What no one told me was, as a senior resource how much context switching I need to do.
It's not even 12pm and I have been in 5 meetings, about 4 different projects
-- streaming platform but blockchain (Node, Golang) > planning + deployment issues meeting
-- goodreads but lighter > frontend approvals and ideas
-- custom node module development in C++ for internal db > debugging
-- SD card ETL tool > estimations and planning

One of my minions (erm, I mean, "a valued junior member of my team") asked to be assigned to tasks more "data science related".
Regardless of the very last-decade sounding request, I tried to explain to the Jr that there is more to "data science" than distilling custom llms and downloading pytorch models. There are several entire fields of study. And those are all sciences. In this context, science equals math.
But they said they were not scared of math.
I've seen them using their phones to calculate freaking tips. If you can't do 15% of a lunch bill in your head, hypothesis tests might be a bit more than challenging.
But, ok then. Here we go.

So I had them do some semi-supervisioned clustering. On a database as raw as dirt, but with barely 5Gb, few dimensions and regarding subjects with easily available experts.
Even better, we had hundreds of manually classified training and test cases.
The Jr came back a month later with some convoluted mess of convoluted networks; just the serialized weights of the poor thing were about as large as the database itself.
And when I tried it on some other manually classified test datasets... Freaking 41% error rate, for something that should be a slam dunk. Little better than a coin toss.
One month of their time wasted on an overfitted unusable mess.

I had to re-assign the task to someone else, more experienced, last friday. It was monday when they came up with an iterative KNN approach giving error rates for several values of K... some of them with less than 15% error on the test dataset.

WTF are schools teaching and calling "data science" nowadays?!?!?
I reeeeally need to watch those juniors more closely. Maybe ask for middle-sprint demonstrations. But those are soooo boring and waste so much time from people who know what they are doing...
Does anyone have a better idea to prevent this type of off-track deviation? Without being a total bore, that is.

And... should I start asking people "gotcha" data analysis questions before giving them free reign on this type of tasks? Or is it an asshole boss move? I would hate someone giving me a pop quizz before letting me work... But I got no other ideas.

It fucking grinds my gear to a cylinder that people just cant seem to make calendar invites in Outlook and just email me 5 times with additional info that i then have to copy-paste to the event!

When the inventor of CSS said "Damn I have this great idea..!" somebody should have told him to chill and tell him "no worries, someone else will do, too."

what if you never die

what if you're constantly, with every conscious decision, on a choose your own adventure ride

what would you choose 👀

@kiki

I really want this whole industry to die. I want it to happen from the bottom of my soul!

Their whole job ad was about web technologies where they were asking for a 7-10 years Symfony developer.

One would think being a programmer for 10 years should superseed your shitty LLM prompt crafting requirements.

Truly, there never was a better time for global EMP to happen..

"Posting is currently turned off for this type of place," so that photo of an oil rig off the coast of Tabasco will forever shape people's first impression of the Gulf of Mexico that US citizens are now supposed to call Gulf of America.

> Americans: THOSE ENGINEER KIDS HIRED BY ELON ARE BRILLIANT AND AMBITIOUS, THEY ARE SO SKILLED, THEY'LL DO WONDERS FOR THE COUNTRY
> me, knowing full well the average dev is a retarded mongrel I wouldn't trust with a hotdog stand, without even going into the whole "Musk is a schizo" story

I mean... you've gotta love Apple's resource management and observation. Math and logic have no say in any of this.

Some 20 years ago I was out on my deck and I found this all metallic green fly that was smaller than normal flies. Even the head was green. Not quite the same, but similar to the picture.

I caught this fly inside a little plastic cup with a lid. I wanted to look at it up close. Then I saw a little tiny jumping spider a little bit bigger than the fly. I lifted the lid slightly and coaxed the jumping spider inside the cup as well. So now I had this little jumper hunting this cool green fly. I set it down and did something else.

Later I came back and the spider had the fly. He was having green fly snack. I left it alone again. When I came back I was absolutely astonished by what I saw. The metallic green fly was dead on the bottom of the cup. But it was now a metallic blue color! What?! Then I realized the loss of moisture probably caused the skin/shell to contract changing the wavelength being reflected to a blue color.

This made me wonder. How many entomologists have specimens what are labeled "green fly", but the specimens are blue?

Is this an early example of web devs (spiders) making CSS changes to nature?