Notes, Twitter, and Clipping

Notes, Twitter, and Clipping…

It’s been a while since I’ve appeared here on the blog, and some of my three readers have called me out a bit regarding this semi-voluntary hiatus.

Hiatus

In fact, a lot has happened in the meantime in both the personal and professional spheres. But in short, I never really stopped; I just slightly changed my relationship with the platforms where I was sharing some of my thoughts.

One pleasant surprise was the Staff+ Podcast, where together with Marlesson Santana and Paulo Vasconcellos, we talk about topics more related to life after reaching a certain level of seniority and its challenges.

ML Articles—which I shamelessly copied from Yannic Kilcher—has been receiving positive feedback that surprised me a lot, especially from folks who like to know what’s going on in terms of research for ML/MLOps/Recommender Systems in general.

Twitter is not that cool anymore

The big change, besides the blog hiatus, was my self-imposed hiatus on my personal Twitter, where I was very active for a number of factors I’ll list below; but first, a brief opinion on what I think of the platform…

I simply think Twitter is a sensational product because I can follow people I actually have some affinity for and/or interest in their ideas; I can follow a bunch of paper bots that almost always present me with something interesting; I have a direct news feed from independent institutions/people outside the mainstream; and, of course, the memes.

And as someone who writes, I can’t deny that Twitter as a distribution platform is the place to be for anyone who wants to be read by some niche interest.

However, at least for the last two years, Twitter has become a hostile place for me, with a high level of negativity, a factory of bad takes, and very low (I would venture to say zero) algorithmic curation.

Below are some of the reasons that led me to have a more reflective attitude regarding using Twitter.

• Threads and more threads that explain the world with the depth of a flat razor blade
• Interactions increasingly full of animosity
• Many people without any kind of public expression calibration
• Virtue signaling to garner sympathy from others
• Authority signaling
• The transformation of the platform into an indignation machine where a complex and nuanced reality does not exist
• Worship beggars who feel entitled to be pastors to their followers

Is everything lost? Obviously not. Twitter is a very good platform for gathering ideas and promotion, but the blog is where I can structure part of what I think with a greater degree of depth.

Notes

As the name suggests, they will be very short things, more or less along the lines of what I already wrote in 2012-2015 with reviews of things I’m reading, clippings, and some moderate rants.

Technical Posts

Here I’ll take the opportunity to share some things I’ve been working on daily, such as Data and Kubernetes, my journey building DevTools as an MLE, whether maintaining my passion for R, or ProdOps (or Machine Learning in production for real).