Click bait of a title... I think the more important thing this article is trying to say is: use a good heuristic to solve your problem, if it can't do so then ML may be something to look into.
You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
41–50 of 331 posts
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#42Doesn’t scale.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#43But if you say "I'm going to use a bunch of shell scripts to parse logs" you are boring. If you say "I am going to use groundbreaking ML/AI technologies to transform big data into customer retention solutions", you are a visionary.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#44A huge part of the "data revolutions" that we've seen in the last few decades really has nothing to do with data and everything to do with process.
Data Warehouses changed the way people and companies do data. They expose all kinds of things that were never available before. It was magic!
No. It wasn't. Not that Data Warehouses are bad or ineffective. But it's a lot like the problem you face when you observing something changes it. The work you have to go through to build a real data warehouse is that you have to get disparate parts of an organization to codify process. Data warehouses don't model data. They model processes.
The mere fact of forcing the company to pin the process is often more beneficial than the warehouse itself.
The same thing goes for ML and AI. The only way to extract features is for them to actually exist. And that means the data needs to exist in a certain form, and there's a human process that leads to that. Absent that, it's pretty useless.
I cut my teeth on SQL, and it's a big part of my professional career. I think it's great. It's one of my favorite languages, and it does a lot that maybe a lot of people don't know about.
But this title and the content are really pretty garbage. Anyone who thinks that good SQL can do what good AI/ML can do is really misunderstanding both.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#45I like the notion that AI is impossible to wrangle into a neat box, because it has always described the cutting edge of technology. Image manipulation, audio synthesis, and other techniques we're once considered artificial intelligence. But now that they are far better defined and understood, they essentially have fallen out of the nebulous sphere of sci-fi tech.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The advertising agency I previously worked at would take the first month and only work on how data is collected and stored. After that first month they would begin addressing goals, plans, etc. About a year later is when true value would be realized because data that previously never existed could be analyzed. Few things were more enjoyable for me than getting a new client, imagining what analysis I'd like to…
how did you convince them to stick on for a year when most clients want to see some results within 2 months or they give up? according to your schedule they’d ask what I’ve been doing and if I tell them I’ve just been “collecting data” that translates to them as “I haven’t done anything in 2 months”. If I say “keep paying me and you’ll see results in a year” that translates to “I haven’t done anything in 2 months but…
Bigger clients (and intrepid smaller clients) are willing to commit to longer term plans. The key is to be clear about what it will take and what it will return. If it's the first time they have even thought about using a large dataset the ROI could be high, and it's a long term strategy to start collecting and using data anyway.
Bigger clients budgeting can also be conducive to longer term planning as well. In year one they can write it off as an R&D investment, year two it can start to make returns.
Clients who have been burned by less capable companies are also comforted by very well defined plans, so they are happy to hear you have actually accounted for the issues that likely "came out of nowhere" last time.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who on earth are these people describing ? I was asked about my thoughts on AI/ML at work, I said it didn't really apply to us. I was told "but with ML we can figure out when deliveries are happening and scale the machines before the deliveries happen based on the peak traffic times". I tried to explain that we could so all that from SQL and looking at our data. We have all the data we just need to formulate it int…
The catch it the “and looking at our data” part. ML is basically a collection of thorough ways to look at your data, understand the patterns and infer what that means for the future. In your example, you should absolutely start by cleaning your data up and run some basic SQL aggregations and plotting volume over time. So you look that that and notice (1) volume is increasing over time, (2) some holidays bump a few da…
Haha, I wanted to have a bar graph which were by day of week:
Bar 1: Last years deliveries.
Bar 2: Predicted this years deliveries (based on % of increase from other markets if no previous years, or percentage of growth from last 2 years)
Bar 3: Actual deliveries.
Then another graph:
Bar 1: Average processing time from previous year.
Bar 2: Average processing time for current year.
I'm terrible with graphs and such tho, I can get all the data, I really suck at displaying that data tho.
(and also show the holidays in that region, India has a lot!)
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#48My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…
I went to your website, and I can't figure out what your product is or does. I had to click in to individuals before I figured out what it does.
Why not put "BeeLine Reader makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable. We use a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes from one line to the next." on your front page?
Maybe you guys have already done some kind of testing and found out that the current layout is optimal?
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#49Good points but really a false dichotomy. The purpose of AI and machine learning is to find patterns in data that aren't simple heuristics like this.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#50In a layman term the difference between sql and ml is, ml predict things and sql just tell you things.
Things has changed and ml now a days can do far better things. If the competitor is using ml and making gain, then one should also catch up as soon as possible.
SQL analytics was past, predictive analytics is the future. ML can do more than predictive analytics for you :)