Another writer trying to redefine a common english word to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time.
Pass.
Average is all you need
31–40 of 111 posts
Re: Average is all you need
#32If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.
We make more homes, but I would say the construction of the average home is worse after the invention of the power saw than before it.
Re: Average is all you need
#33> You did not write a single line of SQL. You did not set up an attribution model. You asked a question, in English, and got a table.
But nobody bothered to check if it was correct. It might seem correct, but I've been burned by queries exactly like these many, many times. What can often happen is that you end up with multiplied rows, and the answer isn't "let's just add a DISTINCT somewhere".
The answer is to look at the base table and the joins. You're joining customers to two (implied) one-to-many tables, charges and email_events. If there are multiple charges rows per customer, or an email can match multiple email_events rows, it can lead to a Cartesian multiplication of the rows since any combination of matches from the base table to the joined tables will be included.
If that's the case, the transactions and revenue values are likely to be inflated, and therefore the pretty pictures you passed along to your boss are wrong.
Further reading, and a terrific resource:
https://kb.databasedesignbook.com/posts/sql-joins/#understan...
Re: Average is all you need
#34Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.
LLMs are trained to predict tokens on highly mediocre code though. How will it exceed its training data?
Because you ask it to improve things and so it produces slightly better than average results - the average person can find things wrong with something, and fix it as well. Then you feed that improved result back in and generate a model where the average is better.
/end extreme over optimism.
Re: Average is all you need
#35If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
The average of quality isn't always available in all people.
Re: Average is all you need
#36how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge? Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?
You don't, and if businesses start using vibed reports for regulated reporting then I guess we'll see soon what the courts say about that
Re: Average is all you need
#37Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.
LLMs are trained to predict tokens on highly mediocre code though. How will it exceed its training data?
Probably the same way other models learned to surpass human ability while being bootstrapped from human-level data - using reinforcement learning.
The question is, do we have good enough feedback loops for that, and if not, are we going to find them? I would bet they will be found for a lot of use cases.
Re: Average is all you need
#38This seems like a nice context to mention Sturgeon's law:
> ninety percent of everything is crud
Re: Average is all you need
#39This is not only average. This is actual magic. So let's be real: the SQL is average. The joins are average. The chart is average. And that took us less than 5 minutes and that was amazing, that is the entire point. You did not need a data engineer to model your HubSpot data, or a meeting to agree on whether it should be last-click or first-click or linear or time-decay or whatever. You needed a query, written fast,…
Author here; I suppose the... side eye awkward monkey meme was a bit lost on you; it was written on purpose. Funnily enough. Everything is slop if you want it to be slop. This however, was written by hand my little hands. Now I might be a bad writter - that is indeed another subject.
Re: Average is all you need
#40This is yet another ad, it's tiring. It's a post claiming average AI is useful... by a for-profit "data platform with a CLI that LLM agents can use directly". What are they going to do? Criticize the whole industry they are selling to?
I did not post it. I did not intend for it to be posted here - really. It just happened someone did see it and posted it. So I did not advertise anything :-)