Category: Uncategorized
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Prediction without intervention
Genetic testing – useful or not? In 2020 I got results of a genetic test that said “Overall lifetime cancer risks have been reported as high as 73% for males and nearly 100% for females.” I had a newborn and the world was facing the biggest public health crisis since World War I. I was…
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“These are magic beans, my boy. Their value comes from growth and scale, not revenue.”
This is a photo I took of a cartoon in the New Yorker in 2015, but the disassociation of corporate valuation from economic fundamentals is even nuttier these days. I especially love the scowling skeptical cow who is being traded for the beans. Feels like a lot of common sense improvement initiatives and analytics projects…
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Fat Carmine
Cannoli, cash and good wages My dad and his siblings all grew up in the projects in New York. Every so often. my uncle tells me a story of what their childhood was like that sounds like a scene from the Sopranos. In this scene, Fat Carmine, is making the weekly pickup at the shipping…
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Networking
ICP & the strike zone I spent a day in June at the Snowflake’s Dev Day in SF. To be honest it was overwhelming. So many people, so many vendors, too much to really take in. I went because I wanted to talk to a couple people and get more familiar with consultancies and tools…
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Made Redundant?
Why are businesses not SERENE? I think the British term for layoffs is particularly weird. In climbing Redundancy is not only desirable, but can be lifesaving. Free climbers and boulders don’t use ropes, anchors, cams, nuts, hexes, slings or the myriad other tools sport and trad climbers use to protect falls. As my friend Alan…
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Noise: a flaw in human judgement
Kahneman has passed, but his ideas live on With Kahneman’s passing I finally started listening to his book Noise: a flaw in human judgement. You may be familiar with oracle Nate Silver’s book the Signal and the Noise or the concept of measuring noise statistically in systems, but have you really thought about how influential…
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Vulnerability for collaboration
I’m working with a guy who is leagues better than me at SQL right now. I know things about ML he hasn’t been exposed to. We have really complementary skills but many overlapping skills too. I look at some 20+ slice pie charts he’s built and cringe and I probably don’t know all the things…
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Talk to your data engineers
There’s never a useful data catalog I was thinking about using Age as a feature in a regression model for churn prediction. I looked at the range of values in a box plot across categories and it was nicely differentiated, centered around different median values. The weird thing was some of the values in Age…
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Capitalism | Freelancing | MMM
Years ago I used to occasionally read Mr. Money Moustache’s (MMM) blog. There was a big movement (FIRE) to establish Financial Independence (a huge net worth which generates passive income) so you could Retire Early. When I graduated from college I had $25k in student loan debt at extremely low (subsidized) interest rates. I was…
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Bored vs Boring
Thoughts on raising kids My friend Karan asked last week if driving our kids from one structured activity to the next kills their ability for self-play and other skill development? Below is my response:I’ll answer your question obliquely —My daughter sometimes comes to me complaining “I’m so boring” which is a linguistic foible. What she…
Carragee Consulting 