Cassie

Making Data UsefulHow to muscle up on data-related topics quickly(Feeling impatient? Scroll past the text and cat photo to get the learning paths!)Your author.First, may I say a huge thank you to all of you for encouraging me to write? I just noticed that here on Medium, my community of followers is 70% the size of Barack Obama’s. Whoa!I’m honored and humbled by all the love this amazing community has given me. I don’t know if it’s despite my being a cheerful weirdo or because of it, but thank you! And thank you for being…

A first look at two major AI releasesYour author. This isn’t the video, the video is lower down. Or here, if you insist.Here comes an AI unboxing video! These shiny new tools were released just over a week ago, so they’re fresh out of the oven. In the video, you’ll see me running my first ever Bard + GPT-4 side-by-side prompts. Below that, you’ll find something that started as the video transcript and quickly morphed into a feast of asides, edits, and snide comments. If that’s your cup of tea, enjoy!Link:…

The industry-wide neglect of data design and data quality (and what you can do about it)My favorite way of explaining the difference between data science and data engineering is this:If data science is “making data useful,” then data engineering is “making data usable.”These disciplines are so exciting that it’s easy to get ahead of ourselves and forget that before we can make data usable (let alone useful), we need to make data in the first place.But what about “making data” in the first place?The art of making good data…

Image: Marvel StudiosRight now, if you want to know about Kang’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the person to talk to is Jeff Loveness. Loveness, best known for his work on Rick & Morty, not only wrote Marvel’s current hit Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, he’s also writing Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, the fifth Avengers film currently set for release May 2, 2025. And since that script is still being worked on, technically Loveness probably knows just a tiny bit more about it than even the man who hired him,…

Ant-Man and The Wasp - Post credits scenesAt the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, before they’re dusted, Scott goes into the Quantum Realm to get materials so that Ghost can survive. Hank, Janet, and Hope are observing. Janet even gives him some tips! Everything seems fine until, you know, Thanos. But if Janet was so scared of the Quantum Realm and Kang, why let Scott go down there at all? The answer here depends on how literal you want to get. The real answer, most certainly, is that the Marvel Studios team hadn’t conceived…

Paul Rudd and Peyton Reed on the red carpet for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Image: Marvel StudiosTen years ago, when it was announced that Peyton Reed was taking over Ant-Man from Edgar Wright, it was met with some skepticism. Really? The Down With Love and Bring It On guy? Sure, those movies are great, but can he really do superheroes? Well, the answer turned out to be a resounding “Yes”—and now, with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Reed becomes the first director with Marvel Studios proper to…

The bias-variance tradeoff, part 1 of 3Should you read this article? If you understand all the words in the next section, then no. If you don’t care to understand them, then also no. If you want the bolded bits explained, then yes.“The bias-variance tradeoff” is a popular phrase you’ll hear in the context of ML/AI. If you’re a statistician, you might think it’s about summarizing this formula:MSE = Bias² + VarianceIt isn’t.Well, it’s loosely related, but the phrase actually refers to a practical recipe for how to pick a…

The bias-variance tradeoff, part 2 of 3In Part 1, we covered much of the basic terminology as well as a few key insights about the bias-variance formula (MSE = Bias² + Variance), including this misquote from Anna Karenina:All perfect models are alike, but each unhappy model can be unhappy in its own way.To make the most of this article, I suggest taking a look at Part 1 to make sure you’re well-situated to absorb this one.Under vs over… fitting. Image by the author.Let’s say you have a model that is as good as you’re…

The bias-variance tradeoff, part 3 of 3We covered a lot of ground in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Part 1 was the appetizer, where we covered some basics you’d need to know on your journey to understanding the bias-variance tradeoff. Part 2 was our hearty main course, where we devoured concepts like overfitting, underfitting, and regularization.It’s a very good idea to eat your veggies, so do head over to those earlier articles before continuing here, because Part 3 is dessert: the summary you’ve earned by following…

An evil ruler with a legion of faceless soldiers at their disposal. A band of heroes, traveling across vast new worlds filled with evocative and wild creatures. Transports that look like giant stingrays. Enormous battles across towering technological wonders. A cantina. Yup, that all sounds like Star Wars, but it’s actually Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a massive sci-fi adventure that takes both Ant-Man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to brand new places, with both good and bad results.The good? Characters we…