Questions and sometimes half thoughts

Aging as an evolutionary advantage

Humans, throughout our lives, gather experience, and the older the man, the wiser he becomes. So these older men will have a much better survival and procreative advantage. If there is no aging and slowing down of the old animal, future generations will be less diverse. This homogeneity makes the whole species an easy target for a sweeping disease. The longer the time, the higher the risk.

So you can see, taking the advantage away brings back the balance and gives the species the strength via diversity.

Making money

Man makes money either by realizing a Platonic ideal or corrupting one. I want to be in the 1st category.

Have you ever seen a failed machine learning project ?

If the answer is no, then ask yourself if you have seen the boundaries of what’s possible. If all that you see are successes, how much of it is just spending time on a worn-out path doing something everyone has done ?

Dataset drift detection is a silly idea

The whole point of model based machine learning, or modelling as a method of understanding the world, is that your model can generalize. From a practical point of view, a generalized model can perform well on unseen (even drifted) data. From an understanding point of view, a generalized model encapsulates how man thinks the world works. Focus on making your model generalize well.

Writing code that’s breakable with tests

Taking the idea of modern scientific discovery by Karl Popper, a programmer should write code that’s breakable in tests. This is crucial for production grade code, where we absolutely need to know the boundary of the logic of the code and how it can break.

The Art and Science of Cause and Effect - Judea Pearl

When God asks: “Did you eat from that tree?”
This is what Adam replies: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, She handed me the fruit from the tree; and I ate.”
Eve is just as skillful: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
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explanations are used exclusively for passing responsibilities.

Then would a man, the one who can explain things, feel guilty if the outcome is bad, or would he feel he deserved the outcome when it’s good ?

Does god have human emotion ?

Look, He can create all this cool stuff with ease, on a whim. Does he even feel bored ? The man of ultimate wisdom and love, why does he let all the atrocious things happen on Earth? Hmm. Does he feel anything ? Yes, no ? If no, why would we pray for his love? If yes, would his feeling be equal for all parties ? If someone does something horrible to someone else for a blind reason, would he let it happen ? But anyway, he’s dead now and mankind has killed him. Now what does mankind fear?

Metrics

All metrics are wrong, but some are useful. more

Tech debt

From a business perspective, tech debt is a sign of growth, where business functions outgrow the software. From a labor perspective, it creates jobs. From an engineering perspective, it creates fun puzzles to solve. What the beef again ?

Study

Confusion should open the door for your curiosity.

Logging

Logging is a programmer’s insurance. The larger the program, the higher the premium.

True randomness

Is there objective randomness out there, which is not just randomness observable by a man (subjective randomness) ? And how, epistemically speaking, can we answer this question when given a seemingly random event, i.e. can we tell if this random event happens because it’s truly random, or we observe it to be so because of our inability to perceive, or sense the whole of it. Heisenberg principle comes to mind …

Grandma

Pity the one whose grandma doesn’t cook good food

Thinking and calculating

Without gaps in knowledge, thinking is reduced to calculation - Byung-Chul Han

Best technologies

The best kind of technology is the invisible one, like wifi

Value of a test set

The more you use a test set, the less valuable it becomes. In some cases, we can measure this value by something like information gain i.e. how much information you have gained (in bits) from modifying your model using your test set. As a result, the best test set is only used once.