select links from 2025-12-06
VIBE IT UP
Hello friends! I missed last week, sorry about that! Luckily, this week I have a BUNCH of links I wanted to share.
There’s one about business process automation with AI and I DEFINITELY agree with it. Companies notoriously underdocument their procedures - and so if the process is a mess, we can resort to the good old “garbage in, garbage out” maxim whenever we try to throw AI at the problem. I am somewhat hesitant to talk to chatbots for this exact reason. It’s pretty likely the chatbot is slower to respond and slower to route my issue to some specific workflow. At my current company, clients can run into hundreds of different issues. Heck, clients may even have trouble explaining their issue! A human in the loop remains extremely valuable at quickly parsing and routing the issue.
Manager Tools
Sometime last year I stumbled upon Manager Tools, a consultancy company that has A LOT of podcasts about being an effective manager. I had listened to a few episodes before, but I am sinking my teeth in this time. Let me tell you, the material is EXCELLENT. It’s a treasure trove of material - if you’re a manager or you’re aspiring to be one, I strongly recommend listening and reading the free material.
One of the good bits I caught this week was about delegation. If you have a task of some size, delegating that task to a direct report increases the size of the task. Usually that’s because the direct report has less experience BUT delegating is one of the best ways of upskilling your reports. Luckily, you yourself probably did the task for the first time - yet here you are, not fired yet! And sometimes, if you have too much on your plate, it’s ok to delegate to the floor.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto
Lately the socials have been better at capturing my attention and, frankly, distracting me. Software has become more anti-social and working against your interests. And so enters the Resonant Computing Manifesto. Simon Willison also has his take on the manifesto on his blog. On the one hand, the barrier to building large scale systems is lower these days and so creating your own private dedicated software product is easier. On the other hand, if Netflix hadn’t optimised for eyeballs, it wouldn’t be in a position to acquire Warner Bros. I love the proliferation of AI tools and I love the fact that I can develop software for my own needs but most folks out there are probably sticking to tried and true products.
Other links
This week I’m happy to share a lot of standalone links!
Josiah Parry is a great blogger and he recently reworked his blog.
Creating Synthetic Data by Q McCallum
Net migration in Pacific island countries by Peter Ellis
How good is your country at statistics? by Nicola Rennie (Lithuania is at 89.4!)
Stack Overflow: When to use negative binomial and Poisson regression
Modern SQL now covers DuckDB
Cooking with DuckDB by Bob Rudis
R package: ernest, a package for nested sampling
Blog post: It’s always the process stupid by Dr. Sami Bahri
Book: Statistical Process Control in Python by Timothy Fraser