Archive - Simplicity is SOTA

The stubborn persistence of online-offline inconsistency

The most preventable bugs are surely the most infuriating

Apr 21 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

February 2025

The Monty Hall problem: The golden goat variation

Bayesian reasoning through a fun twist on the classic puzzle

Feb 3 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

October 2024

Can machines think?

On stochastic parrots, generalization, and the subsumption conjecture

Oct 14, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

September 2024

Postmortem anti-patterns

10 behaviors that prevent us from learning the right lessons, and a few principles for having better postmortems

Sep 2, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

July 2024

The duality of tech debt and vendor debt

Why I say "no" to most vendors even if I believe their product would improve my tech stack

Jul 22, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

April 2024

When static datasets lead to static ideas

Why I left the beaten path for my position bias in features paper

Apr 8, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

March 2024

Benchmark datasets for learning-to-rank

The use and history of the most important datasets in the field

Mar 11, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

February 2024

Position bias in features

What happens when model features depend on prior ranking

Feb 12, 2024 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

August 2023

A story about validating language models

This happened some time ago, but it has some good lessons.

Aug 14, 2023 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

July 2023

A model of everything

Challenges with building models of an entire business

Jul 17, 2023 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

June 2023

What do we mean by inductive bias and expressiveness?

The choices we make about how models make choices

Jun 19, 2023 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

Unraveling Deep & Cross Networks

Explaining an effective recent method for automatic feature crosses

Jun 5, 2023 •

Richard Demsyn-Jones

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