Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

Just walking from the bus station to Kiyomizudera, and we turn a corner and stumble across this gorgeous ~600 year old pagoda draped by rain and mist at the top of a lovely hill street lined with cool shops.

Just another day in Kyoto.

Houkanji, October 2017. Now on our list of off-the-beaten-path must-sees in #Kyoto.

https://octodon.social/media/Z_QW2b1_SJ52qKc52V4

```
>> r=exprnd(10)
To use 'exprnd', the following product must be licensed, installed, and enabled:
Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox
```

#Matlab, every time you do this to me, you're just reducing the likelihood I type `matlab` in the future when I have a numerical question, instead of `ipython` or `julia`. 🚮

Canadian goose atop a huge slump rock, high above the Little Miami River.
Clifton Gorge, John Bryan State Park, USA.
https://octodon.social/media/B9IA8BswATr5ABZJVtY

Morning doves nesting outside our door. The circle of life, the magic of nature, all that gooey squishy coolness. https://octodon.social/media/f95rqahbyyYD2e8cqNM

2/2 “… Galen is an extreme example but he is the sort of figure who pops up repeatedly in the history of medicine. They are men (always men) of strong conviction and a profound trust in their own judgment. They embrace treatments, develop bold theories for why they work, denounce rivals as quacks and charlatans, and spread their insights with evangelical passion.” —Tetlock/Gardner.

I love that:

“Why should he? Experiments are what people do when they aren’t sure what the truth is.”

1/2 ‘Galen’s writings were the indisputable source of medical authority for more than a thousand years. “It is I, and I alone, who has revealed the true path of medicine,” Galen wrote with his usual modesty. And yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment. Why should he? Experiments are what people do when they aren’t sure what the truth is. … Each outcome confirmed he was right, no matter how equivocal the evidence might look…’
—Tetlock/Gardner, *Superforecasting

So while everyone’s in the streets, for these twenty, thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrating “it’s not the end of the world! We hit three empty chambers in the game of nuclear roulette!”, I’m inside, watching some of us slowly picking up the revolver and eyeing it lovingly and thinking about spinning it again it freaks me the fuck out. We can deal with droughts, infections, small-scale fighting, even energy crises. But WMDs and nuclear codes and dictators… I’m freaked.

If you say “all’s well that ends well so carry on like we were, it’ll turn out ok again”, after surviving Russian roulette, you need help. (Not even talking about climate change or 6th extinction here.) Ok fine, enough with the sophomoric insights.

But I think this awareness of counterfactuals might make you: less quick to jump to conclusions, less sure you understand enough, more tolerant of ambiguity, more willing to accept added nuance—more likely to avoid playing Russian roulette again.

I see the 20th century as humanity playing Russian roulette (spin a revolver’s cylinder and pull the trigger) a few times and coming out ok, so I see the 21th century so far as a huge collective sigh of relief, “omg I didn’t even know we were in so much danger…!”, like when a tornado passes your house without you knowing.

You may examine the history and disagree with me, but if you contaminate your risk assessment with the fact that it turned out ok, that’s not cool, and you’re being deluded.

“…why stop at toy number theory problems, when surely your fintech app needs compressive sensing and spectral theory and special relativity.”

By the way I fully recognize what a lucky person I am to be able to tell an interviewer to GTFO when so many of my friends are looking for work. Y’all keep looking, don’t stop improving—we’ll make enough work for everyone soon enough. Hang in there.

Currently contemplating how to tell interviewers I'm disqualifying them if they ask me about Gauss' rule or prime numbers or any such no doubt very cute math tricks on coding interviews. I get it—for whatever reason, you think liking math correlates with coding well. But, well, it doesn't, so this stopped being a coding interview and became a being-into-math interview.

Alternatively, I could start asking THEM math questions. "So you like math? Let's see what you know about FFT, SVD, KDtree…"

Alexandrescu’s Dictum: "You must measure everything". (https://fasiha.github.io/post/replicating-matlab-columns/#you-must-measure-everything)

I thought I was being sooooooo clever here:

`varZ = var(inrange; mean=meanZ)`

giving #Julia `var` (sample variance) a pre-computed mean I had lying around. "It's gotta be faster right?"

Removed the `mean=meanZ`, letting `var` calculate the mean: runtime of my whole program is 8% faster, with *half* as many ephemeral allocations.

I am impressed with Julia's @code_warntype and @time macros
https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.6/manual/performance-tips/#man-code-warntype-1

"Doesn't our workplace feel like an anime?"
"Tell me when it's the beach episode."

(Yes I’m still thinking about Steve Yegge’s https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest and Anders Ericsson and the thread from last month: https://octodon.social/@22/99637730196296990)

This is exactly how I feel about coders. We get paid to write code for years. We ship products. We mentor and interview. We *have* to be good, right? Maybe, maybe not. We lack a way to measure how good we are, we have very slow feedback (only later do bugs and inextensible design become apparent). I bet I’m pretty bad at programming relative to how great I think I am.

2/2 “… Psychologists who test police officers’ ability to spot lies in a controlled setting find a big gap between their confidence and their skill. And that gap grows as officers become more experienced and they assume, not unreasonably, that their experience has made them better lie detectors.” —#Tetlock and Gardner.

1/2 “#police officers spend a lot of time figuring out who is telling the truth and who is lying, but research has found they aren’t nearly as good at it as they think they are and they tend not to get better with experience. That’s because experience isn’t enough. It must be accompanied by clear feedback. …” —Tetlock & Gardner.