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Randy Au

@randyau.com

6.6K followers 4.4K following 5.5K posts

Hobby consultant, 💎🪚🎮🖥️🎙️🎹🎧👨‍🍳📷🪛➕ Quant UX Researcher @ GCP (posts are my own) Writes a data newsletter: https://www.counting-stuff.com/ https://linktr.ee/randy_au Languages: EN/JP/CN

www.counting-stuff.com

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Randy Au @randyau.com · Oct 30

So on here I talk about hobbies and crack snarky data jokes. But once a week I also write a very long form data science newsletter. at www.counting-stuff.com
#DataBS

Here's a thread of old posts that people liked [ugh no thread writing interface] (1/n)

Counting Stuff

A weekly newsletter about the important, mundane, parts of being a data scientist, UX researcher. With some extra fun about tech and hobbies.

www.counting-stuff.com

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 1h

So we were/are supposed to be in the middle of a nor'easter right now but honestly it's been just a rainy, chilly day. I guess the main action is out on long island

Randy Au @randyau.com · 4h

Ever since I got the meat grinder attachment for the mixer, I've never had to bother goign to the market for ground meat anymore... and it'd be nice to do the same for slices...

Randy Au @randyau.com · 4h

so... for about $300 I can get a 10" manual deli slicer from the restaurant supply (there's cheaper ones on amz but.. y'know) technically they're not strong enough to slice cheese (which isn't a big concern for us) and i'm debating whether I want one for hotpot slicing

Randy Au @randyau.com · 8h

I'm not the one empowered to make mutli-million dollar mistakes and then fail upwards for it!!!11!1!1!1

Randy Au @randyau.com · 8h

TIL that I can rebrand like a solid chunk of my current research job as some flavor of "feature engineering" because, like, fucking researching how shit works and collecting correct data for it needed a name?

Randy Au @randyau.com · 8h

I believe what they call this is "next quarter's problem"

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 9h

I hope it's enough to get people fired for pulling dumb shit like that

Randy Au @randyau.com · 9h

I guess, wouldn't be surprised if agencies pull this shit in first, that's where the shit translation shops started. Underbid for jobs, MTL crap and underpay for editors instead of translators

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 9h

Yeah, vibe coded ai is gonna go one of two ways... "Xgboost and close enough" or "lol weird contamination and leakage and everything explodes"

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 10h

Lol on LinkedIn I saw a 100% serious, completely not ironic job posting for a part time data scientist... The job is to clean up and fix ai coded machine learning

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 10h

Grr ok fine if y'all keep insisting ds times have to do ML then I'll just go and learn the peaky interfaces to run that nonsense.... All my skills are in the feature eng side anyways

Randy Au @randyau.com · 23h

おおおお

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

They have a SQL interface in the admin side and the query was simple
Select date, count(distinct comm_name) from detections where confidence > 0.8 group by 1

Then I was supremely lazy and pasted the csv into Gemini for the chart

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

being surrounded by awesome people constantly also doesn't help because you lose sight that those folks probably aren't "typically" =\

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

also, caching? parallelization? modular design? even REST? gotta do all that to move useful amounts data around so I can hold my own no problem.

wtf is a lexer =P and if I need an algorithm for anything and somehow it's not in the std lib, I'll go pull out the CLRS I never use or look up SOTA

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

thanks! but I'd probably need double that salary to pay my bills and support the kid x__x

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

probably the biggest downside to my rabid generalist skillset is how... uneven things can be? I learn what I touch.
I can rant about ETL code and SQL engine behavior for hours, even do O() notation crap but then be completely clueless in how javascript does anything useful because fuck .this()

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

Also I checked on the birdnet instance i've been running at my window since I activated it in May, the count of unique birds has drifted down. I was pecting a bigger rise due to migrations but maybe they haven't stopped by yet? I dunno. can't wait to see a year of data

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

today is wake up and realize that my bitching about stupid race conditions in telemetry and other things probably means I"m actually qualified to apply to data eng positions but i need to completely rewrite my resume =_=

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Reposted by Randy Au

Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 3d

I am so grateful for everyone who has subscribed (500 of you), liked, shared, promoted, and bought me coffee in support of RDM Weekly! Just knowing that people are reading is a huge win. I have really enjoyed putting this newsletter together over the last 3 months and look forward to continuing it!

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

Update, I had to leave for about an hour. The cat -has- -not- -moved-

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

The cat has discovered that we sleep with electric blankets. It is not about to leave unless it's for food

A white/brown cat sitting on a grey fleece blanket, the blanket has a black button with an led light on indicating it is heating

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Randy Au @randyau.com · 2d

The cat has discovered that we sleep with electric blankets. It is not about to leave unless it's for food

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Randy Au @randyau.com · 3d

SOMEWHERE in this house I packed our heating pad and I CAN'T FIND IT T___T we have electric blankets but for working at the desk a pad is nicer

Randy Au @randyau.com · 3d

it's getting chilly in NY.... enough that i dragged out my fingerless gloves and hand sewed back the seam that blew out between two fingers