And the limitations (today!) of this approach — The authors of Stable Diffusion, a latent text-to-image diffusion model, have released the weights of the model and it runs quite easily and cheaply on standard GPUs. This article shows you how you can generate images for pennies (it costs about 65c to generate 30–50 images). Start a Vertex AI Notebook The Stable Diffusion model…

A step-by-step guide to preparing for, and doing the hike. — I hiked the 18-mile one-way trail across the Enchantments in July 2022. In this article, I’ll talk about what the Enchantments are, how I prepared for the hike, the logistics of the hike, and share my experience of the hike itself. What are the Enchantments? The Enchantments is an area near Leavenworth in Central…

Explaining the fallacy in the lawsuit against Twitter — Some highly paid lawyers made this dubious argument in the filing against Twitter: Because there are really good bots, the lawsuit uses the words “false or spam” to refer to bad actors on Twitter. Still, “false or spam” is a mouthful, so I’ll use the word “bot” in this article. The argument …

Use matplotlib to draw a Pandas Dataframe into one large PDF or a multi-page PDF — This is a problem I was faced with recently — I had a Pandas dataframe with carefully computed metrics and needed to “print” them to a PDF. While there is a to_markdown() and to_html() in Pandas, there is no easy way to create a PDF file. Goal What I wanted was…

Use LTV to set goals for your business and devolve accountability downwards — If your business is undertaking a data-driven transformation, one of the first things you ought to address is what the purpose of that transformation is. Data-driven transformation should not be about short-term thinking such as squeezing out operational efficiencies. Instead, as suggested in the excellent book Converted by Neil Hoyne…

Moving from academia to industry — If you are a graduate student in a quantitative discipline (engineering, biology, even sociology), you can make it in industry as a data scientist. But you do need a bit of preparation because data science is more than just statistics. How to prepare for the interview You have the necessary mathematics and programming skills, but are…

Why a simple question is so effective at making you work smarter — You hear the term “10x” bandied about so much that its lost its purpose, which is to shock. It does not mean you need to work harder (grit or “not giving up”) or become more skilled (“10x engineers”). Instead, 10x is about working smarter, by changing your approach to a…

How to adapt custom Layers, Model, loss, preprocessing, postprocessing into a servable API — If the only Keras models you write are sequential or functional models with pre-built layers like Dense and Conv2D, you can ignore this article. But at some point in your ML career, you will find that you are subclassing a Layer or a Model. Or writing your own loss function…