And this is probably its main weakness as well. — Mental models shape the way we think and how we see the world around us. This is something in which Peter Thiel excels. He has brilliant mental models where he contrasts the World of Bits with the World of Atoms. In this dichotomy, the world of bits is mostly the…

A quick guide on how not to calculate averages 🧮 — Apple pride themselves on their attention to details, and that’s why I had to hold them up to their standards. I am talking about their Health app in particular, and the way they calculate averages in it. This is a chart of my weight over the last 12 months. Each…

When it comes to books and movies, there are reviewers helping us discover what is worthy of our time. But why aren’t there reviewers for op-eds and Medium posts? The algorithm and the claps try to play this role, but sometimes we need a news-jockeys, a la disc-jockeys or DJs…

And what is the point of probability distributions anyway? — A footballer is known to score 70% of the penalty kicks he shoots. In the next season we expect him to shoot 10 penalty kicks, how many of them will he score? He will score 7 out of the 10 penalty kicks, obviously! Actually, 10 penalty kicks is a very…

All the big names promised me personalized news, but they all failed and failed again — Privacy online is everyone’s concern. When apps and websites started to track us, they promised us a better experience. The promise of a personalized content was their justification for their tracking cookies and hidden pixels. But, unlike Amazon’s same-day delivery, this promise was never delivered. Not even by Amazon itself.

A short history to put you in the scientists’ shoes and see the world through their eyes. — We all had these questions when we first learned about the basic statistical terms in primary school: Why is standard deviation (𝜎) or variance (𝜎²) the way they are? We intuitively get the part where we calculate how far each sample (x) is from the mean (μ). That’s what deviation…

The “Somebody-Wanted-But-So” way to tell a story — Someone: I am interested in writing, mostly blogs. And like most of us, I write about different topics. Sometimes these are computer science related, some other times it is about anything else from my dietary habits to the latest books I’ve read. Wanted: When writing, I like to connect the…

Why “eat less and exercise more” isn’t the answer? — In the last 20 years, obesity went from 30.5% to 41.9% in the United States¹. The usual suspects are fast food chains, sedentary lifestyle, and the lack of willpower. Your advice to your overweight friend is usually something along these lines: “Eat less, exercise more, and have some bloody willpower…

What is AST? And how pytest hacks it to give you a better UX? — In Python, like many other languages, there is a statement that checks a given condition, and raises an AssertionError if this condition is False, otherwise, it does nothing if the given condition is True. That’s basically what assert does.