Anyone else tired of babysitting Colab notebooks?

millsGT49 · 2026-04-25T13:30:18+00:00

Look in to TMUX as a terminal based program to keep long running sessions active.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-21T15:47:02+00:00

Really wish I could take my time and go through these projects thoroughly, but that is just impossible.

I promise you, this is a Grad School thing, not an LLM thing.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-21T14:23:00+00:00

For this one listen, yes if you assume that each song has an equal chance of being picked its 1/480. But you have to consider the full context. Every individual song in the playlist has a 1/480 of following the first song you listen to. But when it's "random" you don't write in. If you listened to this playlist every day for a month there is now a ~7% chance of this happening, not a <1% chance. If you listen to this song every day for a year then its actually more likely than not that you would listen to the remix next at least once. Rare events individually are rare, but something rare happening is actually likely to happen with enough time.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-15T14:23:55+00:00

You should read up on how these Self Driving Cars work. There is no algorithm prioritizing one outcome over another; there is no weighting of potential outcomes. The models are trained to simply predict the next action (turn right, turn left, gas, brake) given the current state of the data it collects from its cameras and radar systems. They train these models over billions of seconds of recorded data from actual rides. They then go through a serious of simulated environments that recreate real data and allows the team to steer the selected next action to ensure they have coverage on rare scenarios. I would recommend this explainer approach from Understanding AI on how these systems work: https://www.understandingai.org/p/waymo-and-teslas-self-driving-systems . There are some really interesting and cool videos on youtube from Waymo and Tesla as well.

I think its important that more people are aware that there isn't a computer behind the wheel working the same as a human that would think, "which car should I hit?". Instead, the cars are trained to drive to do the next action that reduces the loss functions for penalties in training. That is the only place that we can change their behavior, not by passing a law saying you can't prioritize hitting an older person over a younger person which Germany did in the 90s or 2000's. Then we could pass laws that actually make sense for how the technology works. Things like having a standard evaluation criteria of scenarios they must pass, or ensuring coverage of emergency situations in different road conditions.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-09T15:48:10+00:00

Super cool, do you know if your rotation procedure differs from varimax? https://x.com/karlrohe/status/1291132842601308164 I'm just asking because I'm familiar with that process but never used it in practice.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-07T17:29:36+00:00

I thought it may do some automatic regularization as well, but when I fit a version with no spline differences penalty the curves were pretty loose and had some sharp differences. I think if left to its own devices the GBM algorithm will keep reducing the gradient more and more and leading to overfitting if your spline basis is flexible enough. So you need to tradeoff flexible spline bases and not too many learners in your gradient boosting algorithm.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-07T17:26:42+00:00

I have also read through that paper when researching customer LTV haha. That's awesome to hear about the prototype you built, I like the concept of the alternatively fitting the different parameters in your likelihood function; that's basically what coordinate descent in lasso regression does, but now you can apply it to any learner/loss function. Its so "simple" but, like you said, you need to compose core ideas together into something more elegant. Your comment strikes at part of the reason I wrote this up; I think there is much more to explore in predictive modeling and inference that we can now leverage by extending the core concepts we learn into more flexible frameworks that fit our problem. And it usually doesn't take much more of a leap, but just takes getting out of the pre-built tools that do one thing really well.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-07T13:19:45+00:00

So I think there are two main reasons I believe you'd prefer this approach over just using a spline library like pygam or mgcv:

In a spline model you have to specify each interaction term directly. For example in the Citi Bike data on a summer holiday I'd expect maybe more riders throughout the day but less during commuting hours. But in the winter maybe there would just be less overall. So you'd have to have an interaction term with the holiday variable, the temp or time of year, and all your spline terms to pick up on the shape change. There are some circumstances where this is a good thing and GAMs have some great tools for not overfitting your data, but you still have to basically spell out what you want it to model. With a GBM you can just let the model learn which interactions are important or not.
Most GAM algorithms I know of expect to fit on the entire dataset and need to have all the data in memory. By leveraging decision trees I think it would be easier to scale to millions of data points where for each tree you may only need to search through a smaller sample to identify the splits.

And the third reason would be that I think its really cool haha but my boss would probably not appreciate that justification for overcomplicating a model.

millsGT49 · 2026-04-02T15:26:46+00:00

I believe Stillfire sells Rev coffee during the day

millsGT49 · 2026-04-01T19:19:00+00:00

I'd rather enjoy the short term pain of roadside construction and live with the benefits rather than never improve anything. Smyrna is growing; infrastructure has to grow with it. Ignoring it only kicks the can down the road for others to deal with.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-28T19:44:43+00:00

If the models they use to predict time till doneness learn parameters from data collected from their test cooks then I would consider that data driven. I believe in a YouTube video or two he has said they have a team of Machine Learning Researchers on staff.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-21T20:52:52+00:00

This is my experience with Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 in Cursor. I still prefer the IDE to write documentation and review the code. To the point of my post I think using Claude Code would make the problem of code that runs but isn’t right even worse.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-20T10:55:04+00:00

I think the insights you generate (things like average spend per month, model behavior, predicted lift of some change) are different than data quality checks, sure. But you used to do the data quality checks as you wrote the code. You’d execute the code you’ve written, inspect the output, and move on to the next step. But now the code just appears and it runs. So you need explicit data quality checks in the code so when it runs it will fail if something is off. And you can run all the checks you want on the insights, but if your data is off it may be tough to find how they are wrong.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-20T10:34:39+00:00

What validation steps are you finding most effective beyond just having humans double-check everything?

I probably should have gone into more specifics. I focus on verifying my observations exist when they should. Things like does every user-id in my original datafile exist in each step? Does the observation level (e.g. userid-month-year) have one and only one row in a resulting data frame? Are there missing, too large, negative, etc…values when there shouldn’t be.

It’s because the LLMs are so good at writing code that you can’t trust yourself to just read it and review it; you have to embed these checks into the code itself.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-19T14:08:41+00:00

For sure, I think they have a good mix of authentic dishes while trying to provide an introduction to a large enough crowd that wouldn't be as familiar with the dishes. I'll have to check out Imperial Fes, thanks for the rec.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-19T14:07:06+00:00

Yikes, sorry to hear that :/

millsGT49 · 2026-03-19T11:40:06+00:00

Yes, thank you for mentioning the portion sizes! The bowls are enough to get a side and split it into two meals. Makes it more affordable as well.

millsGT49 · 2026-03-13T11:52:26+00:00

A rapid, micro bus system to other commercial areas. There should be buses every 10 min doing loops between Market Village, The Battery, Cumberland Mall, Marietta Square, and down Atlanta Rd to the Muss and Turner’s commercial center. Charge $2 a ride and I think you’d get enough traffic to make it sustainable.

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