Zaher

health IT #analytics; previously health services research; ♡ complexity, scalability, optimization, keyboards, leading commas; #dataviz #SQL #bash #olkb

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

"...a data scientist not wanting to do data cleaning is like being a farmer and only wanting to harvest..." @claudia_perlich #DemystifyDS

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

What actually works:

Hierarchical retrieval with compression. Instead of flat embedding space, build a tree structure with progressive summarization.

Think: Encyclopedia → Chapter → Section → Paragraph

Reduces search space from 50k to ~200 at each hop.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown]

I learned yesterday the video I made in 2017 explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down, and my channel received a copyright strike (despite it being 100% my own content).

The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies"

I could be wrong, but it sounds like there's a decent chance this means some bot managed to convince YouTube's bots that some re-upload of that video (of which there has been an incessant onslaught) was the original, and successfully issue the takedown and copyright strike request.

It's naturally a little worrying that it should be possible to use these tools to issue fake takedown requests, considering that it only takes 3 to delete an entire channel.

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

how embarrassing this all is.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

“Maximizing shareholder value is my passion.”

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

Are we ok with DataCamp again?

[Brian Merchant @bcmerchant]

This week, in a genuinely stunning series of events, a bill that was written to save local journalism from big tech was gutted in a backroom deal—and wound up bailing out Google and *boosting AI* instead. You can't make this stuff up.

Here's how it happened.

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

Zoom meeting background music is HYPE.

[Ruth Wong @ruthgracewong]

So based on Butte 1992 (https://t.co/2wyxxW2b1V) we can estimate that breast feeding increases average per-waking time from 20 minutes to 30 minutes for the baby, and based on https://t.co/Oo3IOsjXAe average number of night wakings goes from 1.65 to 2.19.

[albina @enjojoyy]

he wrote this in 2009 and some still do leetcode problems on interviews

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

Not fair that Van Gogh could also write like that

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

Peak aging remote worker: trying not to sound pained during a zoom call while your hamstring cramps and you engage your standing desk to try to stretch.

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

“We have a range of boards from top brands like Portico, AKKO, Keycult, and more.” One of these is NOT like the others! Woah!

[Marc Brooker @MarcJBrooker]

New blog post, on the "you don't need distributed systems" meme, and the idea that distributed systems are only about scale: https://t.co/3CHYt47QRv Short version: scale is only a tiny part of what makes distributed systems interesting and useful.

[Paul Butler @paulgb]

One thing nobody told me about getting older is how much time you spend thinking about databases.

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

I guess time for Llama and Mixtral to catch up🤷‍♂️

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

NVIDIA bragging about replacing nurses. Microsoft got a whole dang Phi-3 family. Everybody loves LLMs!

[Zaher @datakarpenter]

no yapping