Tag Archives: twitter

Why lines of code is a bad metric for a programmer

There  is a long explanation over at medium

committing code is a small part of what software engineers do. There are many ways in which you can contribute technically without writing much code. In fact, the best senior engineers I know are great at prioritization, delegation, and simplifying. Their pull requests are tiny because they’ve made the code modular and straightforward. … Writing negative code is a point of pride! If you refactored a complex piece of logic, picked a good library to solve a problem, or eliminated unnecessary features, then you’ll have a negative commit history. ..  fine-tune configs, research arcane issues, and dive deep into underlying architecture. Working on these jobs can mean days of research just to make a few-line change.

The same applies to amount of funding received by a scientist (although frequently used for calculation of salariy). If I can achieve the same impact at a fraction of the costs, isn’t that much better than producing more costs?

At least one positive advice?

Is there at least one positive advice of all that Musk utterance?

https://archive.ph/TcxaF#selection-1319.0-2987.210
  1.  Avoid large meetings
    Large meetings waste valuable time and energy – They discourage debate – People are more guarded than open – There’s not enough time for everyone to contribute. Don’t schedule large meetings unless you’re certain they provide value to everyone.
  2. Leave a meeting if you’re not contributing
    If a meeting doesn’t require your: – Input – Value – Decisions Your presence is useless. It’s not rude to leave a meeting. But it’s rude to waste people’s time.
  3. Forget the chain of command
    Communicate with colleagues directly. Not through supervisors or managers. Fast communicators make fast decisions. Fast decisions = competitive advantage.
  4.  Be clear, not clever
    Avoid nonsense words and technical jargon. It slows down communication. Choose words that are: – Concise – To the point – Easy to understand Don’t sound smart. Be efficient.
  5. Ditch frequent meetings
    There’s no better way to waste everyone’s time. Use meetings to: – Collaborate – Attack issues head-on – Solve urgent problems But once you resolve the issue, frequent meetings are no longer necessary. You can resolve most issues without a meeting. Instead of meetings: – Send a text – Send an email – Communicate on a discord or slack channel Don’t interrupt your team’s workflow if it’s unnecessary.
  6. Use common sense if a company rule doesn’t make sense
    Contribute to progress – Apply to your specific situation Avoid following the rule with your eyes closed. Don’t follow rules. Follow principles.

Warning : 2) and even other x) only suitable for slightly autistic, self obsessed and excellent scientists.

 

 

Katzenjammer II

Seltsam, was gerade auf Twitter los ist wenn wir CT Bergstrom glauben, der eine Team Email von Musk geteilt hat.

putative chief twit email as distributed by CT Bergstrom https://archive.ph/ZNWIN

Es sieht so aus als sei Twitter nun in der Gewalt von einem reichen Mann, der einem pseudoreligiösen Mars Kult angehört – nachzulesen in dem aufschlussreichen Artikel von Dave Troy

This is a reference to “longtermism” the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity’s future in space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future. This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars. Longtermism is heavily influenced by “Russian Cosmism” and is also directly adjacent to “Effective Altruism.” Musk’s stated mission, which he intends to fulfill in his lifetime, is to “make humanity a multiplanetary species.” The anti-democratic urge in longtermism is rooted in the belief that “mob rule” will lead to nuclear annihilation; we should, Musk thinks, be guided by “wiser” minds.

 

 

 

Katzenjammer I

Auf Science Twitter ist die Stimmung am Tiefpunkt nachdem Wissenschaftler scharenweise den Dienst verlassen.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1585880361292435456

obwohl doch klar ist, daß Continue reading Katzenjammer I

Yes, you can search Twitter and block unwanted accounts automatically

 

Using the link https://twitter.com/search-advanced also advanced search is possible while I run a remote backup with archive page and any local copies using GoFullPage. Also Likers Blocker is recommended.

How to save a Twitter thread

This is not a trivial task as most browser produce garbage when printing to pdf. Also screenshots do not help so much with multipage threads. “Unroll” also doesn’t work reliable.

So I have been using the archive.today plugin before producing the pdf,  but this method is time consuming  as it needs a captcha.

Having now Selenium running in a docker container, there is a more convenient solution where  just two lines of R are sufficient

remDr$navigate("https://twitter.com/SZ_Muenchen/status/1346425350394236930")
remDr$screenshot(file = 'screen.png')

Login is also possible as explained at github

username <- remDr$findElement(using = "name", value = "session[username_or_email]")
username$sendKeysToElement(list("XXX"))
passwd <- remDr$findElement(using = "name", value = "session[password]")
passwd$sendKeysToElement(list("XXX", "\uE007"))

A sentiment analysis of the most recent @realDonaldTrump tweets

There had been a repeated assessments of psychiatrists during the presidentship of Donald Trump (“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President – Updated and Expanded with New Essays“).

I am now analyzing here the 3.200 most recent tweets using a computational pipeline created already some years ago using the following packages

# -- based on https://www.r-bloggers.com/analyzing-the-us-election-using-twitter-and-meta-data-in-r and http://juliasilge.com/blog/Joy-to-the-World/
list.of.packages &lt;- c("twitteR","ggplot2","httr","rjson","tm","gridExtra","lubridate","wordcloud","devtools","syuzhet","SnowballC","scales","reshape2","dplyr","stringr")
lapply(list.of.packages, require, character.only = TRUE)

The choice of words isn’t unexpected – just what is already known – with “great”, “president”, “will” and “trump” being the most frequently used words.

wordcloud

All tweets can be classified by sentiment scores of the words used. If we look at the total counts, three categories are being used excessively: “positive”, “negative” and “trust”.

sentiment scores

Trust seems to be used not so much in the context of personal relationship but in the context of economics  of “deal”. As it has been speculated that he suffers of cyclothymia ( 0.4% to 1% of the U.S. population has cyclothymia) we can look also the time course of sentiments.

time series on a daily basis
time series using 3 day intervals
time series weekly basis

Variation (dispersion) is high, in particular on a daily basis, while in the absence of any normal values it is difficult to make any definite conclusions. Positive and negative emotions are not always in parallel, there are “converging situations” nearly every month where negative emotions go up and positive emotions go down indicating a more profound mood swing.

The correlation plot shows the expected decline of negative scores with increasing positive scores. Many values are outside of the 95% confidence bounds, making  the sentiment score (and even the personality) largely unpredictable.

correlation plot

An extended analysis including more reference accounts would be necessary for further conclusion. Nevertheless, there is evidence of  mental instability as noticed already by various expert testimonials.

There is first the emergency situation his mental instability poses as a result of the power that he holds and the weapons he has at his disposal…There is first the emergency situation his mental instability poses as a result of the power that he holds and the weapons he has at his disposal. But there are also the effects on public health through his fomenting of violence. Hate crimes have seen unprecedented spikes, bullying is widespread, and white supremacist killings have doubled. There are also statistics on the rise of stress levels that are nationally worse than during World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and September 11 terrorist attacks. He is also destabilizing the global scene by alienating allies, emboldening dictators, reigniting nuclear proliferation, and launching a trade war in ways that are predictable from his mental impairments. These are not just matters of policy but arise out of a troubled relationship with reality, a propensity to attack if questioned or even slightly criticized, and dangerous behavioral patterns that need to be spoken about.

There is not so much to add to man who believes in his “great and unmatched wisdom”. Frank Zappa once said “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry”.

Bad news are good news

e! Science News reports a new study in EPJ Data Science by Marcel Salathé showing that anti-vaccination sentiments spread more easily than pro-vaccination sentiments.

We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious

Read the full paper for the tricky design – at least the results fully underpin daily life experience. It’s certainly much easier to do Twitter than Facebook studies on the other hand these rather short messages are certainly not the main channel of many great “opinionated” people.

The third largest problem in epidemiology

Some people are writing their diaries on the web (“blogs”), other are sharing photos (“flickr”), their social background (“big brother”) or are broadcasting themselves (“YouTube”); others let you trace their current location (“twitter”) or look at their desktops (“wakoopa”) or computer files (“BitTorrent”). Why is it still so difficult to run an epidemiological study with an adequate response rate? Is that excessive profiling a minority habit only?