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Move Slow and Make Things

multithreaded.stitchfix.com

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Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#21

Post by fxtentacle »

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny.

I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough.

The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit. The belt they included was a completely different size than the trouser and I'm still waiting for the shirt to arrive. And now I'm fighting the usual uphill battle to talk to a human and get this mess fixed or get a refund.

The core of Stitchfix is personalization, as they say. But that means an individual solution for each individual customer, and not AI for memorizing generic trends in a huge dataset.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#22

Post by toyota86 »

dstick wrote: post #16

I know it’s an april fools joke. But I’ve recently “discovered” why this is nevertheless very true. If you move slow, you have a higher chance of meeting the right customer, of actually allowing your idea to grow and improve over time. Without being locked into it in one form or another. Moving slow allows you to work on it as a side project first. Which means no financial stress. And then making things. To me this m…

Relevant to your process of discovery

> There once was a Master Programmer who wrote unstructured programs. A novice programmer, seeking to imitate him, also began to write unstructured programs. When the novice asked the Master to evaluate his progress, the Master criticized him for writing unstructured programs, saying, "What is appropriate for the Master is not appropriate for the novice. You must understand Tao before transcending structure."

~~The Tao of Programming

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#23

Post by fxtentacle »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #17
jiofih wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same feeling here - instead of laughing I was disappointed when the second paragraph laid out the April fools joke. I would love to see “small batch data science” where people actually understand the results. Black box recommendations never feel really right.

It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.

People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem.

For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#24

Post by bambax »

fxtentacle wrote: post #21

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny. I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough. The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that sa…

> I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit

That is nothing short of hilarious. The machine knows best! Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?!

> AI for memorizing generic trends

It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#25

Post by nicbou »

solarmist wrote: post #3

I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.” Artisans make beautiful things and software artisans make beautiful software, but it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business. And artisans moving slowly isn’t arbitrary. They move slow on the things that matter. The things that shine when attention was paid to the details.

One of my favourite articles on the internet is "an app can be a home-cooked meal". It's something you can make for your own enjoyment, with no plans for scaling on monetisation.

I have started making this sort of software, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I target the platform I use, I solve the problems I have, and my only metric is pleasure.

I wish we all had more of such projects.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#26

Post by hardwaresofton »

fxtentacle wrote: post #21

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny. I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough. The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that sa…

There are two areas of technology I avoid these days -- blockchain and AI.

It may very well be to my own detriment (there is a lot of promise in either) but fortunately there are lots of interesting problems outside these areas and I can just treat the mention of either of those topics as red flags.

That said, I want to note that I have had good results with Stitchfix but that was due to entering professionally-taken measurements. I got even better results however, from a local to-order suit maker and bought the full suit there, but basic shirt(s) from Stitchfix

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#27

Post by samueladam »

This is the way I build cybersecurity opertions centers and ingest data for mining.

Every log structure is analyzed by hand. Every log structure data behaviour is verified with statistics by hand. Every log data is normalized by hand. Every parser is done by hand. Every log is documented and gets unit tests.

What has not gone through this process ends up in the "automatic extraction" bucket waiting to get human love.

April's fool or not, you may laugh at me. My L3 security analysts don't.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#28

Post by TeMPOraL »

bambax wrote: post #24
fxtentacle wrote: post #21

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny. I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough. The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that sa…

> I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit That is nothing short of hilarious. The machine knows best! Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?! > AI for memorizing generic trends It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to e…

> It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.

It's also an internal distraction. They'd achieve something much closer to what they promise if they just threw some old-school regression analysis at the problem. But that's not cool these days, plus it's hard to relabel as AI even for the marketroids these days, and would involve actual work :).

This applies to many "AI companies" - so many want to either have easy process (throw data at some random Kaggle model and hope it sticks) or just a buzzword to bullshit investors with. Sometimes both.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#29

Post by ZephyrBlu »

fxtentacle wrote: post #23
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.

People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem. For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.

> But nobody knows why the issue occurs

They do know why that occurs. It's because the data set is biased.

Re: Move Slow and Make Things

#30

Post by dstick »

konschubert wrote: post #19
dstick wrote: post #16

I know it’s an april fools joke. But I’ve recently “discovered” why this is nevertheless very true. If you move slow, you have a higher chance of meeting the right customer, of actually allowing your idea to grow and improve over time. Without being locked into it in one form or another. Moving slow allows you to work on it as a side project first. Which means no financial stress. And then making things. To me this m…

I think even when moving slow, you can still work with prototypes and get feedback as long as you're open about it and you're not taking people's money. For example, I have https://www.invisible-computers.com up as a website. You can read about the product and you can sign up to be notified. But I won't take a cent until I have a product ready to ship.

I agree, but the general consensus in startup pop-literature (is that a thing? :D) is that you can never be sure unless you ask money and people are willing to pay. Otherwise people can just say they like / want / need it, without risk. I have to say that I agree. Too many times I've experienced that people _say_ they'll pay, but never actually do when push comes to shove.

But when someone does agree to pay (meaning you've somewhat validated your idea) then you're left empty handed and have to backtrack with your first customer. Not a great start. But that's just me :) YMMV

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