Reflecting on this past year, I've found myself -- more than once -- threatening to no one in particular to stop consulting all together. I spend about 10 hours a week (nights and weekends) employed by my local medical school to help with statistical aspects of research. ...

Going to the pub is a reflex instead of a conscious choice. Don't know what to do on a Friday? How about the pub! Bored? Pub! Weather nice? Pub! This is really apparent in the summer when the weather is nice, and when I cut out booze for November, pub spend plummeted (why go if I can't drink)

Really outstanding post for both CS and social science folks #linkoftheday doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

Oof family stone is hard to watch this year

Much better now

Muppet Christmas Carol is the best tradition I’ve created. “ A Thankful Heart” always gets me, man

2 pm negroni lead to 3 pm nap which means 4 pm through 11 pm is a lit hydration and snacking

Interested in other takes on price experimentation à la Instacart. Economics or is there something more fundamental we miss in this kind of experimentation

Allie bought these vegan stake bites. A bit chewy but made fantastic stake substitute in my impromptu steak and egg sandwich. In unrelated news, not working has given me time to eat and enjoy eating

Santa clause rally is real

Gemini just showed me tarchetypes::tar_map and this is going to make things a lot easier for me.

Discovered a frozen breakfast hash at Costco and my breakfast burrito game has changed.

That moment when you try a new machine at the gym and have to perform the bisection algorithm

Ah dang, my little synthetic control model actually kinda sucks at estimating incremental outcomes

Every time I try to write this, I think of all the tech bros who are going to get in my notifications tab about how synthetic controls should be this or that, or all the MMM bros who will point out this or that. Sometimes, I just wanna say "Hey, this kinda works, YMMV"

A hard squat session, a hot shower, a cool shave, a quiet drink.

If you work in tech and frequent some place — a restaurant, bar, cafe, etc — tip well. You can afford it and it can make someone’s entire year, let alone their day.

Is an entire year of 1 Password a good secret Santa gift? Maybe for the right person

Paper on which I am a co-author was desk rejected. I think now would be a good time to step away from this project. It is in a fine state (aside from being rejected) and if there is a need for other stats expertise, this is a natural place in which to get that

“Hot take: Small black coffee” should be a universally understood term at cafes. Obviously, I mean the smallest size you have. Responding “we have large and medium” tells me you lack critical thinking skills.

These look like fairly convincing counter factuals

I've got this synthetic control model that is like halfway to being an MMM and I think I should just burn it in the event it becomes sentient and thinks it is a real MMM

Fuzzy little synthetic control caterpillars

Synthetic control methods are so interesting and range from very careful optimizations over convex weights to “lol fuck it, Bayesian regression go brr”

Is Pluribis about AI?

Yearly Xmas photos

Plan: read causal inference in marketing books. Execution: an entire bowl of chicken nuggets and a nap on the couch

This is the haul

Stuff I keep forgetting. There is some good stuff here! github.com/Dpananos/Obs...

Favourite books from Taylor Routledge? Already have @vincentab.bsky.social ‘s book in my basket

A “hard no” on going to the states — for work or play — will undoubtedly hurt me professionally. But fuck that. I’d rather take a career stunt.

When my lizard brain goes "what about your career" I am trying my best to reply "fuck off, I'm relaxing"

So we've got this product that basically stops a progressive feature flag rollout if we detect a degradation. Netflix did something very similar in this paper, and for a hackweek I re-implemented the method IN SQL! arxiv.org/abs/2205.14762

You will be visited by 3 spirits

Something something case control Something something unbiased odds ratios www.reddit.com/media?url=ht...

Pro Tip: Use cleancaf regularly. Cleaned my coffee urn and my morning coffee is noticeably better.

An LLM I can talk to in order to palpably change my recommendations. “Yea, I’m not interested in body building. Haven’t been in a long time. Got any more of those grossly overfilled sandwich videos?”

First night drinking again last night. It wasn’t fun. Reminds me of the time I didn’t have subway for like a year and then was grossed out upon trying it again

Ducats Underscore That Which Is Around Me, D.U.T.W.I.A.M!

Honestly, there are def some lunches which feel free in statistics.

Said "No" to being part of a Data Safety and Monitoring Board. That wasn't even the easiest "No" I said today

Stakeholder management is like 50% flattery and outright lying about your feelings

Sometimes I worry about AI Other times I remember the university faculty can't use features like: track changes, schedule a meeting, etc

What does it say if my coworkers are surprised I can code in python?

Inference on the CDF? imgur.com/a/YCOIZxL

Top Tier move: Read a paper Implement the method Something isn't right? Download the tex from arxiv "Claude, look at @main.tex and..." Fixed

Oh good, advent of code is up. Can't wait to do 3 days and then forget about it.

Writing the models was never the hard part tho. Knowing what models to write and why was the hard part. That being said, Claude/Gemini is remarkably good at doing that too.

Oof, spent part of my weekend chasing a ghosts (was an artifact from a bug in my simulations). Hard rule: No statistics over the holidays. It isn't worth it.

Gemini has this awful tendency to change my parts of my code even though I instruct it not to.