Statistician, data scientist, husband and father. A little better every day, I hope
Grand Rapids, MI
Joined January 2014
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Daniel retweeted
I'm quite troubled by our willingness to have chatbots perform the very tasks human beings are *most* suited for!
By all means, have the robot write your code and buy your plane tickets. But don't have it be your therapist, write your dating app messages, or do whatever this is.
Watching this made me respect Fielder so much as an interviewer. He's in high stakes time limited convos but will still take 5 secs to pause and stare and drill down further. Comes in with careful plans and agendas but abandons them instantly if he senses something important.
Some friends house shopping in Tucson earlier this year made me realize there's tons of incredibly cool houses there across many styles. Still not Midwest prices, but beautiful. Looking forward to going back for a visit next year.
This home in Tucson, Arizona sold this week for $850k. Two bed, three bath, 3.3k sq feet. Constantly shocked at what you can get if you look outside the Bay Area and NYC.
realtor.com/realestateandhom…
Daniel retweeted
Finally got round to reading this.
In any other administration it's something that would be a top 5 history-making story, published shortly before an election!
The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
Daniel retweeted
If nothing else, the past two presidents have taught a valuable lesson to the world about variation among the elderly. Some become docile, almost vegetative. Others start to lose their minds, ranting wildly and lusting after men.
Daniel retweeted
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins.
Daniel retweeted
In Austin, I visited a coffee shop tucked into a single-family neighborhood. It was a community hub where neighbors gathered over coffee and breakfast tacos.
We need more third spaces spaces like this to bring our rapidly fracturing society back together, not fewer…
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Daniel retweeted
This is sad news on multiple fronts - for those of us who worked there, for our friends and colleagues at BioWare who are impacted, and for fans who were looking forward to the next Mass Effect adventure.
I started my career at BioWare and will forever be grateful to the founders, Greg and Ray, for inviting me to join in BioWare's legendary journey. Its legacy will live on through those who were part of it and continue to create games through a passion for unforgettable stories, worlds and characters.
Daniel retweeted
Lots of Security incidents today, here's some practical tips for those who just wanna protect yourself:
1) UPDATE EVERYTHING - main targets are:
a) Browsers - Chrome, Safari, Firefox
b) OS: : Settings -> General -> software update; Linux: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade; Windows: I think there's a button. Do this for any remote home servers & Openclaw/hermes boxes
c) Phones: Update it all
d) Desktop apps (Slack, Cursor, Discord, etc)
2) Limit web browsing this week: Stay within walled gardens (twitter, youtube, etc); don't click random links this week. Just wait until the patches go through. Do step 1 again after a week.
3) Avoid untrusted Wifi networks until your devices are updated
4) Stay vigilant about phishing emails offering "certificate fixes" or fraud updates
5) Have an iPhone 11-16? TURN BLUETOOTH OFF for the time being until apple patches come through.
6) Code/Dev: UPDATE ALL YOUR REPOS - @charliermarsh has already updated uv 0.13.4 which reacts to the eMudra incident for uv (Python), Typesript according to Claude has equivelant. Tell your agents to go and update all your active repos to update package manager across uv, npm, bun, cargo, etc etc
What advice did I miss?
The good old Kalamazoo Beer Exchange was doing this in Michigan for 15 years. Very fun spot, I was sad when it closed last year mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/202…
Was recently at a bar where drinks were dynamically priced,
i.e. the more people bought a particular drink, the more expensive it became (price would then decayed over time towards a floor).
Fascinating to watch a few market mechanisms play out in a bar:
People ventured outside their usual orders in search of cheaper alternatives, often discovering new favorites in the process.
Others treated rising prices as signals of quality, happily paying premiums to try expensive drinks they’d never had before.
More experienced drinkers behaved like value investors, picking up underpriced drinks they already knew were good while everyone else chased the popular ones.
Price discovery, information leakage, herding, and utility trades all unfolded over rounds of drinks.
More bars should try this.
Daniel retweeted
I have made a good-faith effort to learn from MMT and I can report that I learned nothing. If I was supposed to learn that a country that issues its own currency can inflate away its debt, I already knew that. (And I worry about that.)
This feels like the logical conclusion of seeking relationships without any stakes or risk that demand nothing from you.
The ultimate yes-man. Something that would never stop talking to you no matter what you say or do because that would be against its programming.
I hate it.
Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you.
Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet.
The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations.
This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year.
Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m.
To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)
The people involved seem nice and well-intentioned from a casual look, but man, the financial pressures involved here to increase engagement will be extreme and I ultimately don't trust anyone with this type of product if they need to make investors money.
Daniel retweeted
tl;dr: dating disproportionately rewards and trains courtship skills. long-term happiness depends more on partnership skills. the former are visible, repeatable, and easily reinforced; the latter are slow, relationship-specific, and hard to practice. this creates a false-negative problem (good partners are overlooked) and a false-positive problem (bad partners attract more partners)
let me clarify this since it was said in response to something and not too well
at a rough cut, there's two separate ~skillsets. one is attracting a partner and the other is maintaining a relationship. partner selection is, counter-intuitively, in the latter camp
being attractive is validating to people. so, it is tempting to optimize for the skills of attracting partners and disregard the other skillset. usually this is framed as a problem specific to men, but it isn't. men look to learn to seduce, be good at sex, be fun, etc. women look to learn to gather attention, be attractive, display status by being selective, etc. most accurate is that the skillset is roughly seduction: being attractive to the other gender and broadcasting this. people who are single in their ~late 20s/ ~early 30s tend to be peak attractiveness in this sense, and so it is VERY tempting to optimize here. by attractive i don't mean only looks, though that's included. a good example is men learning to dance or cook -- regardless of intention, this tends to make them more attractive
however, once you've attracted a partner, the game changes by quite a bit. this starts coming up after ~6-18 months of being in the relationship. by then the relevant skillset is ~relationship-building and it's more about communication, emotional safety, conflict resolution, and importantly about alignment of goals & values. teasing out misalignment from temporary conflict is often difficult, the differences can be subtle. this skillset isn't so easy to practice -- you kinda have to be in the specific relationship to get reps
so, what we have is a skillset that is VERY amenable to practice and VERY tempting (~being attractive) and a skillset that isn't amenable to practice nor tempting. moreover, since the ~attractiveness dynamics happen more frequently and result often in conflict, there's tons of discourse about them. meanwhile, the dynamics that are more important to long-term happiness are the relationship-building ones, and since those are more specific and slower moving there is a lot less discourse about it
this structure also has the unfortunate side-effect that people who don't develop the attractiveness skillset but would make very good long-term partners get overlooked. ofc, don't let that be you, anon, learn to be attractive. but also, don't let that be everything, anon
It's crazy how much time good teachers spend lesson planning and how how rarely schools provide detailed lesson plans.
The bad teachers simply don't do this and I'd guess it's a big part of why experience matters initially for teachers quality but not beyond first couple years.
An interesting thing about Montessori is that every lesson is not only scripted but scripted with stage directions.
Sit to the right of student and use your right hand so as not to block the student’s view. Move the materials in this exact way. Say only this, don’t say that.
And yet…
…Montessori teachers almost never complain that this scripting is inadequate or creatively stultifying. They love it, use it, and depart from it cautiously and with reverence and with the guidance of hundreds of strong, fully explicated model lessons.
My wife worked for years at a language school that selected curriculum and provided detailed lesson plans for existing classes and gave frequent observations and feedback. Teachers loved it! The classes were very high quality! New teachers were became skilled ones very quickly.
