stochastastic

Thanks for making and sharing DVC! It’s been a big help.

Is there any support that would be helpful? I’ll look at the project page too.

It doesn’t force you to use any of the extra functionality. My team has been using it just for the version control part for a couple years and it has worked great.

> I live in Oregon and that's not true…

Argh, that makes it even worse!

> I say all of this as someone who has lost a lot of friends to the opioid crisis and has watched Portland's meth problem first hand.

Sorry to hear that. I’ve been fortunate not to have friends or family caught up in it, but we lost a neighbor last year.

I hope you’re right that things will get better.

In the meantime, it feels disingenuous to act like the impact so far has been positive for everyone, or like legalizing and hard-nose crap are the only options. I think it undermines trust and pits different parts of Portland against each other. It’s easy to get a laugh or an eye roll from my neighbors on the north side of town when I pass along some of the ”obvious” solutions my friends and colleagues from the west side have shared with me. Please consider our perspective: even if we double the police force and start addressing crime more promptly, our neighborhood is still worse off because we have more crime. Other parts of the city don’t seem to appreciate that.

I don’t think legalization is better for everyone, though. I live in Oregon and I’ve been very disappointed with the impact of decriminalizing possession. Cases are no longer clogging the courts, instead we have people using in my neighborhood park and on public transit. I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person). It was, apparently, not his first time.

You seem to support it, how would you address the externalities?

Yes, they typically will buy insurance to deal with risks outside their core business (like the health insurer having liability coverage).

It’s different when you have people depending on you! Not OP but I’d love to spend a sabbatical with my family… if I could afford it. I’d need a much bigger cushion.

I’ll be joining you for “see how far I can Haskell (for great good)” this year!

Then I’ll probably fall back on Python. :)

This doesn’t seem cynical to me. Maybe it’s just that I’m too far gone, but I think it’s a matter of subtractive vs additive perspectives on work.

This guide?

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2021/06/django-for...

I think it’s the other way around — tack this number on the back of anything and the result is composite.

Okay, I can totally see it now. We are still at the stage where people seem to think that I’m neurotic for worrying about the python side of things, so DLLs have not been on the radar. ;)

Thanks! That totally makes sense. If I had to pick a pain point for getting people started with Python tools it would be environments. Comments here make me think my team is working with a lot less data too.

I’ll second klelatti’s question about R vs Python. From my perspective Python is just as practical for actuarial calcs and better for building general purpose tools. Is there a reason Anaconda didn’t click?

Hey fellow reinsurance actuary! I totally agree that Excel has its place in modeling, especially one-offs, and your criticisms make sense. That said, we have been moving a lot of our calculations to Python. We have had way too many rickety tools to move files or send emails (“first you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then...”), and way too many version control issues over the years. Python solves those nicely.

I’m curious about docker + pip, why do you like that better than poetry or pipenv?

Ha!

... that’s a laugh of bitter jealousy. I’ve dealt with XML, but I’ve never with XML that came with a schema, or which would have reliably followed one. Not saying schema-less formats are great, but at least I can eyeball them to see what is going on.

Thanks!

While I understand why authors may not like the IA’s emergency program, I find the language to describe it confusing. A number of comments here use the term “uncontrolled digital lending”, and it took me a bit of reading to discover that the files still had DRM and would “expire“ after a set time. The phrase paints a picture of the IA sending unprotected PDFs to anyone and everyone. I think it is confusing at best.

Authors, I don’t think the confusion does you any favors. I was more sympathetic to your concerns before I read your comments.

I have thought about using DVC at work, but I have held off in part because it isn’t clear to me how the development is supported financially. I recall seeing a job posting (almost put in a resume!), but I don’t see any pricing info, so I’m a bit confused. Am I missing something obvious?

Can you say more about the insights from Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen that are missing here?

In my experience with auditors, harsh/rigorous does not necessarily mean better because the auditor’s mindset makes an enormous difference. I’ve had process-focused people spend days of their time and mine digging into things that do not have a material impact on results. Unfortunately, even if people have the best intentions, I think that process-focused-but-loose and results-focused-but-rigorous can be easy to mix up, especially for people not in the weeds.

This really resonates with me. I have seen the “buy before you build” attitude turn into “buy because we can’t build”. I know correlation is not causation and there are always plenty of other things going on... but it sure seems like the pride in our work dropped off and we were on the wrong side of every tipping point.

I’ve always taken the tone to be “the world is as f’d as we choose to make it”. I’m an optimist?

Mostly because of the concept of “insurable interest”. Insurance pricing doesn’t hold up unless the buyer has a reason to avoid the outcome being insured against. The simplest example is life insurance.

Why do you question whether identity would matter?

Thanks for writing/sharing this. It puts words around some dynamics I’ve seen, and not just online. It got me thinking about people and my mental models of them, which I think is helpful.

Financial services?

Edit to be more substantive:

There are a lot of places where Know Your Customer rules apply. Further, there are places where identity really does matter, such as insurance. The approach you outlined sounds like a headache when it comes to those things. Not sure who the headache is for... :)

Thank you Guido! At the risk of sounding saccharine, Python has literally made life better for my colleagues and me. In the corporate, financial world where I’ve been working, people often see coding as someone else’s job. Python, and the community that has grown around it, have made programming accessible (socially acceptable?). It has saved months of work for us.

I hope you enjoy whatever you set yourself to next.

This sounds like how I used to think. A question from a mentor of mine: what does being right accomplish?

Does there need to be a line drawn here? I don’t think there is a contradiction between empathy and enforcement. For example, I would really like an end to the bike and package theft and I think it is reasonable to enforce laws against it. Do you disagree?

That’s interesting. Thanks!

That makes sense; if it makes any difference I don’t necessarily mean “take code from X and drop it in” so much as “if the consensus appears to be that the X api is better then add that to stdlib”. I like that notion of adding the X api, or parts thereof, And then having a third party X+ package. Maybe I just like the idea of something I built being “worthy” of stdlib.