wenc

29 ms·

391.
by wenc 2y ago
It depends on your demographic. Now if you're talking about tech startups/firms, then you'd more likely be part of the Linux/open-source and AWS subculture. Your tech choices are going to cluster around that. But if you
392.
by wenc 2y ago
H. P. Williams' book is often recommended for learning MIP formulations. However, I've found a cheat sheet to be much more helpful and practical for MIPs (not LPs but MIPs): https://msi-jp.com/xpress/learning&
393.
by wenc 2y ago
I have the exact opposite experience — VS Code notebooks are much snappier and are possibly the best Jupyter implementations I’ve ever used (better and more responsive than vanilla Jupyter or Jupyter labs). VS code notebooks also support L
394.
by wenc 2y ago
Sounds like you’ve diagnosed your issue in the last line. Notebooks are usually not inherently slow — I use Jupyter in VS Code running off a remote server and it’s snappy. I have a MacBook Pro 2020.
395.
by wenc 2y ago
Python 3 was a painful episode and I lingered on 2.7 and only ported over around 3.6. But now 3.11 is fine again. Looking forward to faster releases.
396.
by wenc 2y ago
They wouldn’t benefit from performance because as you say they are already blazing fast as is. And I know what you mean — I rewrote a pure (granted old pre-2.0) pandas transformation into duckdb and compute time dropped from nearly an hour
397.
by wenc 2y ago
As a former Perl hacker who started using Python in 2005, I saw Python ride several waves. (Numerical computation, data science, deep learning) Perl was the leading tool for scripting and text parsing. Python didn’t really supplant it for a
398.
by wenc 2y ago
DuckDB is not currently a supported package, but Pandas and matplotlib are which is good. If DuckDB and Polars were supported and if they ran well, I suspect many data jobs could benefit.
399.
by wenc 2y ago
That's true, except an LLM can sometimes propose a formulation that one has never thought of. In nuanced cases, there is more than one formulation that works. For MIPs, correctness can often (not always but usually) be checked by simpl
400.
by wenc 2y ago
Sure, but that is nature of LLM prompting. It does take some doing to set up the right guardrails. It's still a good starting point. Also a trick when the LLM fights you: start from scratch, and put guardrails in your initial prompt. L
401.
by wenc 2y ago
Thanks for sharing that, I appreciate it. It looks like they used open-source Llama models which are not great. I tested these models offline using Ollama and outside of being character chat bots, they weren't very good at much (the on
402.
by wenc 2y ago
I had to prompt it correctly (tell it to exclude x=y case in the x≠y formulation), but ChatGPT seems to have arrived at the correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/66e652e1-8e2c-800c-abaa-92e29e0550...
403.
by wenc 2y ago
Can you point me to that paper? What version of the model were they using? Have you tried again with the latest LLMs? ChatGPT4 actually (correctly) explains what each constraint does in English -- it doesn't just provide the constraint
404.
by wenc 2y ago
I appreciate this thoughtful comment. You are absolutely right that the trajectories, if taken linearly, might hit a dead end. I should clarify that when I mentioned "trajectories" I don't mean unpunctuated ones. I am myself
405.
by wenc 2y ago
No, but I don't carry a backpack due to back issues. Instead I have a small messenger bag which I lug, and you'd be surprised how much a 1 lb iPad Pro 10.5" bears down on you when you are carrying it all day.
406.
by wenc 2y ago
Also, I'm deeply skeptical of crypto too due to its present scamminess, but I am keeping an open mind that there is a future in which crypto -- once it gets over this phase of get-rich-quick schemers -- will be seen as just another ass
407.
by wenc 2y ago
I think it's perfectly ok to be critical of technology as long as one is thoughtful rather than dismissive. There is a lot of hype right now and pushing back against it is the right thing to do. I'm more reacting against simplisti
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by wenc 2y ago
That's category (3).
409.
by wenc 2y ago
This has been my experience as well. I treat LLMs like an intern or junior who can do the legwork that I have no bandwidth to do myself. I have to supervise it and help it along, checking for mistakes, but I do get useful results in the end
410.
by wenc 2y ago
Once GPT is tuned more heavily on Lean (proof assistant) -- the way it is on Python -- I expect its usefulness for research level math to increase. I work in a field related to operations research (OR), and ChatGPT 4o has ingested enough of
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by wenc 2y ago
I need that kind of power, not for apps, but computational photography and videography.
412.
by wenc 2y ago
I find that for writing (not coding, writing) I don't need the external monitor. There's an even simpler solution. I just pair my phone with a lightweight butterfly-foldable BT keyboard ($40) and I can type on the train, plane, et
413.
by wenc 2y ago
> Fast fashion is bad for the environment. I don't disagree with this, but I feel it's mostly to do with the volume and consumer demand (by the shopper types) rather than quality. > It’s lower than quality in most cases. Fas
414.
by wenc 2y ago
DuckDB understands Pandas and Polars dataframes so you can move back and forth seamlessly between them in-memory (with Polars, it's nearly zero-copy via an in-memory data structure). df = pd.DataFrame({"a": [1,2,3], &qu
415.
by wenc 2y ago
Wes McKinney (author of Pandas, but also co-author of a host of other major data formats/tools like Ibis, Arrow, Parquet, Feather), wrote "10 Things I Hate About pandas" https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apach
416.
by wenc 2y ago
Lots of automatic performance optimizations on what is already a very fast engine. (I’ve stopped using Pandas) I know most software folks feel some type of way about SQL (most don’t grok it beyond a simple SELECT) but this is one of the adv
417.
by wenc 2y ago
I type pretty fast, but never learned touch typing. What WPM's do touch typists typically attain? This is a touch typist at 190 WPM, which I think is rare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jBTKgobGWw
418.
by wenc 2y ago
I love my Maruman Mnemosyne 105 (not the 182 which is single sided) notebooks (I've been using them for years). The great thing about them is that the paper is thin but there is no bleed through even with fountain pens. They're al
419.
by wenc 2y ago
While German rigidity and risk-aversion might have made it more difficult (I used to work for a German multinational so I have some experience with this), it's true that for any big company -- even American ones -- that it is hard to d
420.
by wenc 2y ago
German cars are notoriously unreliable (well, a common refrain among owners is -- they are reliable as long as you spends lots of money maintaining them, and invariably anecdotes of a BMW 19xx still running like a champ will be offered. But

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