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Now imagine big saas companies hiring these 'scientists' / AI engineers at a large scale, ritualistically implementing features no one needs, without considering data bias, performance and environmental impact..

welcome to 2024

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Considering how hard it is to get statistics right in sanitized laboratory settings, I've always expected most statisticians in private companies to be generating more noise than signal. A lot of people (anecdotal I know) complain that these jobs often come down to 'give the deciders confirmation for their choices'.

This blog post seems to articulate my misgivings better than I ever could. She does conflate APIs and libraries tho which is an unfortunate conceptual mistake when calling out software developers for having poor mental models of their tools.

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