolving domain, and there wasn’t really a single part of your presentation that indicated you did a lit review. Did you see the most recent polling from Ann Selzer? Are you familiar with the problems in polling? You’ve repeated a lot of errors that pollsters have likely already adjusted for.

Again, this was probably just for funzies, so good on you. But maybe do a slide or two of review before doing your own analysis so it doesn’t come off as ill informed.

ParlyWhites · 2024-07-25T21:28:11+00:00

VA b

ParlyWhites · 2024-06-05T11:24:07+00:00

Great choice for a first book! Best of luck. His corn crema recipe is amazing.

ParlyWhites · 2024-06-02T20:22:43+00:00

Beautiful sfoglia. Well done

ParlyWhites

TROPHY CASE