First vacation in over two years when I left my work laptop at home. What could go wrong? 🤣

It's been a couple of weeks back to back when I'm trying to explain to people that having a PhD doesn't magically transform bad data into insights. If you haven't done your due diligence at design stage and collected garbage in lieu of experimental data, no suffixes can come to rescue.

Got Graspop 2025 tickets yesterday! Still need to figure out travel arrangements, but am super excited to make another trip to Belgium.

Beautiful day in Killington for Stifel World Cup!!! #GrandSlalom #Skiing

Black Friday is one of the busiest times in my company. Not a single issue from my team's pipelines came up or any alerts fired up to get anyone on call. I'm so proud of all the hard work my team's been doing and feels so good to see its results!

People often confuse alarmism with progress. You don't build a data product with endless strings of last minute all nighters. You build it through failing fast, iteration, and a clear vision.

MNTN CEO Mark Douglas and CCO Ryan Reynolds are on the cover of INC this month! Well deserved! The article also talks quite a bit about MNTN Matched and Keywords targeting that I spent most of my past 14 months or so leading the 0->1 and GTM efforts in engineering. So cool! trib.al/2MnMrVd

Excited about seeing Pineapple Thief tonight and Zeal & Ardor tomorrow!

Just digging through The Last Will and Testament. §1 rips! Sounds like the last years of Opeth remaking Ghost of Perdition. I'll take it.

Also sounds about right...

There's still 40 days to go this year, but this seems about right.

Being a data scientist is weird because stakeholders assume they already know all the answers to be attainable by using their own simple logic, which often fails. They often come to you when all those fail and expect you to implement your wizardry to their solution to make it work this time.

Iron Maiden and Slipknot at #GMM2025. Give me Heaven Shall Burn, Cult of Luna, Julie Christmas, and Cemetary Skyline in the bill and I'm so there!

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice In Chains.

Any advice for a fun game that's optimized for PS5 Pro?

Is it just me or is the DualSense controller that comes with PS5 Pro a little heavier than the one that comes with PS5?

This is one of the rather stranger debates. I go with using plotnine in Python while eating popcorn.

This came out pretty early this year. After having to crunch my best of 2023 in late December, I've been taking better notes for my top albums this year, but strangely nothing immediately screams top or even top 5 yet... #metal

I actually still consume internet through RSS feeds via Feedly and perhaps controversially think that news should be social(ized) not personal(ized), but I do like this idea and it would make this a great place.

I've been having a pretty busy year building out the AI function at MNTN Engineering. Building high performing ML, Data Science, and Experimentation teams in a company that's going through a hyper-growth, where the scale is constantly getting bigger has been a unique experience.

I hear this place is much more popular these days, how's everyone doing?

Unlike last year, Turkish elections didn't get any real interest or coverage in the West ahead of the polls. I suspect it'll get more attention now, can't wait to read all the parochial takes about to come.

You've been murdered, who do you want to be on the case?

I haven't posted much here (or any social media) in forever. I got a new phone and installed all apps from scratch back in Thanksgiving. I installed Feedly again after years, which quickly replaced all my social media habits. I feel like Internet is fun I have control over my information again.

Where’s my like and reskeet? @seanjtaylor.com ?

I was in Seattle for MNTN Meet last weekend and it was a blast. It was great meeting my new colleagues in 3D for the first time. Also I had never been in Seattle before and ended up having the most amazing seafood ever!

On my way back from a Euro Trip that had to get rescheduled from summer 2020. Finally made it back to Wacken after a decade and got to see Heaven Shall Burn in a headlining spot. Good times! Once I get ahold of my bearings I might make a Thread of the Wacken part of the journey with some pictures.

Oppenheimer has the best reenactment of a typical Data Scientist/PM conversation when Oppenheimer says, we ran calculations and the chance of a chain reaction destroying the world is near zero, what do you wanna hear? And Matt Damon’s character responds, “I want to hear zero.”

Say hi in the thread, find more people

On the subject of irony and data… I feel like I’m often stuck as that “this steak is well done” in that comic strip except I’m saying “this experiment is not random” and I hear “thank you!”

I believe in power of data and empirical analysis, which is why ironically I often find myself spending most of my time at work hopelessly trying to help folks not to be crushed underneath their misinterpretations of data.

I was reading this Platformer newsletter reporting engagement in Threads is going down. I find it unsurprising.

After years of resistance, I decided to give the re-recorded Clayman tracks a spin and once again I remembered how much I miss pre-2015 In Flames…

I was saddened to hear that Özkan Uğur passed away today. He was one of the greatest bass players in Turkish Rock Music and while he’s most famous for his own band MFÖ, he was also a frequent collaborator of the pioneers in Turkish Psychedelic music in 70s. Rest in Peace Özkan Abi.

This sounds like a very specific and restrictive definition of politics.

One of the biggest internal debates we used to have was about the ratio of in-network content vs out-of-network content. My POV on this was if you just rank all posts based on engagement, the universe will almost always win out against your follows, filling your content with viral irrelevant posts.

So it seems like Threads just launched to public and it feels like I’m the only person who isn’t without a checkmark in my feed at the moment. I’m really curious if it’ll end up being a microblogging platform, where I’ll actually know a bunch of people IRL.

I think the lack of direct messaging capabilities in a social media offering is a feature not a bug. In IRL public spaces, we don’t expect privacy of our conversations. The only major user problem is delivering contact information privately. It’d be nice if we could pass a business card discreetly.

I am paywalled, but I wonder why this is and Threads will be different than Facebook or Instagram to result in this decision…

Yes, I also want to know what happened to all the money that should have gone into Expanse seasons 7-9!

I wonder what it is that causes my Mastodon followers to go up regularly every day into hundreds even though I haven’t posted anything there in months while my follow count here stays pretty low 🙄

There’s an irony to claiming you want to build an everything app that only exists as control and surveillance tools in places without democracies or free speech; but end up failing to even maintain a “one-thing” app.

I spent the last two days studying Wacken Running Order and creating Apple Music playlists for each day based on recent setlists of bands we potentially want to see and I couldn’t feel more accomplished. 29 days to go!

Just last week mu uncle&aunt was visiting from Turkey and I asked them if Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has changed anything for them. They said, it didn’t really matter at all. I also hadn’t really noticed much of a Turkish presence in Bluesky. What a difference the last 72 hours made…

I miss the good old days when Amazon Prime was a reliable service for conveniently delivering your orders home instead of an exercise program that makes you walk to the nearest Whole Foods only to tell you to come back the next day because it won’t generate barcodes after arbitrary hours.

It’d be ideal, if we put our main focus on finding solutions for real long term problems like climate change instead of manufactured issues like billionaires not feeling like paying their public cloud bills.

hey new users, Bluesky is a *public* social network please read about data privacy and more in our User FAQ to help you get oriented! even though we require an invite code to create an account, you should treat any posts here as if it's a public blog https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq

Even the app had enough.

In case it is not obvious Twitter doesn’t know if you read a tweet or not. It knows if you rendered it and how long the tweet stayed on your screen. That is to say Elon can’t put limits on tweets read; he can put a limit on number of tweets delivered in payload, tweets rendered or tweets dwelled.

OK render unto Ceasar, he’s gotta be an engineering whiz, as he also just put limits on Bluesky, too.