@karlhigley@recsys.social
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

karlhigley

@karlhigley@recsys.social

I build recommender systems that work for actual people. Aspirational cyclist. Actual dog person. Not even remotely neurotypical.

I run RecSys.social. I don’t accept follow requests from accounts without a bio or profile picture.

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karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

“AI” enthusiast: i have made a chatbot that answers your questions

Software developers: you fucked up a perfectly good search engine is what you did. look at it. it's got hallucinations

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

I can’t let you remove that, it’s a load bearing organizational delusion

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

This is your annual reminder that many autistic people consider groups seeking to prevent or cure autism to be eugenicist hate groups and would strongly prefer that any donations you make go to groups that seek to improve the lives of autistic people instead

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Google translate between Icelandic and English has gone from 75% useful, 25% laughable nonsense to mostly unusable in the space of a year. You used to be able to use it effectively as a dictionary. Enter a single word and you'd get the most common dictionary translation

Now, half the time you'll just get nonsense.

karlhigley,
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

@baldur It “helpfully” [and silently] auto-corrects English words toward the things it has translations for too

“trader” (merchant) -> [“traitor”] -> “svikari”

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

> Rarely, you will encounter engineers who have learned to temper their baser instincts and instead find a sick kind of joy in reading, understanding, modifying and even deleting other peoples' code. We call these odd folks "Senior Engineers."

https://www.dancowell.com/software-engineers-hate-code/

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

In my experience as an autistic person humans are very bad at actually answering questions, so I wouldn’t say that “human-level performance” is a very meaningful benchmark for ML-based question answering systems

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

Would really appreciate it if y’all could stick to lambasting public figures for the important stuff (like being fascists) instead of their awkward facial expressions, alien/robotic demeanor, or difficulty remembering to make eye contact.

(You know your autistic acquaintances—and you have more than you may realize—can hear you when you say this stuff, right?)

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

A very clear way to express the “divide and conquer” software project management fallacy:

“We cannot hunt a part of a bear each. We’re either capable of hunting a bear as a team, or we cannot hunt one.”

https://sollecitom.github.io/software-product-development-blog/posts/2023/2023-12-31-so-you-think-you-work-in-a-team/

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

The dog is sleeping in the bed again and we’re trying to express to each other how thrilled we are very quietly so as not to disturb her

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to put honey in your tea when you’re not feeling well, but now that we live so far north we just use maple syrup

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

It’s amazing and mind-boggling to me the amount of faith that people have in embeddings and nearest neighbor search. It’s useful and fascinating stuff, but I will never understand why people think there are magical points in space that represent exactly the right thing and none of the various wrong things. Querying with a single embedding is bonkers, and it’s been interesting to watch (parts of) multiple fields figure that out lately.

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

Let me remind you this is a list of instructions for how to sabotage organizations, not for how to participate in them effectively

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

this town will not accommdate the numerical totality of our combined mass

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

I recently referred to something as a “home improvement project” and C said something like “I’m thinking of them as a subset of life improvement projects. I don’t want to have a nice house just to have it. I only want it if it makes my life better.”

I hereby reject the framing of house work as “chores.” From now on, I only do “life improvement projects.”

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

This is your semi-regular reminder that there are graphical interfaces to git and you should use them, because they make stuff like cherry-picking, rebasing, and resolving conflicts way easier.

I used SourceTree on Mac for years and later switched to GitKraken for Linux support. They’re both good, and both a hell of a lot better than git’s command line interface.

Don’t be macho about this—it’s much better to be effective.

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

“Why did Google spend billions recommending gasoline pasta?” is a real and legitimate question people have to ask these days ⛽️ 🍝 🫠

https://mastodon.social/@JoeUchill/112493422972172496

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

When people deride stand-ups as useless status report sessions, all I hear is “I have no idea how to identify or communicate useful information to my colleagues, and I also don’t collaborate well.”

It’s apparently a very sneaky way of telling on oneself, because not realizing that’s what they’re doing seems quite common.

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

Big plans this evening, we’re going to watch that classic movie about an autistic person whose special interests are relevant to their career: Legally Blonde

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

On some level, I’m just a turntable for the plates our dog wants to clean

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

Spent a significant amount of time this week chasing down a really weird bug, which turns out to originate with three lines of code in an open source library that look like they do something but are actually a no-op. So I found the PR that introduced it, and lo and behold: a reviewer pointed out the issue before it was merged but got blown off.

Reader, the reviewer was a woman, and today I am feeling even more Death To The Patriarchy than usual.

recursive, (edited ) to random
@recursive@hachyderm.io avatar

I was thinking of making a list of types of software that most people think is "too difficult" and they leave to "the experts", e.g.:

  • geometric modeling kernel
  • integrated circuit floorplanning
  • cryptography
  • compiler backends
  • database query planners
  • electromagnetic simulation (antennas, transmission lines, microstrip design, etc)
    ...

Oh, it's all applied math.

(As an aside, I just want to note that there's some really difficult work to be done in accessibility and UX too.)
[1/?]

karlhigley,
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

@recursive i had all of these but the one my peers hated the most was discrete math as a prerequisite weed out course

(i took number theory as a teenager, loved that class, and eat over 10000 spiders a day)

karlhigley,
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

@recursive i hated all the the things my peers were fine with and vice versa. almost failed several semesters of calculus in a row, never attended modern algebra and set the curve. i literally got carded to turn in my exams but also desperately needed a tutor 🤷‍♀️

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

C: “What?! What is an offset bread crumb? How can a crumb have a zig-zag?”

Me: “Noooo, offset bread knives”

C: “Ohhhhh, then your knuckles don’t hit the cutting board”

recursive, to random
@recursive@hachyderm.io avatar

An unexpectedly pleasant result of teaching myself some abstract algebra and number theory is that I get to properly indulge my inner child, who is deeply resentful that anyone ever demanded that she believe something based on appeal to authority.

Despite being moved into "two years ahead of most kids" math starting around age 13, until I hit some theoretical computer science stuff in college, it was mostly practical technique and very little proof and hard for me to fake interest in.

karlhigley,
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

@recursive I was very lucky to take these in the opposite order…which surprised the hell out of my college abstract algebra teacher when he had a student who was deeply bored, didn’t attend class, and finished the exams in half the allotted time because they’d been doing it for a decade already

(I also nearly failed pre-calc, so…I get it. I lucked out and my inner child got dessert early.)

karlhigley, to random
@karlhigley@recsys.social avatar

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