27 Jul 2023
What? Me? 40?
Seeing as I recently turned 40, I thought I’d take on the time-honored and cherished tradition of writing my thoughts. Yes, this is one of those posts where people post about their thoughts when reaching an arbitrary milestone accomplished only by having the good sense and luck to not die by misadventure or misfortune before a certain number of days have passed. If you’re reading this blog, we’ve probably interacted at some point in my life. Thanks for that – every little bit of life, experience, and such have made me the man I am today.
Words of life
Here are some words I’ve come to live by. Some are quotes from others, but having tried them on like a nice winter jacket and found them right, I have unabashedly adopted them as my own.
- We all come from somewhere. Where and what we are working to be is what matters.
- Get sleep. Tomorrow is always a new day.
- Time is the most valuable asset you have. Invest wisely, celebrate the wins and don’t sweat the losses.
- Never take a person’s last dollar
- Everyone has a story to tell
- There never was a good war or a bad peace
- Be busy, but not so busy with the small stuff that you lose the whole picture.
- Embrace reality and deal with it
- Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. The greatest gift is the ability to forget - to forget the bad things and focus on the good.
- Cognitive dissonance is your subconcious begging for you to wake up.
- We may not have chosen the circumstances of our life, but we choose how to respond and rise to the occasion.
- Trust, but verify.
- Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
- When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Talk openly with the people you care about and love.
- Family is not always by blood. It is by heart.
- Finally: live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Words of Hopes
Some life goals / bucket list items I look forward to working towards
- Run a marathon at the age of 50
- Write a scifi book
- Finish my book on the craft of data science
- Places to visit
- New Zealand
- Iceland
- Angel Falls (Venezuela)
- Istanbul
- Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and Portugal
- Petra and Samarkand
- Write thoughts on turning 90 and teasing my brothers who will be 92 and 88.
- Attend my kids’ milestones – be that graduating college, formalizing relationships, landing that dream job that supports their avocation, or simply picking them up after their first skydive
Ending thoughts
Thanks for spending the time to read through my thoughts. It’s genuinely strange to be turning 40 – the people you know are getting older, your body now tells your brain the things it won’t do, and you spend time thinking about things like “What are my thoughts on turning 40?”. Keep on rolling, my dedicated readers.
07 May 2023
The Importance of Naming
What do children, variables, and new products have in common? Naming them is hard.
The importance of naming cannot be overstated. A good name can make a process or product more memorable and easier to recognize, while a bad name can make it difficult to remember or even understand what the process or product does. Moreover, a well-chosen name can help to create a sense of identity and belonging among the users and developers of a process or product.
LLMs in the mix
In the case of using generative model output in products and services, I have not come across a general name for this. As the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to advance, new processes and products are constantly being created to help service providers and customers. One of recent interest is the use of generative models, which can be used to create text, code, images, etc., that can be used to improved communication and customer/provider interaction.
What do we call the portion of a product or service that uses generative models? Much like we call the integration of statistics in reporting analytics or in decision contexts classification or predictive modeling/predictive analytics, we need a name for the integration of generative models within a product.
The Final Name List
I took a straw poll of the MLOps.community and from fellow AI practitioners on LinkedIn, and got some great feedback. Below are the ones I think are strong contenders.
GenAug 
GenAug, short for “generative augmentation,” is a name that accurately reflects the idea, which is to augment the delivery of service providers. Especially at their current stage, LLMs are tools, and rather than replacing the person providing the service they instead offload some of the overhead of content generation.
GenAmp 
GenAmp, short for “generative amplification,” is another name that accurately reflects the idea. This speaks to how using generative models can amplify people’s productivity. Case in point, I used ChatGPT to help get through a small logjam on this very blogpost. While I didn’t keep any of the original wording, seeing a similarly related example was enough to blast through my typical writer’s block.
GenTool, short for “generative tooling,” is a name that emphasizes LLM model integration as a tool. This is easy to remember and fairly general. The one fault I see is it could anchor the use of LLMs as “tools,” where in a number of cases that may be limited. For example, the sufficiency of their delivery is still questionable for a number of use cases, so calling it “tool” might mislead a user to think the answer is right when LLM hallucination is still being worked through.
GMI 
GMI, short for “generative model integration,” is a name that emphasizes the integration of generative models into a workflow. Currently, this is my preferred answer, but I’m looking forward to seeing a consensus emerge.
Final Thoughts
Naming things is hard, but it is an important task that cannot be overlooked. What do you think we should call including generative model outputs into services and products? Let me know on LinkedIn or the MLOps.Community Slack.
02 Jan 2023
Megaface is a dataset of scraped face images used by dozens if not hundreds of commercial projects. It was originally housed and maintained by the University of Washington and freely available, though it is now permission-walled.
A recent discussion from Exposing.AI explores the licensing and legal problems associated with Megaface, such as not respecting terms of licenses from sources for commercial versus non-commercial use, and whether that is necessary remains to be clarified in the courts. (For example, web scraping of publicly facing information is commonly said to be fair game). The treatment of this dataset, and the dataset being subsequently considered toxic (e.g. retracted from paperswithcode) mean that those who downloaded this data and built their models to date have a competitive advantage.
This suggests that AI’s limiting factor will continue to be the economics of labeling and data collection. The Megaface experience shows the cost won’t always be monotonically decreasing. If Megaface is representative and public datasets are taken private more in the future, I could see the perverse incentive for data product builders to hoard data despite GDPR and CCPA discouraging unnecessary collection and hoarding.
18 Nov 2022
I love finding niche datasets. Information search costs can be high despite the prevalence of surface-level search engines like Google and Bing.
Here are a few sources I use for improving data discovery:
I’d love to hear your approach! Connect with me on Mastodon at @tomrod@econtwitter.net
06 Nov 2022
Mastodon
I’ve followed the discussion about Mastodon over the years via Hacker News. The recent actions on Twitter, between the Musk acquisition and layoffs, encouraged a community I like to move over to Mastodon.
I started an account to see how it works. To my surprise, it was fairly simple to migrate, set up verification (through this blog), and to find things outside the specific community in the fediverse.
I’m new to the space, but looking forward to learning more. This is also a great reminder to start adding to this blog.
04 Sep 2020
Who am I?
My name is Tom Roderick, and I’m an economist and data scientist. I am the managing principal and chief data scientist for Flamelit, a B2G/B2B data science and services consultancy.
I have worked on projects or in roles in the following industries:
- Infrastructure: Utilities / Internet
- Technology: Ed-tech, auctions, recruiting, manufacturing, industrial IOT
- Research: healthcare (clinical, policy, and population health)
- Banking: retail deposits, consumer lending, business and commercial banking
- Digital services: cloud, operations, DevSecOps
My scopes has spanned statistical modeling, machine learning engineering, and managing data science organizations:
- Architecture/technical lead
- Analysis
- Scoping / Proof-of-Concept build
- Model build
- Implementation
- Ongoing performance assessment
- Communication: output socialization / executive communication
Things I am passionate about
- Making things work, efficient, smooth, and accurate
- Mentoring economists and data scientists
- Mathematics and Economics
- Philosophy of Science
- Nature
- Open source software
- Dreaming about fine wine and a pastoral life in Iceland, Switzerland, or New Zealand
LinkedIn or Mastodon are the best ways to contact me personally. Please visit https://flamelit.tech to contact Flamelit.
