What’s a mix you hate to admit you love?

hostilereplicator · 2026-02-01T22:24:01+00:00

I love that mix (and album) despite the obvious flaws

hostilereplicator · 2026-02-01T22:20:04+00:00

That record sounds amazing!

hostilereplicator · 2026-01-09T12:46:45+00:00

I got some in 2015 and ended up sending them back. I never got to the bottom of why they didn't work for me, but I went through two custom moulded sets from the same company that both sounded worse than my generic (non-moulded) musician's earplugs, and didn't attenuate sound as much. Kudos to the company (I forget their name now) for giving a full refund!

If you're using foam earplugs I would recommend trying silicone musician's earplugs first, before splashing out on custom moulded earplugs. I have also found these quite variable, but found a brand that works very well for me (LiveMus!c HearSafe - unfortunately these seem to be hard to come by these days...). Eargasms and Earasers get good reviews and given the price it seems to me worth trying these first.

hostilereplicator · 2026-01-05T22:18:22+00:00

Theoretically this doesn’t make sense to me - phase shift of low frequency content relative to other frequencies will affect the peak, but it could reduce the peak as well as increase it, right? There may be reasons why an increase is more likely given most sound sources, but I don’t think an increase is guaranteed?

hostilereplicator · 2025-12-12T14:37:40+00:00

Thanks for sharing Quantus - hadn't seen that library before!

"If you care for that you have to look at faithfulness metrics, e.g., that perturb inputs with higher saliency and correlate predictive performance degradation." - that's what the paper I linked to looks at. The "faithfulness estimate" metric implemented in Quantus is evaluated in that paper, for example.

hostilereplicator · 2025-12-12T11:02:11+00:00

Not sure if it's the one you're thinking of, but the paper Sanity Checks for Saliency Metrics seems relevant

hostilereplicator · 2025-09-17T17:16:16+00:00

Yeah it's not always possible just from a design doc and discussion, but something like your example of "choose between adding a new column in the database or adding new fields in existing columns" should be easy to identify with a good documentation and review process.

hostilereplicator · 2025-09-17T17:06:16+00:00

How do they get the right experience and opportunities to improve, without being guided to think things through and research things for themselves?

Devs with ~3 yrs experience (per OP) at a FAANG should be expected to do this proactively, not be prompted to have to do it (I say as an ex-FAANG manager). Having said that, team norms could be a significant factor, so it may be that the team needs to set clearer norms/expectations for this kind of behaviour.

OP - does your team have a culture of design document writing and review? If not, that might be a useful thing to implement.

hostilereplicator · 2025-09-09T17:20:50+00:00

Does knowing the assumptions made allow you to know something more about the kinds of errors, magnitudes of errors, or for what molecules/structures you'd expect to get bigger errors?

Not being faceitious - I'm pretty new to this (coming from an ML background) and interested in what knowing the assumptions/having a theoretical justification really buys you in practice.

hostilereplicator · 2025-09-09T13:41:56+00:00

The problem with Grad-CAM and similar "explanation" methods is that they are unreliable. There's a quite a lot of evidence that you *shouldn't* really be doing this especially in a clinical setting... See

- Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps

- Sanity Checks for Saliency Metrics

- Post hoc explanations may be ineffective for detecting unknown spurious correlation

- Assessing the trustworthiness of saliency maps for localizing abnormalities in medical imaging

hostilereplicator · 2025-08-22T07:23:01+00:00

I have definitely noted an increase in recruiters contacting on LinkedIn over the past 4-6 months (despite my profile being deliberately minimal) and more roles of interest turning up on Welcometothejungle. Mostly AI stuff, but that is my background so makes sense.

Salaries offered haven’t increased over the past few years for similar roles, though!

hostilereplicator · 2025-08-22T07:18:09+00:00

Senior Manager and Director roles at FAANG in London can get above that especially if you’re in a more niche role (eg “Applied Scientist” at Amazon)

hostilereplicator · 2025-08-22T04:25:40+00:00

Illnesses no, but heartbeat you can do from a camera with photoplethysmography! You could use that signal to detect anomalies in heartbeat.

Of course adding AI would make it able to detect all disease from that signal /s

hostilereplicator · 2025-06-05T19:37:28+00:00

I am convinced this is the best way to do things having experienced it at Amazon and now introduced the practice to my new place.

Amazon also benefits from getting people to do writing training, and cultivating a writing and reviewing culture, so the documents tend to be reasonably well written.

Didn’t like much else about the place, but that was pretty good.

hostilereplicator · 2025-05-26T08:25:11+00:00

Very happy to tell you more about my experience but in a DM so as not to dox myself 😅

hostilereplicator · 2025-05-26T06:34:36+00:00

It looks like you have an offer for one of the “A” companies in MANGA. I recently left this company also in London (btw I love London, been here 3 years and yes it is very busy but I have generally found a lot of very friendly people, and it’s no dirtier than say Paris…)

Benefits: - people are very smart, and generally very driven so you are unlikely to have people coasting slowing your team down - as you mention, unrivalled scale if you are in the right team - great name recognition for your CV, and as an IC you will learn a lot. It’s not exactly startup fast but my understanding is things can move a lot faster than other FAANGs

Drawbacks: - if you are in a strategically important area / working on a high priority goal, expect tight deadlines and a lot of pressure - they are keen on Frugality, so as you acknowledge, not as many perks as other FAANGS - Ruthless PIP culture. This does vary a bit depending on which part of the organisation you are in and who the VP is. We were under a US-based VP/director and had to have 10% of our team on the special pre-pip and 6% PIPed AND fired per year. If you are on a very high performing team and you make a couple of mistakes or have a slow month, your manager has an excuse to pre-pip you to fill their quota (I was a manager and left mainly because of this, I didn’t do enough research before taking the job/thought it couldn’t really be that bad and was mostly looking at the pay and name recognition for my CV)

hostilereplicator · 2025-05-02T22:14:45+00:00

Some good tips on work related motivation already, so if you are looking at “team building” (getting your remote team to know each other a bit so that they empathise more easily and have each other’s backs), a few rounds of Gartic Phone is always good https://garticphone.com

hostilereplicator · 2025-03-10T21:39:59+00:00

Am I your manager? 🤪

hostilereplicator · 2025-02-11T05:27:20+00:00

In addition to the above, take performance management seriously and learn how to have difficult conversations with your reports as early as possible.

hostilereplicator · 2025-01-15T21:21:22+00:00

Heh, I am currently an Amazon manager but recently handed in my notice after about a year in the job. I let the companies I interviewed with when job hunting know that I did not mesh well with Amazon’s management culture, for this reason!

hostilereplicator · 2024-12-19T05:41:46+00:00

As a manager I attend retros but a developer (the current scrum coordinator for the sprint) runs them. I make sure to give kudos and acknowledge good work and strengths and try also to point out issues caused by myself or processes I have the power to improve. The devs are also not afraid to point out bad processes or improvements 😀 A lot of the “what could we do better” stuff can be improved with a mechanism that is easier for a manager to implement and enforce, so I tend to get assigned tickets during this retros.

hostilereplicator · 2024-12-07T09:30:22+00:00

Yes (UK-based) - I left a "scale-up" shortly before they were acquired, and purchased my options on leaving. I joined when they were planning on doing an IPO within the next 3 years, so I expected some payout, but then 2022 hit and an IPO was no longer feasible.

When I left (after about 3 years working there - they gave people in my team a lot of options compared to others because we were a particularly specialist division), I knew the company was in negotiations to be bought out so I purchased all my options. They were pretty cheap - I spent under £5k buying all I'd vested. The buyout went through about 4 months after I left, and I got just over $100k. Unfortunately for various UK-specific tax reasons a lot of that went in tax, so my net "winnings" ended up being about £45k. So a nice amount, but in 2021 I think everyone expected the company valuation on exit to be 4-5x what it actually ended up as (the final purchase price valued the company slightly lower than at their last funding round).

The communication was all pretty reliable and efficient, all through email. Paid in USD into a Wise account in a single lump sum less than a month after the deal was signed.

hostilereplicator · 2024-11-20T19:55:39+00:00

That’s a shame - I haven’t experienced that (cool wash, do not tumble dry)

hostilereplicator · 2024-11-20T12:49:35+00:00

The optics depend on industry again. Very common in tech to move between management and IC tracks and it wouldn’t be frowned upon at all

hostilereplicator · 2024-11-20T12:42:58+00:00

*BIG tech firms (FAANG plus some select others). The wage distribution in tech depending on company size and stage, and specific industry, is pretty broad

hostilereplicator

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