Peter Drake HAS MOVED @peterdrake@qoto.org

Bluebird again

#birds #wildlife #nature #photographer

Hey folks! I'm looking for examples of elected officials and people running for office who have accounts on the fediverse.

Know of one? Please let me know! Boosts appreciated

She has a real good example of how algorithms on platforms like Instagram not only try to make you addicted but also divide us even more

I real LOVE the fact Mastodon and most of the Fediverse software avoids this all together

Friends: Who are you listening to right now?

Me, very hip: Oh, you wouldn't know them.

if you can't be in a coalition with people you disagree with on at least a few things, you can't build a coalition big enough to accomplish anything in the United States or defeat rising fascism.

It’s just not going to work.

@RickiTarr

Luxottica, an Italian company, owns 80% of the eyewear business worldwide, including Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision Center, Oakley, Ray-Ban, Target and Sears Optical, and licensing on designs by Prada, Chanel, Coach, Versace, Michael Kors, and Tory Burch.
It costs them $4-8 dollars to make frames, and top quality lenses for $1.25 each.
With markups of up to 1,000%, a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers can cost from $200-300 USD.
It's a sick monopoly that should be broken up.

Usually, if there’s a thing you feel passionate about doing, there are other people already working on the project.

Individualism is not helpful. Find a place to plug in.

Gradient Descent Visualization 👇🏼

I was looking for examples of interactive data visualization for a gradient descent algorithm, and I found this app by Lili Jiang. This desktop app is based on C++ and enables simulation and visualization of different gradient descent algorithms, such as momentum, AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam. The app enables to compare different methods simultaneously.

https://github.com/lilipads/gradient_descent_viz

Image credit: App repository

#DataScience #MachineLearning

Omg any day now computers will be able to add

@bbbhltz @hacks4pancakes When people join my team, I tell them to go and look at productivity studies. Across different industries (I originally thought this was solely for knowledge workers, but I recently chatted to a researcher who has reproduced the same result in the construction industry), they all show roughly the same shape:

Productivity increases up to 20 hours a week.

It then plateaus up to 40.

It then starts to decrease and is typically negative by about 60.

This is the total net productivity, not the delta. If you are working 60 hour weeks, you would probably be more productive if you just stayed in bed all day.

For programmers, just think about how long it takes to fix a bug that you introduced when you were tired. Fixing mistakes (in any field) is often slow and expensive. Reducing the likelihood of making mistakes is usually much cheaper,

This is for sustained periods. People can often be productive for a 60-hour week if they are well rested, so if you have a one-off urgent deadline, it *may*be okay to work longer hours to meet it, as long as you take enough time off to recover. Averaged out (factoring in the recovery time), this tends to be less productive overall (ignoring the secondary impacts on people who have other commitments, like to see their families, and so on), so it’s generally a bad idea.

I want the most productive 20 hours of each employee each week. I don’t care when they happen (I’ve worked with some people who find they are most productive 2-4am, and that’s fine). Employees are responsible for getting enough rest to make sure that they can be productive for 20 hours each week.

I wrote our vacation policy to be explicit about the point of leave. It is not a gift from the company. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is an obligation from the employees to the company to ensure that their brains are taken care of so that they can be productive. My contract (which is the model for new employees) has a minimum amount of leave I must take each year and a maximum time I can go without taking at least two days of leave.

The book I most recommend to new managers is PeopleWare and the most important point in that book is that, as a manager, it is not your job to make people work. Most people take pride in their work and want to do it well. Your job is to remove obstacles that stop them from being able to do good work. I don’t think it goes quite far enough because sometimes the biggest obstacle is the employee. If you’re hiring smart and motivated people, the most likely failure mode is that they work too hard and don’t notice their productivity dropping off. Sometimes you have to force them to take a week off (and you need a leave policy that supports you in doing so).

Sorry for the long rant, I haven’t had coffee yet and bad management annoys me, even when it’s depressingly accurate satire.

Yep, I like it