RobinL

12 ms·

211.
by RobinL 2y ago
I think this is pretty good advice. I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use
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by RobinL 2y ago
Same! (asking it to write code for the foss lib I maintain). This is immediately very useful.
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by RobinL 2y ago
Can anyone comment on the viability of using an external SSD rather than upgrading storage? Specifically for data analysis (e.g. storing/analysing parquet files using Python/duckdb, or video editing using divinci resolve). Also,
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by RobinL 2y ago
I use cursor (cursor.com) and it's fantastic
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by RobinL 2y ago
The whaling industry as depicted in Moby Dick is pretty high on my list of the most unbelievable things that really happened. Particularly the range of the boats and the method of catching the whales. Up there with the Spanish conquest of
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by RobinL 2y ago
In the short run, the trains are running anyway, so you might as well fill them up. This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2
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by RobinL 2y ago
By way of a single example, we've been migrating recently from spark to duckdb. Our jobs are not huge, but too big for a single 'normal' machine. We've gone from a 2.5 hour runtime on a cluster of 10 machines (40,vCPU to
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by RobinL 2y ago
I wonder what percentage of 'big data' jobs that run in clusters would now be far faster on a single big machine with e.g. duckdb rather than spark
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Splink: Transforming data linking through open source collaboration(government-transformation.com)
1 points by RobinL 2y ago|0 comments
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by RobinL 2y ago
To take one example of where this is valuable: - Take some dense research paper or other material that is unsuitable for listening to aloud - Listen to it (via NotebookLLM) whilst commuting/washing up or whatever This way you'll h
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by RobinL 2y ago
Yesterday the rain was torrential when I picked up my 5yo from school with my 2yo. I brought wellies and we walked up and down the streams of water running down the hill. The kids were more excited than anything we've paid for recent
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by RobinL 2y ago
In general I'm very optimistic about the usefulness of AI to programmers but I can't think of much worse than an Excel sheet that's bundles a bunch of AI generated Python code from a quality assurance/correctness point o
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by RobinL 2y ago
Agreed. The sweet spot is people who have product owner skills _and_ can code. They are quickly developing superpowers. The overhead of writing tickets, communicating with the team and so on is huge. If one person can do it all, efficie
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by RobinL 2y ago
I am cautiously optimistic. So much of building software is deciding what _should_ be built rather than the mechanics of writing code. I you like coding because of the things it lets you build, then LLMs are exciting because you can build
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by RobinL 2y ago
Have to say, whilst this tech has some creepy aspects, just playing about with this my family have had a whole sequence of laughs out loud moments - thank you!
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by RobinL 2y ago
Does anyone know of examples of something like this that can be bought in the UK?
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by RobinL 2y ago
Just recently released version 4 of our free library for data deduplicating/linkage at scale. After four years working on it, finally getting to the stage where I'm really happy with both the performance and the API design. http
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by RobinL 2y ago
The effect of this should be to reduce the price of used peletons by around $95 - i.e. effectively seller pays. I imagine that's the thinking behind this (ie it only affects the customer who's leaving the service), but it probabl
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by RobinL 2y ago
Also worth noting there are benefits to exposure that are often not full unaccounted for when considering exposure: https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2024/uv-rays-may-boost-health-in-l...
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by RobinL 2y ago
Overall perception: there are a lot of inefficient and ineffective charities, you have to be careful about who you give to if you want to have an impact Ever given? Yes, I give through a regular deduction from payroll (I'm a giving wha
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by RobinL 2y ago
She's got a great blog too: https://susan-stepney.blogspot.com/
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by RobinL 2y ago
Everything is a video. An image is the special case of length 1 frame
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by RobinL 2y ago
Similar or a bit better per mile to an efficient European ICE car with a single passenger. But: - you travel vastly more miles in the plane - you could fit four people in the car to achieve quarter the per person fuel consumption Also assu
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by RobinL 2y ago
Agreed. Highly recommend giving it a go for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'm a heavy (paid) chat gpt user, but for anything that I know in advance the answer will benefit from a web search (because it needs recent data), I use pe
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Splink 4.0 Released(moj-analytical-services.github.io)
2 points by RobinL 2y ago|0 comments
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by RobinL 2y ago
A public good is a commodity or service that is non-excludable (no one can be effectively excluded from using it) and non-rivalrous (one person's use of the good does not reduce its availability to others) Examples include clean air, n
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by RobinL 2y ago
The performance is pretty good because the prediction is ultimately just adding up match weights. Much of the performance is dictated by (1) The blocking approach you choose (how wide you cast the net in searching for matches. This is act
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by RobinL 2y ago
The Fellegi Sunter model is able to estimate the importance of different types of information from the data itself (i.e. unsupervised learning). For instance, a match on a date of birth column lends a greater weight of evidence in favour of
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by RobinL 2y ago
One useful technique here could be to use text embeddings and cosine similarity: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/
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by RobinL 2y ago
For deduplicating people, the Fellegi Sunter model is also a powerful approach. Splink[0] is a free Python library that implements this for big datasets. Probably you could combine parts of both approaches as well. Full disclosure: I am

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