How AI fear crushed the indie creator of ProseCraft.io for no good reason — I’m a writer, but this will be a story criticizing writers. I plan to debut a novel someday, and I know this may hobble my chances. The lit crowd is a close-knit and cliquey sort. But I’ll do it anyway, because that’s what you do when giants go curb-stomping underdogs. The demise of ProseCraft.io

Never hand-write a funnel query again — The product funnel. CEOs love them. Product managers love them. Engineers love them. And analysts love them, too—the first time they write the query for one. Funnels give you great visibility on a product’s health and pinpoint where onboarding needs improvement, making it a deeply impactful piece of work.

Here's a great Reddit thread discussing this—with many commenters pointing out bits that I overlook (especially re: assumptions I'm making about the distribution of the "standard deviation of the mean-difference" as well as when we can actually rely on asymptotic behavior given by the Central Limit Theorem). I will incorporate these into the article over the coming days.

What we actually mean when we ask that question — Google just suspended the engineer Blake Lemoine for publishing conversations with the company’s chatbot development system, LaMDA. According to Lemoine, these conversations are evidence that the system is sentient. Google disagreed, citing that there’s plenty of evidence against the claim of sentience. This all strikes me as rather odd, mainly…

CI/CD directly from your repo — Shipping code can be a nightmare. With every code push you need to build, test, and finally upload your artifacts somewhere they can be used. With the rise of Docker, we’ve had the luxury of papering over minor differences in build and deployment environments—but we still need to pull, build…

Macros for maintainable, testable data analytics — SQL is an analyst’s bread and butter. It’s powerful, expressive, and flexible — but the more power a language gives you, the more ways you have of shooting yourself in the foot. Better abstractions can help us with this. If we can abstract away bits of code that we use…

The struggles of science at a fast-moving startup — Even hired its data team a few months after launch. Our mandate was simple: figure out if we were doing the right thing. Everyone at the company wanted to know if the product was optimizing for impact, and to optimize we needed numbers: risks to minimize and objectives to maximize. …

Election fraud in Michigan? Nope, just a huckster — Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is doubling down on a video which I poked holes in a few days ago. In it, he claimed that Joe Biden stole more than 60,000 votes in Michigan. It involved poor mathematics, and folks like Matt Parker of StandupMaths drew similar conclusions. Stanford Ph.D and director…

Election Fraud in Michigan? Nope, just being misleading with data. — A few days ago, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai posted a video that claimed to prove election fraud in Michigan. He is wrong, and I’ll show you how using data from Oakland County, Michigan. …