If AI helps me get ideas from my head to the readers' heads faster, that's good. Society thrives when ideas are shared, critiqued, and built on. But authors shouldn't take credit for other peoples' ideas -- they should synthesize others' ideas, including the "blurry JPG of the web" that is LLMs. The question …

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What are Post-Query Refinement Suggestions? One of my favorite search UX patterns is post-query refinement suggestions — buttons that appear between the search box and results, adjusting the query in various ways. See, for instance, these suggestions on Etsy, which recommend that I filter by shipping speed, seller …

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I keep seeing AI skeptic takes like "AI is useless" or "LLMs are only good at Natural Language Processing", usually because of hallucinations and AI slop. Both are real problems. But that conclusion still misses the point: it misidentifies what LLMs are actually good at. My take is: LLMs are great …

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Algolia is a tremendously powerful search platform, especially for e-commerce. But like most SaaS tools, the management dashboard doesn't do everything you need it to do. In particular, it's hard to compare search result rankings across variations in indexes -- a super common pattern when you're testing and iterating …

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The rise of AI-assisted coding tools has made it dramatically easier and faster to build small side projects than ever before. What used to take weeks of evenings and weekends can now be done in a few focused sessions, with an AI pair programmer handling much of the boilerplate, debugging, and implementation details. …

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As I've written about before, as a data scientist supporting a product or marketing team with A/B testing, the job is communication -- helping to translate between business requirements and what we can learn from statistics. I (and many, many others) have found that there is a lot of value in having a document, shared …

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The other day, I was reading a post by Venkatash Rao (thousands of words of under-edited brilliance, as usual), and was struck by this note about the complexity of climate solutions: I tend to take as an article of faith the systems science rule of thumb that the complexity of solutions generally matches the complexity …

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There’s been an immense amount of discussion about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT over the last year, of course. Some of that discussion has been whether they are intelligent, conscious, or on the path to Artificial General Intelligence. I’m particularly interested in the "consciousness" …

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Recently I wrote a blog post that mentioned “Superiority” as a type of A/B test decision. In this post I want to talk about all five types of A/B test decision that I think are relevant. This is an adaptation and extension of a talk I gave last year at the Quant UX conference (it’s a great event, you should check it …

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Recently, tech-journalism site The Markup ran a long, detailed, critical investigation of a predictive machine learning model used by the State of Wisconsin to identify public school students at risk of not graduating. I mostly agree with the conclusions of the piece -- the system appears not to be fit for purpose and …

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