HuwFulcher

I hope the price of the Scribe actually includes the stylus unlike ReMarkable. It seems pretty sleazy that you big an e-ink tablet that needs a stylus and it isn’t included in the price.

$399 for an experimental device when companies like Boox and Kobo have more stable devices at similar price points?

It’s a real shame that the e-ink tablet space is so pricey at the moment. I’m in the UK so recent events haven’t helped.

You can find her name (Meredith Whittaker) in 2 clicks from that article. I agree the name should be present but it's not exactly difficult for someone semi tech-literate to find.

As someone who had their first child the last couple of years I would really recommend taking the time off when they’re first born. Those are special moments but hard to appreciate through the sleep deprivation. Having more time to be present and not worry about work the better

Not sure how to feel about this story. On the one hand it sounds like some well intentioned ways to keep people focused and avoid echo chambers. On the other it’s easy to see how this could be abused.

If you we look at Slack as an analogy for the water cooler (when it’s used to discuss company related things but not necessarily work related). It makes sense that sometimes threads will need to be capped to stop unproductive rehashing of arguments over and over.

Maybe there is something I’m missing from this article but it seems like it’s looking for a scandalous angle where there isn’t quite one. Lots of companies are trying to figure out how to moderate an always on, always available communication tool when it’s used by everyone in the business.

Totally agree with you. I’ve been teaching people over my career so far, with varying degrees of success

Experiments using notebooks are fine as long as they are well documented.

Having your services and library code as .py files you can import in is great.

The issue comes with how to move from experimentation to deployment. If you already have services/library code as .py files you make your life a lot easier. The issue comes when everything is spread across multiple, poorly documented notebooks. If you're working with an MLOps team it makes their life a nightmare to take those notebooks and conform them into something usable.

Jupyter is great when it is used in the right way.

Yep, I don't know enough about the interpreter under the hood but an interactive mode like a debugger where you can go back to a previous line, etc might be the solution. I doubt that's high on the priorities of the Python team though.

I’ve found varied success. In general, I’ve encouraged the move across to being teaching source control. That has been in contexts where notebooks are being used for critical outputs rather than exploration.

When you get into MLOps as well, having .py templates actually makes the Data Scientist’s job easier as they can plug and play their models into a system that tracks inputs, outputs and changes for them

Yes that’s a big plus of notebooks. Hopefully a solution can be found for .py files in future where you can earmark the top part of the script to be cached so the interpreter skips over it

I would also lean more towards culture and the environment that Jupyter provides only perpetuates it. I think what made me leave Data Science in the end was that I wasn’t driven by work outside of the notebooks (i.e. coming up with a mathematically superior solution) but driven by building ML driven systems as a whole.

I think notebooks are a great way of presenting findings and showing your workings at the same time. If that was their main use then I wouldn’t have any issues

I agree, Jupyter has its place in helping so exploration and learning. A problem that Data Science faces is that the majority of courses don’t show Data Scientists how to progress on from notebooks to write robust training pipelines that are reproducible and safe.

Whenever I can I strongly recommend not using Jupyter for anything more than the most transient tasks.

I don’t know whether it’s the Data Science culture or Jupyter but there is a big lack of discipline in writing maintainable code in DS and non-existent git support is part of that.

I always strongly discouraged developing models using notebooks, instead advocating for using .py files and then using notebooks for sanity checking data.

I don’t have any clever ideas for how we can move past Jupyter but the sooner we do the better.

What you've just said doesn't have any tension with what I've said. For almost 17 centuries Christianity was not at odds with intellectualism. The Reformation introduced the clash.

They didn’t explicitly state it but it’s heavily implied based on the context.

No, I wouldn’t take an adult believing in Santa Claus seriously. They’re entitled to their beliefs and if they do their job well then I have no reason to have an issue with them.

The issue I take is with the equivocation they have made. Believing in Santa Claus and believing in a divine entity are two drastically different things.

But wasn’t allowed to call it heresy until 1615, a while after Copernicus died. This isn’t an apologetic that the Catholic Church did the right thing, I’m not even Catholic. I’m trying to highlight that historically Christianity hasn’t been as anti-intellectual as many have been led to believe

Some Catholic theologians criticised but the church did not denounce the theory for some time

That’s a valid point, I think what should be considered though is the interest that the Catholic Church had in encouraging scientific study

Copernicus’ theory of heliocentricity was taught in several Catholic universities until growing Protestant opposition made them stop. The worst the Catholic Church could be accused of is submitting to popular opinion, not being anti-intellectual.

Your equation of Santa Claus with God reveals your prejudice and stereotyping of religious people.

As another commenter has said, many great scientific discoveries over history have been made by Christians. It would be wrong of me to deny that there is an anti-intellectual strain in Christianity but it is not the dominant trend that American media would like to espouse.

Whether you think Christianity is sensible or not, if someone has made it to Google then they must possess at least some level of intelligence. To change your perspective on that based on previously unknown information about that person highlights a prejudice.

Why is it hard to believe that some consume information more effectively through video than text? I find it particularly useful to be able to watch/listen to a video on a topic when I have chores to do around the house that prevent me from sitting and reading a book. I suppose an argument could be made that reading is objectively better than watching something but watching something is closer to having a conversation with someone which is (I think) the best way to consume and understand information.

Nice one! No worries

Cool, you should have a cookie banner for users to consent to being tracked by Google Analytics though.

What is the edge of this over competitors like Plausible or Fathom? They look the same and seem to offer exactly the same features

Considering the makers of Databricks are also the maintainers of Spark it makes you wonder whether this is deliberate

In my experience the use of notebooks (exclusively) goes hand in hand with not knowing things such as version control, tests, deployment process or dependency management exist.

I don't mean to sound harsh about other Data Scientists from a non software engineering background but the standard workflow is to fiddle around with a notebook until you can get a result. That's as far as it goes, no real robustness to it.

That's a pretty big generalisation but in organisations where they "home grow" their Data Science capability many of the online courses don't cover production level Data Science.

The backbone of many statistical institutions such as the Office for National Statistics is Excel. I worked on porting a lot of complex Excel systems to Python that had been around for 5+ years.

There were teams of people whose job it was to produce one report over a timeframe and they had the process to a fine art.

The main problem came when members of said teams left. Macros locked behind passwords, magic numbers in formulas, the wheels could come off very fast.

If Excel had a more robust functionality for versioning and documentation it could be even more of a powerhouse than it already is.

This is a toy project I spent an evening putting together just for fun. Hopefully it provides some amusement for you as well.