Willen-blog — Ben Willenbring
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Sphex Ichneumoneus

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Sphex is the colloquial name of a particular kind of digger wasp. Daniel Dennett effectively uses this wasp’s burrowing routine to show how, even basic examinations of animal behavior can lead us right to the doorstep of causal determinism: the belief that everything (ie: particle systems, wasp brains, human courtship rituals, the universe) can be explained as states of affairs, resulting from some previous state(s) of affairs in a purely mechanistic fashion. When a causally deterministic outlook is applied to questions of agency, free will, and consciousness, the implications pile up fast. Some interesting explorations of this issue can be found in popular shows like Devs [FX] and West World [HBO].

Employee Review Samples from a Startup: Chewie

Once in LA, Chewie bought me the greatest chocolate chip cookie I ever had. It was a little place called the Coffee Commissary. He’s a little clumsy, which is odd, because he’s an outstanding rock climber. One year, at one of our summits, he nearly killed our CFO when a horseshoe came flying out of his hands. Total accident, no one got hurt.

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Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 378: Fully Vaccinated against Corona

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On Friday March 26, I received the second injection of the Pfizer vaccine at a Brooklyn health center on Clarkson Street. The appointment was automatically scheduled on the day of my first shot. There was just one complication: I didn’t bring my dumb card. And apparently, there is a black market for these things.

Computationally measuring similarity of terms with 6 algorithms

There are many methods of determining similarity and difference between terms with nltk. None are simpler to implement than the Levenshtein edit distance – but in many ways, this algorithm is grossly insufficient, because it doesn’t take into consideration a word’s meaning or sense (at all!). For accuracy, I’ve found that Wu-Palmer is the all-around most reliable. And even this has some not-too-obvious limitations. This blog post shows how each algorithm stacks up when comparing the word yell with some semantically adjacent verbs. Python code is attached.

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NLP Pipeline trained on Modern Art Descriptions

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“I have found that the trick to successful modern art isn't the art. It's the description.” – My buddy D

Naturally, ☝🏽this got my wheels turning. Could I design an algorithm that could write convincing modern art installation descriptions? Being a total noob with ai and nlp, how far could I get in a reasonably short amount of time in between work and snow shoveling? Well, I found out.

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Preparation for the SHSAT 2021 (in Covid times)

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On Wednesday 1/27/2021, my daughter will sit for the SHSAT, a 114-question math and english test, used by the 8 specialized New York City high schools. The outcome of this test is the sole determinant of admittance into a specialized high school. All other factors you’d think might play a role – grades, teacher recommendations, attendance, extracurricular activities, financial need – are ignored. We’ve been preparing in earnest since last August. This blog post recaps the highlights of that experience, and tries to answer a few questions some parents might have.

  • What is the SHSAT?

  • How to get sample SHSAT test content

  • The importance of Schoolwork

  • My advice to parents for ELA prep

  • How I prepared my daughter

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Implicit Bias

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Shortly after finishing Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s wonderful book Biased, I took an implicit bias test – one centered around race and weapons; the focus being whether or not I am biased to associate specific racial groups (whites vs. blacks) with a higher likelihood of carrying weapons. It took about 7 minutes to complete. As it turns out, I (along with 6% of respondents) am slightly biased to associate whiteness with weapons.

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The Presumption of Savagery

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The week after George Floyd was killed by a police officer, I was sitting on my stoop, chatting with my neighbor. She’s a retired FDNY ladder chief in her sixties. She grew up here in Bedstuy. Our homes share a party wall and fence line. Before the virus, when the weather was nice, I’d often see her carrying supplies back and forth from her house next door to her two other properties, less than a quarter mile away. She’s a grandmother, a home owner, a real estate investor, and restaurant owner. She is black. And she said something that day that took me by surprise.

ORF Specification for Writing bug tickets

ORF is an acronym for Occam’s razor format. It is not real. There is no chance it will become a W3C standard. I made it up years ago (jokingly at first) when I started managing a backlog. But I enjoy acronyms, so I held on to it. Here’s the quick and dirty:

Some bug tickets are unclear despite containing lots of information. Some are very good, despite being tersely worded, sometimes profanity-laced – even ungrammatical. I wanted to better understand why: what makes a good bug ticket good, and a bad one bad.

This blog post is an informal summary of those findings, and a breezy presentation of some simple patterns that have worked well for me and my current teammates.

Daily Work consecrated in Routines (and a Dockerfile!)

Daily Work consecrated in Routines (and a Dockerfile!)

Over the course of 2 or so years, I’ve reached a point of attention exhaustion – thanks to a firehose of requests, reminders, alerts, pings, and messages coming at me from a variety of digital doodads – the sum total of which has diminished my ability to focus; to be able to discern what is very important versus somewhat important, versus not-at-all important. I intend to rehabilitate my concentration by establishing a rock solid routine that emphasizes working deeply in areas/problems that elicit my highest possible contribution. The first iteration of that routine is described below.

Adding Tooltip Functionality to a SquareSpace Site

For anyone who pays for SquareSpace web hosting, adding simple and flexible tooltip functionality is pretty simple. You just need to have a premium subscription – meaning, you pay for the service. Here’s how it works…

  • Add jQuery, Popper, and Tippy into your Code Injection header, along with some basic JavaScript

  • Bring a page or blog post into edit mode, and create specially crafted links prefixed with #tooltip_

  • Save your page, then load it outside of the SquareSpace editor - you’ll see that each of your links is now transformed into great looking tooltips

Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 232: The Zeigarnik Effect

The Zeigarnik effect is the name given to a psychological/cognitive phenomenon whereby a person’s ability to carry out a task measurably diminishes as a result of the residual interference of an unfinished task. For me, this takes the form of: memories, words, proper nouns, metaphors, stories my daughters tell me, possible inventions, badly composed news headlines, product taglines, tacky song lyrics, or just the words I hear coming out of the mouths of people around me. But I have a countermeasure: Evernote Lists.