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Ben Draves

@bendraves

ML Scientist @Uber inπŸ—½πŸš• Working on RecSys /CausalML πŸ“ˆπŸͺ„ PhD Stats. BS in Math. πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»πŸ“š Running long distances, reading long books. Find me here dravesb.github.io

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08.11.2024
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Latest posts by Ben Draves @bendraves

+100

04.01.2025 19:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

When I first learned about RAG, I couldn’t believe it was just β€œ β€œ.join(docs)

It does feel like

RAG -> Variable Selection
CoT -> Boosting

sure there are others too…

30.12.2024 16:00 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It also - for me at least - takes the joy out of it. Science is a participatory discipline and β€œplaying the game” makes β€œscoring the points” all the more enticing (especially for kids!)

24.12.2024 22:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

What app are folks using for e-readers these days? I’m a physical book + digital notes guy but the confines of my Manhattan apartment is causing me to start buying digital - any recommendations?

22.12.2024 21:08 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I get mad about this once a week. Just terrible brand positioning

14.12.2024 02:50 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Christmas Miracle Dimension 32, Quantum Break Β· Lofi Girl - Christmas 2024 Β· Song Β· 2024

So locked in open.spotify.com/track/11AEDk...

10.12.2024 15:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Wait, no he’s right

06.12.2024 14:41 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Oh no - didn’t mean to scoop any takes from the bad place πŸ˜…

04.12.2024 14:03 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

The most impactful CRM personalization is

select user, song, count(*)
from plays
group by 1, 2
order by 3 desc

Always has been. Always will be.

04.12.2024 13:58 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve been implementing some time series type estimates at work this week and man oh man the indexing / naming conventions have me πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«

03.12.2024 16:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Got an email, "Thank you for coverageβ€€py." I immediately thought, "they're going to want something, or complain about something."

Nope! It was all positive. Ended with "Thanks again for this awesome Python contribution!"

If you like what someone has done, tell them!

02.12.2024 15:07 πŸ‘ 162 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 1

Getting a new laptop Monday - so excited to set up everything β€œright” this time only for it to explode immediately.

01.12.2024 16:01 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah something beautiful about a NYC bar on Saturday morning with first round coffees, second round are beers

30.11.2024 19:38 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s also a religious tradition at this point

30.11.2024 19:06 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I was agonizing over why our SPR performance took a nose dive last week. Spent times in the logs, staring at feature values, investigating the FPR.

The front end was using rankings[::-1] not rankings πŸ™ƒ Sometimes the 10x work is not trusting a thing that comes out of the API.

26.11.2024 00:29 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

One of my big ah-ha moments was β€œwait… the hidden layers are just doing feature engineering”.

21.11.2024 16:06 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

πŸ˜…πŸ˜¬

20.11.2024 18:59 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I forgot how nice it is to open an app and be flooded with cool ML/Stats-y stuff. Bluesky has big happy hour at a conference vibes and it’s πŸ‘Œ

19.11.2024 23:43 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
A meme from the Simpsons where the top text is "Don't make me tap the sign" and the bottom text is him tapping a sign that reads "Don't peak at XP results early"

A meme from the Simpsons where the top text is "Don't make me tap the sign" and the bottom text is him tapping a sign that reads "Don't peak at XP results early"

I regularly send marketers this picture which I feel like is the right level of passive-aggressive grump for this group

18.11.2024 22:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

🎯🎯🎯

18.11.2024 04:27 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I made one for stats papers

18.11.2024 04:02 πŸ‘ 545 πŸ” 149 πŸ’¬ 15 πŸ“Œ 28

We really have known the ramifications of RecSys tech (especially in news) all along. It's just that consumers and companies wanted it more than a non-personalized alternative.

What we want vs what is good for us can oftentimes be two different things.

17.11.2024 18:11 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Quote was from 30 years ago...

With GroupLens, users may choose to read articles only from a small group with whom they share many common interests. Over time this could lead to a fracture of the global village into many small tribes, each forming a ... community ... isolated from each other.

17.11.2024 18:08 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Forget ggplot vs base R graphics. Bring back terminal renderings and clip art.

16.11.2024 22:51 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Picture of an article on an online bulletin in 1994. Can only be described as ~old~

Picture of an article on an online bulletin in 1994. Can only be described as ~old~

Picture of a systems architecture from 1994. Can only be described as comically dated.

Picture of a systems architecture from 1994. Can only be described as comically dated.

I’m revisiting some original RecSys papers in prep for a new team-member joining and the figures in the original GroupLens paper are just so πŸ”₯

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

16.11.2024 22:49 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Network growth models that accommodate starter parks (e.g. vertex β€”> block edge expansions) is already so fascinating me.

16.11.2024 16:51 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks for sharing!

The more I read post-PhD on the history of statistics (i.e. Stigler’s works) the more dark stuff I find. I thinks it’s really concerning that one can attain a formal education in statistics and just never discuss these issues. Context as important as content.

16.11.2024 16:38 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Benjamin Draves

Hey folksπŸ‘‹

My name is Ben and I’m a Data Scientist at Uber working on RecSys and CausalML. I’m a proud statistician with interests in matrix analysis and graph inference.

I live in NYC where I enjoy running long distances and reading a bit of everything. Find me here dravesb.github.io!

16.11.2024 02:54 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0