brd

Taking OODA literally in your day to day would likely be burdensome but learning to build mental models that allow you to quickly connect dots is a huge asset. I oftentimes opt to not worry about things but I do it consciously, I have a mental model for cost (i.e. risk) and often I put things into the rounding error bucket.

A more concrete example is when I'm networking: Once I hear what a person does I quickly assess what I know about their industry, what I consider to be most niche or cutting edge about that knowledge, and then riff on it to establish that I am a person worth talking to. From there it's a constant loop of "what can I do to help this person?", "how can I leverage this connection to help my business?", with the occasional "who could I introduce this person to for some sort of mutually beneficial win?"

This mental framework for networking allows me to quickly get to meaningful dialogue, get to a point of action, and part ways. At events my contacts tends to be high quality as a result and I can work a room faster which allows me to make more connections.

Having a similar frameworks for business decisions, meeting management, sales, etc allows me to manage a lot of areas of my life relatively effortlessly.

edit: By effortlessly I mean stress free. I essentially go on auto-pilot.

Obligatory link to friends shop: http://www.mokayagr.com/

I've transitioned across various technical roles by understanding software architecture, business process mapping, master data management, manufacturing, and a slew of other relatively niche areas of domain expertise. I don't think my work was anything unique, I was just aware of the niche components of the projects I worked on and did a good job marketing that knowledge.

On the retail side: Using computer vision to deliver alerts about shelf condition.

For farming: Using computer vision + ML to devise and track health monitoring for crops.

For manufacturing: Predictive maintenance of equipment has been a very popular area of focus.

There have been countless use cases on the finance side of things. For instance, anomaly detection techniques help with reconciling accounts and detecting fraud.

The energy industry seems to never run out of use cases for tracking commodities and/or helping predict load.

In HR, predicting turnover and education demands are some of the early use cases being approached but I expect a lot more over time.

Logistics is another area that will have a seemingly endless supply of use case. Things like loss tracking, warehouse optimization, raw material allocation and sourcing. I don't think I've ever been involved in a logistics/manufacturing project that couldn't have used some ML to add efficiency to the process.

I believe Google Brain has a demo where they show translation between two languages without having any corpus specifically linking the two (i.e. the system learned English/Japanese translations and English/Greek translations and then translated Greek/Japanese) with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This seems to me to hint at a more conceptual understanding as opposed to a simple pattern matching activity.

In either case, I 100% agree that the multi-modal model is the path forward. It feels like there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the area of model ensambles.

To provide a little context, we're currently building an annotation tool that will be accessible by clients and seriously considered prodigy. I'm curious to know what pitfalls we may not be anticipating with that model.

P.S. Your work on SpaCy is nothing short of awesome. Thanks you.

Effective 8 October, the following types of content will be prohibited in chat groups on China-based messaging platforms:

1. Sensitive political content 2. Rumors 3...

Holy shit. What is this going to do to the Chinese tech scene? The liability being created here is crazy to consider.

Lets all hope these practices aren't looked at as successful by other governments, I'd hate to see other countries following suit.

I think I'm okay with this trajectory of scraping being legally acceptable so long as no meaningful harm is done to the entity being scraped.

Later managing IT Operations

With most things, HN overestimates the ability of most organizations to overcome inertia. FB, AMZN, GOOG, etc are anomalies when it comes to managing change at large organizations.

-Tim Ferris Show is a little hit or miss but has some excellent content

-Linear Digressions is a fun little podcast to stay caught up on ML trends

-How I Built This is a more general audience oriented podcast that talks about how companies got started

My greater concern is picking a tool that won't buckle under it's own weight. I use Trello personally but from what I can tell it won't hold up well when a team starts throwing a lot of tasks into it. Basecamp seems to have a similar issue with not handling volume well. Basecamp quickly becomes unruly because of the sheer number of places where the same information can live although I will grant that with enough discipline that shouldn't be too big an issue.

Brightpod seems like an interesting option because it's almost identical to Trello but with multiple views to narrow the problem space depending on the goal you're trying to assess/accomplish. Asana is another top contender for me.

I prefer the "meet and greet" approach to job hunting. If we have a good conversation about their needs and how I'd satisfy them, I'm inclined to feel a little insulted when a resume is asked for.

A blunt environment requires a certain level of professionalism but actively knowing you will be challenged when its called for and knowing everyone is simply striving to do whats best for the cause can be really refreshing.

I'm known to request that people tell me when I'm full of shit. I'd much rather have a moment of subtle hostility than a stretch of time where I operate under false assumptions. Once people acknowledge it's not personal, it allows everyone to move much faster.

For what it's worth, I found this to be a fascinating statement. It's an elegant way to convey the psyche of the citizenry from places like Russia or China.

I might be interested depending on the number of people in the space, the conditions of the space itself, and the available amentities of the surrounding area

Recently (and not for the first time) as I stepped out of a cab, the the driver made a comment about how God had placed me in their car that night. Times like that, I arrive at my destination with a smile on my face.

SAP, Oracle, CRM solutions, Warehouse systems, Manufacturing systems, etc can all easily lend themselves to travelling the world working for fortune 500 companies

Manufacturing and finance related gigs in particular lend well to travel. Finance because reporting is being done on a more and more granular level and oftentimes you need boots on the ground to ensure local branches adhere to correct processes and/or have compatible data. Manufacturing because you'll need to visit plants to better understand their processes since all plants are a little different and the system needs to support those differences.

I left because ultimately there was too much friction between my methods/goals and those of the incumbents. I had buy-in from upper management but they lacked the conviction to really support the changes necessary.

I tend to not get emotionally invested in a given organization anymore and as a result I've taken to consulting.