James Kirk
@Jiminy_Kirket
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AI/ML at Atlas, prev co-founded Meru, ML+Recs @ Spotify. A nervous little punk boy.
Boston, MA
Joined February 2017
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Pinned Tweet
By age 30 you should have
- a cabbage
- a goat
- a wolf
- a canoe
- a plan
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When the team lets the Engineering Manager submit a PR
33-year-old fruit bat with arthritis goes on 'flights' to keep him active
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Starting a Python project in 2022 is easy - just use the arrokuda cookiecutter and execute the cresselia script inside it but dont forget to install graveler before you do or lillipup will fail when it tries to access your nuzleaf config
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I would pay $20/month for AI that doesn’t sound like a fake flirty Californian but instead sounds like a guy from New England who can’t believe what you’re asking of him
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A single 15 minute video call in which I will say “no blockers”
What stops you from working 4 hours straight in a coffee shop?
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Are you a junior data scientist? Double your salary with a few simple word replacements:
Instead of "data points" say "manifold"
Instead of "my beliefs" say "priors"
Instead of "I don't have enough data" say "I'm a Bayesian"
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my coffee is cold because the mug is stuck in a software update and I'm wondering how I got here
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ML Engineers love to say "matrix factorization for recs? What is this, 2014?" and then spend a few million dollars building something worse
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Every software company is scrambling for AI talent, while every AI company is scrambling to find one good backend engineer
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The same people who made a pile of money five years ago telling your executives that ML is the Future are about to make a new pile of money telling them that it was overhyped and that they should invest in something called "statistics"
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Imagine having to look someone in the eyes and tell them that before the water wars you were a “data scientist”
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Born too early to answer Stack Overflow questions
Born too late to use Copilot once it gets good
Born just in time to parse this CSV
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I love teaching backend/data engineers about machine learning because there's always a point at which they go "so its just kinda wrong all the time" and I have to go "uh, yes"
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“Now you can run Python and R in the same docker image” I can also order a Big Mac and chili cheese fries and eat them over my sink like a gremlin but that wouldn’t be sensible would it
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A friend asked "so you're a math guy, do you have like a favorite equation?" and at first I laughed at the idea then I realized I do and it's Euler's formula
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Deeply grateful to the engineer who just joined a small Tech Strategy meeting and asked "What is a Tech Strategy?" and no one could answer him
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@beeonaposy
“George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, and you would know that if you ever picked up a fahkin book.”
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New in Python 3.10:
Every package must have a utils․py file containing all important logic and any bugs. Bugs outside of utils․py are considered unpythonic.
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"Modern Data Stack" was actually the data stack we used from the 1860s to the 1970s.
We're currently in the "Contemporary Data Stack" period.
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Every industrial recommender system I've seen or worked on was a lumbering amalgam of recommendation techniques, cultural data, product beliefs, etc
But every writeup or critique I see about industrial recommenders assumes "lol it's just knn retrieval obviously"
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my favorite part of advising on recommender systems is how often I have a conversation that goes "how do you look at your recommendations?" and they go "why would we look at our recommendations?" and I say "to know if they are any good" and they say "oh, good idea"
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"What is the best tool for managing python dependencies?" idk man. I mean I know but I wish I didn't. I wish I didn't know. I wish I didn't have to know. I wish you didn't ask me. I wish I were outside on the grass right now.
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Today is my last day at Spotify, and I'm grateful to so many people, but most of all I'm grateful to the person who responded to my goodbye e-mail blast with just the word "bummer"
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Docker is such a vital, popular tool because it satisfies every layer of the Software Engineer's Hierarchy of Needs:
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Big tech cos have such well-developed MLOps that it takes quarters-to-years to roll out ML products while national retailers' tiny tech teams have 3 people putting SoTA in prod in a week
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You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me
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The hardest part about owning a Peloton is remembering to bring it up in every conversation
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Dr Fauci says it won't be until 2025 that our friend will order a beer and say "ooh this is nice, try it" and you'll take a sip and pretend to like it
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ML people love to use the word "heuristic" to mean "easy stuff" and then spend two years trying to beat the heuristic baseline
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if your airflow DAG doesnt look like this wtf are you even doing
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It’s serverless!
Just make sure you leave one server on, to reduce cold-start latencies. And minimize tasks that might slow down server boot-up. Actually, leave a few servers running, for spikes. And don’t forget to allocate instances to serve your db. Also,
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The Correct and Most Pythonic import order is
<Packages that spark joy>
<Packages that do not spark joy>
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500% user growth day-over-day this trains got no brakes 🚀🎷🐛 (ignore the Y axis please thx)
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List of professional networking platforms in order of efficiency:
Twitter
Instagram
Standing on the Kendall/MIT train platform screaming your startup idea at the top of your lungs
LinkedIn
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Early-career people will get lucky by solving problems with a certain skill. They then take the wrong lesson from this and assume every problem requires that skill. You can avoid this by never solving any problems.
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gm to everyone except the Google recruiter who reaches out every 30 days to see if my startup has gone under
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I'll never forget when I got promoted to Staff Engineer and called my dad and he said " 'Staff?' that sounds... worse."
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I am weak for 1:1s. I will accept a 1:1 invitation with anyone. Calendar already full? No problem. I'm two weeks behind on my work? Accepted. I'm totally unqualified to help with your problems? Better make it recurring.
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The best thing about
@normconf
is that it feels more like hanging out and talking shop over dinner with friends than a high-falutin high-pressure Data/ML conference
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I write Rust
So my children may write memory-safe Python
So their children may ask ChatGPT to write SQL
Python default arguments being mutable state retained between executions of the function is a deeply evil design decision.
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absolutely devastated when a friend told me "I bet you pay for linkedin premium"
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The best part about being a dude with long blond hair is that, every once in a while, someone yells at me “THE BEACONS ARE LIT, GONDOR CALLS FOR AID”
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If you're a parent WFH and you have to blend childcare with meeting time then I just want you to know that yes I DO want to see your baby and your baby IS ADORABLE and can you please hold your baby up AGAIN thank you
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Instead of "this one doing numbers" say "this outcome was outside the boundaries of our model"
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StitchFix’s Style Algorithm uses principles from quantum mechanics and state of the art machine learning to ensure you are still dressing like it’s 2015
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My last iPhone was a 4 but I just got a 13 Pro and I am blown away by how many things about the iPhone have gotten better in ten years:
1. the camera
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Hell yeah I'm a "Full Stack ML Engineer" -- I'm
confused by web engineering
intimidated by data engineering
frustrated by backend engineering
totally unaware of design
and ready to rock this linear regression 😎
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Every few months an OpenAI employee emerges from their meditation, logs on to this website, and posts the most deranged thing you've ever seen
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My love language is commenting to request changes but approving the PR anyway
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I am delighted to announce that I have answered the age-old question of "Build or Buy?" and the answer is: Neither, just ruminate on it for a while, then forget
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These "February OKRs," are they in the room with us right now?
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What the PM sees when they join a meeting called "multi-cloud architecture and strategy"
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Buying an M1 MBP so I can have the exquisite experience of remoting into my M1 Mac Mini from which I can SSH in to the Raspberry Pi where Python actually works
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After years of "oh you work at Spotify, you should change <thing>" someone finally told me about something that was actually my fault and that I could fix so congratulations
@jhforster
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@sarahcat21
Rings true - any time a group is organized by skillset, rather than by goal/product, they'll get slammed with decontextualized requests -- and the more flexible the skillset (like broad "data skills") the more groups can make these requests
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I’m worried that the push to apply LLMs everywhere will steer young ML folks away from our true calling (whining about data quality)
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ChatGPT is down because all of us
@normconf
speakers are trying to have it write our talks last-minute
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"It's a no-code tool! Super easy to use. You just need to know CSS, html, grid layouts,
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The rewarding thing about working in TensorFlow is that you get the joy of relearning it from scratch every time there's a new release
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been using
@modal_labs
for a few hours and am already certain this is how I will be getting things done for a long time to come
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lofi hip hop radio💰 - beats to generate shareholder value to
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just got my emcee instructions for
@normconf
and it says I'm supposed to introduce every speaker as "the inventor of the data mesh"? that can't be right, I invented it
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StackOverflow is a powerful tool because you can encounter a scary looking Warning blurb from your code and someone will condescendingly explain how to turn off Warnings.
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Difficult Wordle today. Text your friends to check in and make sure they're alright.
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man if I'd gotten this email 7 years ago I could have gotten promoted so much faster
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In 2018 I met someone from Facebook's VR team and they described their cool new vision of the future and I said "oh neat, like Second Life? I love Second Life" and they abruptly ended the conversation and walked away
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Oh, you have a Data Lakehouse? That's cute. We have a Data Bauhaus.
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"Wow this outdoor dining is great! So Parisian!" I scream as a Mack truck passes within three feet of me and me and my omelette
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Exciting news! I've accepted a new job at NASA where they will shoot me in to the fucking sun
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"Yeah, okay, so Bitcoin is money but it's on a Blockchain... Yeah, so, it's like, a digital solution to the Byzantine General's Problem... Oh, okay, so when Constantine moved the seat of the empire from Rome in 330AD..."
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My hit rate of
want to watch a thing -> search Netflix -> find it
is about 5%?
why do I still pay for this?
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First presentation for my new boss today and I can't decide whether to wear Business Casual (dungeons and dragons t-shirt) or Business Formal (dungeons and dragons polo)
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Perks of living in a 300-year old house:
- Fireplace in every room
- Whole building is slanted 3°
- Previous owner shot by the British
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There has never been a time that I’ve written a python decorator and thought “This was the right solution to that problem. I did that well.”
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Made an appointment with the dentist and she said "it'll be at 2:30" and I said "that's the dentist's favorite time" and she did not laugh
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