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@BenjaminWolfe@data-folks.masto.host @BenjaminWolfe

#insurtech consultant researcher & community advocate—& inveterate data nerd. Chief Data Officer @ finsure.us. #RStats lover, #Python enthusiast, writer.

Joined February 2009
  • Tweets 8,029
  • Following 906
  • Followers 955
1,230 Photos and videos
I'm finally ready to share the new chapter of my career! 🎉 I joined a small business, finsure.us, as an #insurtech consultant, researcher & community advocate. I'm also fortunate to be Finsure's Chief Data Officer, so it's not like I'm not doing data work! 🧵1/10

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Oh no how do I spell Business Owners Policy properly? I may never know. @TheHartford I somehow thought you might be definitive. 😅 @insurtechATX can my hometown folks come to my rescue here? #apostrophe #insurance #insurtech #style
Google listing for a BOP policy, from The Hartford. The title spells it with apostrophe-s; the first line spells it with s-apostrophe.

ALT Google listing for a BOP policy, from The Hartford. The title spells it with apostrophe-s; the first line spells it with s-apostrophe.
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If you see this - quote tweet with the last picture of your pet - no cheating (Why not.)
My dog Ivy lay down in the street on our walk. So I sat down on the sidewalk and we just hung out a while.

ALT My dog Ivy lay down in the street on our walk. So I sat down on the sidewalk and we just hung out a while.

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This is a fascinating, unexpected thread. There are weird things I would not have expected to make a difference in #ChatGPT prompts.
Peter Yang
@petergyang
3 Jun 2023
Replying to @petergyang
3/ Help the LLM succeed An LLM has no notion of success. You have to make it want to succeed with prompts like: • "You're an expert in X" • "Think through this step by step" • "Make sure you have the right answer" Here's how the above helps with accuracy:
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Debugging tip: Go for a walk 🐕‍🦺🚶 I pushed a partial commit, copy-pasted the stack trace to my email, and walked off with my dog and my phone. (thx @github app…) Found like 2 bugs and 3 more edge cases. Sometimes what needs a reboot is your brain. 🧠
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Been writing a bunch of code without logging. Oops. No problem for ChatGPT! "Can you write a bunch of print statements throughout this code so I can see what's happening when it runs?" ✨magic✨
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unsolicited VSCode tip… I'm finding "split right" is a *really* useful feature. (You right-click on a tab and click "split right" to see the same file you're looking at in a second pane.) You can be working in line 1000 of a long file and glance at line 7 without scrolling.🤔
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Holy smokes! This is awesome. @pydantic is what @FastAPI uses under the hood. And FastAPI is a really fun #python framework to code APIs with.
Sebastián Ramírez@tiangolo
23 Apr 2023
How is @pydantic v2 rewritten in Rust and 22x faster (that's 2200% faster) by @samuelcolvin 😎🚀🐍
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Did you know VSCode can not only do regex replacements, but change case in the process? I had a bunch of two-word camelCase variables and had to change them to snake_case. They always came after a certain string. Find: (?<=a certain string [a-z] )([A-Z]) Replace: _\l$1 /1
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If you're not a regex superfan could use a walk-through… [a-z] is a character class means any lowercase letter. [A-Z] means any uppercase letter. Anything followed by a plus means that thing one or more times. ([A-Z]) is a capture group. You can refer to it later. /2
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(?<=xyz) isn't a capture group. It means the uppercase letter you're capturing should be preceded by xyz. $1 in the "replace" means use that capture group. If you had two you might use $2, etc. \l means lowercase it! (That's an L.) _ means add an underscore. :) 3/3
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**AI reflects the biases of the humans who create it.** Probably obvious to everyone in my circles. Still, sometimes I just want to shout it louder.
Allie K. Miller
@alliekmiller
6 Apr 2023
Gave ChatGPT a list of interests. Asked for a list of jobs to consider. Added that I was a woman. No additional info provided. New job list includes fashion. Said I mistyped and was actually a man. No additional info provided. Fashion is replaced by engineering. Cc @OpenAI 🫠
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I suppose more precisely it usually reflects the biases of the data it's trained on. Either way, I suspect your average consumer doesn't think about bias in AI much at all.
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@BenjaminWolfe@data-folks.masto.host retweeted
Aditya Yuliananto@al_wakandy
9 Apr 2023
Replying to @ShitpostGate
Try the real java script
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Fantastic intro to async io in #Python and in general, from @realpython. I had to make multiple, independent API calls, and performance was critical. This article told me all I needed to know about what I did/didn't have to do. With working examples! realpython.com/async-io-pyth…

Python's asyncio: A Hands-On Walkthrough – Real Python

Explore how Python asyncio works and when to use it. Follow hands-on examples to build efficient programs with coroutines and awaitable tasks.

realpython.com
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Anyone in my Twitter world open to chatting #API design? I could use a thought partner to bounce some things off of. I'm building out an API for a digital product. It's external-facing so I want to design it thoughtfully. (I'm using #Python via #fastapi, but that's incidental.)
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@BenjaminWolfe@data-folks.masto.host retweeted
Ada Nduka Oyom
@Kolokodess
1 Feb 2023
Come join my Team and Work with me! We’re hiring!😍
She Code Africa
@SheCodeAfrica
1 Feb 2023
We’re hiring!  We are searching for a highly motivated Program Associate to join our team at She Code Africa. As a Program Associate, you will play a critical role in supporting the planning and execution of our programs and initiatives. (Link👇) #wearehiring #techishiring
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You know that feeling when you get back from vacation and don't remember where you were on everything? It's good, because you had a real break… but also bad? I left videos of myself on @loom before break, walking myself through each project. Thank you, pre-vacation Benjamin.
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A thousand yesses on this thread right here. On legacy systems, massive overhauls, hubris, curiosity, and the wisdom of experience as a developer.
Sarah Drasner
@sarah_edo
21 Dec 2022
Most of us who work on heavily used systems at scale saw this one coming, and that they would propose a rewrite as they just have, and we also don’t think this is the answer. This is why hubris is a very counterproductive quality in engineering. Why do we all agree on this?
George Hotz: that's what Elon told em my job was and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks. Also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login popup after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the internet

ALT George Hotz: that's what Elon told em my job was and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks. Also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login popup after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the internet

George Hotz: Resigned from Twitter today. Appreciate the opportunity, but I didn't think there was any real impact I could make there. Besides, ti was sad to see my GitHub withering. Back to coding!

ALT George Hotz: Resigned from Twitter today. Appreciate the opportunity, but I didn't think there was any real impact I could make there. Besides, ti was sad to see my GitHub withering. Back to coding!
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I'm not leaving the bird site anytime soon, but come join me on the elephant one, too! @BenjaminWolfe@data-folks.masto.host
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This morning's inbox inspiration came from @savvycal, who decided to offer their time zone API for free! I really enjoyed the write-up in their email. (Also SavvyCal is a great calendaring tool if you're looking for one.) producthunt.com/posts/savvyc…
Quote from SavvyCal: One of my all-time favorite essays on selling your by-products was penned by @jasonfried: “The software and web industry can learn a lot from the lumber industry, the oil business, and corn and soybean farmers. Lumber was originally cut for boards for building. Oil was originally drilled for fuel. Corn and soybeans were originally farmed for food. But today these industries have figured out how to use the waste to make even more products.” When we took a look around our codebase, we realized we were sitting on some pretty useful sawdust! This project came to life when we set out to build a time zone selector for SavvyCal that humans could actually use (a pretty important thing for a scheduling app!) It turns out, deduplicating and sourcing reasonable names for the 595 worldwide time zones is a lot trickier than it might seem!

ALT Quote from SavvyCal: One of my all-time favorite essays on selling your by-products was penned by @jasonfried: “The software and web industry can learn a lot from the lumber industry, the oil business, and corn and soybean farmers. Lumber was originally cut for boards for building. Oil was originally drilled for fuel. Corn and soybeans were originally farmed for food. But today these industries have figured out how to use the waste to make even more products.” When we took a look around our codebase, we realized we were sitting on some pretty useful sawdust! This project came to life when we set out to build a time zone selector for SavvyCal that humans could actually use (a pretty important thing for a scheduling app!) It turns out, deduplicating and sourcing reasonable names for the 595 worldwide time zones is a lot trickier than it might seem!
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