Posts by Yes, *that* Dominic

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: "Journey of Improvement"

To be fair, ad-hoc analysis is often done on crummy data. One tool I wrote years ago worked on data that was horribly incomplete, often wrong and always out of date. But it told us things that made a decent amount of money.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

You can't handle the truth

It happens I occasionally drink with the guy who devised the 'explain' algo used by Google.

Two things stand out;

0: How laughably simplistic it is

1: You won't understand it.

Most people count from 0, like they did when they were 5.

A decent degree in maths or postgrad in econometrics and off you go, apparently there are now fast track courses only two years.

Also software is complex.

Yes, really.

Causality is really quite hard to determine in large code bases and since *of course* you've studied Boolean networks you may well feel that even if your program is as simple as a collection of deterministic finite state automata that you reach the point where it is stochastic.

Oh, but you want to inspect my code to see if it is naughty ?

Seriously dude ?

You speak C++, Python and VBA ?

Good because your mortgage rate, something you people whine about a lot these days is based upon my code.

Ah ? But you can cut & paste code snippets ?

Well done. and you're a "graduate" of a coding boot camp, hired because you're far more attractive than me.

Being prettier than me really ain't an exclusive club.

Sure you can look at my code and I can see how much patronising you can take on your maths before you tell me to just fuck off.

But you've read on Wired that algos use data ?

You can't look at the data because GDPR, oh how we laugh.

Please don't tell me you believe it is possible to genuinely anonymise data.

Seriously, you do ?

Would you like to buy some of my crypto currency ?

Long ago I worked at IBM Labs, it ended badly, actually really badly and it was mostly not my fault.

So did Mandelbrot.

Yeah, you've got a t-shirt with a Mandelbrot set on it.

You hardcore geek you.

Sadly Benoit is no longer with us but a crucial pat of his work was "sensitivity to initial conditions" or as the pop-Science you've read in New Scientist calls it "chaos"

Even as a coding boot camp 'graduate' you must have noticed that even quite small changes to code have huge effects or none on what it does.

So even if you can understand what my code does today, which you casn't, by the time you've pretended to understand it, the system no longer behaves in the same way.

Or it does.

Code is like that, be it it a neural network or the codec that plays your porn.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

This is wonderful and long overdue.

Since Brexit, the pay of people at the low end of the labour market has gone up and this look likely to continue into the next generation. My children will need cheap people to cook and clean for them, serve coffee and look impressed art the rather nicer cars and home they will be able to afford. Moms for Liberty are ensuring that there are plenty of such women in the future and I thank them for that.

Without religion my sons and I would be obliged to treat women as equals and that will never do.

AI and ML could save the planet – or add more fuel to the climate fire

You're not thinking of AI, but ASS, Artificially Sustained Stupidity.

err, economics

Making something more energy efficient does not always decrease it's energy consumption.

Let me share some basic economics here.

When you make something more efficient you decrease the cost of doing it.

That means people do it more.

Which more often than not means so much more of it is done, that you end up consuming more.

Computers are a great example.

The first beasts used so much energy that the heat was piped around universities to keep them warm in winter. One computer I used generated so much heat directly vented into the air of East London that in misty weather there was a mushroom cloud.

But their total was not even a rounding error in total energy consumption.

So if we use AI et al to make things like engines, fertilisers and pumps more efficient, we will end up consuming more, plus of course the remarkable energy consumption of the AIs themselves.

Skills shortage puts SAP projects on hold

There is no skills shortage.

You can get any skill you like to start Monday, but the conversation with HR goes like this.

Manager: We need at least 3 serious MonkeyDB DBA and a C++ for the calculation code.

HR: Fine, we pay 56K for coders, I'll put out another ad.

Manager: But the last 3 ads got no one we could use, we need to pay more.

HR: We pay 56K for programmers.

Manager: This is a 40 million quid project

HR: We pay 56K for programmers.

Manager: I need them now, C++ devs in the City get 150 and our last MonkeyDB went to FB for 130 + share options.

HR: We pay 56K for programmers.