Sedentary patients have tons of health trouble from lying in bed constantly, I'm not sure if its possible to grow a healthy human that doesn't move about.
It's interesting to see how the spots on these horses look different. I thought it was chimerism like in cows, but apparently it's extremely rare in horses, but still there are epigenetic factors in play.
I wonder how much gene expression differs in clones of particular species raised in similar environments, I would expect the amount of difference between genetically identical individuals to differ by species, but I have no idea by how much, and how would humans rate on this measure.
It's not just randomness; it is environmental influence. A simple example being a lack of food in the environment affecting size and developmental health.
While awful I would like for someone to explain what's in that 1.3GB.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
Do you remove those weird implausible outliers? They're probably garbage, but are they? Where do you draw the line?
If you've established the assumption that the data collection can go wrong, how do you know the points which look reasonable are actually accurate?
Working with data like this has unknown error bars, and I've had weird shit happen where I fixed the tracing pipeline, and the metrics people complained that they corrected for the errors downstream, and now due to those corrections, the whole thing looked out of shape.
This isn't possible to answer generally, but I'm sure you know that.
Look -- I've been in nonstop litigation for data through FOIA for the past ten years. During litigation I can definitely push back on messy data and I have, but if I were to do that on every little "obviously wrong" point, then my litigation will get thrown out for me being a twat of a litigant.
Again, I'd rather have the data and publish it with known gotchas.
Should I have told the Department of Finance to fuck off with their messy data? No -- even if I want to. Instead, we learn to work with its awfulness and advocate for cleaner data. Which is exactly what happened here -- once me and others started publishing stuff about tickets data and more journalists got involved, the data became cleaner over time.
Sorry I meant to say that usually it's not always possible to clean the data if the data is corrupt in the first place, because it was collected in a buggy manner. And having a few inexplicable outliers in datasets can often erode confidence in the rest.
Since this is not the data you collected, I understand you have to work with what you have, by the way very interesting post, and nice job!
Data and metrics is 90% what upper management sees of your project. You might not care about it, and treat it as an afterthought, but it's almost the most important thing about it organizationally.
People who don't heed this advice get to discover it for themselves (I sure did)
IF you can't make the data convincing, you'll lose all trust, and nobody will do business with you.
I have also learned that rarely does anyone care if it’s any good, or means anything. This is generally true, but it’s especially true if you are going with the prevailing winds of whatever management fads are going on.
Like, right now, you can definitely get away with inflating the efficacy of “AI” any way you can, in almost any company. Nobody with any authority will call you on it.
Look at what management’s talking about and any pro-that numbers you come up with can be total gibberish, nobody minds. “Oh man, collecting good numbers for this and getting a baseline etc etc is practically impossible” ok so don’t and just use bad numbers that align with what management wants to do anyway. You’ll do great.
Not sure, but I have worked a lot on stuff where the metrics were often very easily convertible to business decisions, like expenses or income. Things like how much do we need to pay for infrastructure, how much money each customer/products brings in and how etc.
If the company were an airplane essentially upper management were flying it by instrument. It would've been a scandal if the metrics had serious issues.
Some of the metrics less directly tied to business stuff were a bit more 'creative' - as in I could justify why I did them that way, but still not 100% solid.
Stuff like optimizing data pipelines, where data scientist experiments which tended to take 1hr, now only took 10 mins.
I could say that data people were 6x as productive, but it's just as well possible they were just more careless with what they ran, but whatever, a white lie.
However saying that stuff takes 1/6th the time, when in fact it doesn't, is an absolute no go. Neither is not knowing why is there a run that took 500 hours or 5 seconds, both of which should be impossible.
Doing that stuff destroys the confidence in the rest of the data.
It is not just embarrassing, it can potentially kill your demo, project or even product as user will first look at data and then the tech behind it. If the data is wrong, it means the tech does not work. I never took data seriously during my demos in the first 10 years of my career and no wonder the audience rejected most of my work though it was backed by solid platforms.
I can’t imagine working in a place toxic enough where:
1. That’s the default presumption (rather than someone doing networking for their current role)
2. Where “looking for another job” is a point of contention
Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with others in the industry. And good teams are made up of people with good communication skills who want to be there.
I think one of the most objectively pathetic things in the world is trying to ride the counterculture wave against a thing, while shilling the exact same thing.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
> all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Isn't that exactly backwards of what you'd naively expect? Peak regulatory dysfunction.
Are these mandated systems capable of operating in the event of a grid outage? I understand that a lot of US installs cheap out on the necessary component.
Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.
And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.
EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
> Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.
The "west" is not a single place and I hate that term, because it contains that "we against them" narrative, which is pushed on us from many directions in recent years.
France, Germany or the USA all have a very different energy strategy, shaped by the availability of resources and geopolitics.
But for the average Joe, the situation across the globe and also in the "west" is not so different from what was described in other commments about Pakistan: People install solar on their rooftop, backyards, balconies etc. because it is dirt cheap now and amortises in a reasonable amount of time.
> EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
I can't speak for all countries in the EU, but at least in Germany, it's already quite easy and became even easier in recent years, e.g. private solar installations are exempt from various taxes.
The effort and money put into renewable energy in the EU is significant. In Germany around 60% of energy now comes from renewable energy [1] (Pakistan for comparison [2]), which was unthinkable 15 years ago. I remember quite well, that the fear mongers foretold, that we never will exceed 20% renewables or if we did, that the grid no longer will be reliable.
That said, you're right that the EU could and should do more. It feels like we're doing the "Energiewende" with one arm tied to the back. Unfortunately, there are many groups working against this goal by influencing the public opinion and it will stay like that for the foreseeable future.
It's not like Pakistan doesn't have these regulations, or doesn't try to tax solar power. It's just that the Chinese-Pakistan border is open and nobody's paying import taxes or listening to government regulations.
So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power.
You misunderstand. Nobody should be getting short changed (who doesn't deserve it).
It's just that the difference between the cost of something that's safe and effective and one that is ensured to be safe and effective by the govt should be no more than 10-20%.
Instead it costs 3x as much, and comes with mandatory government monitoring, and the sword of Damocles over your head that things are liable to change in the near future on the governments whim' instead of you owning the solar plant you have bought.
All the subsidies the government hands out are calculated for it to cover the cost of a self-install, and then maybe a bit. So tax money (which is YOUR money) gets used by the system to support itself rather than you, even when its supporting you.
Europe no longer can afford to act like it's in a privileged position, and one of the things it cannot afford is to spend exuberantly for the same results others get for the fraction of the price.
> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
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