My hypothesis is markets are fractally efficient and fractally competitive. Much like a strange attractor, they swing between states of efficiency and competitiveness.
The default regime is instability. Computational capacity is unstable through time, and the problem size itself changes (fractally) through time.
SEEKING WORK | Data scientist consultant | Canada/Remote Worldwide
Most of what people call "data science" is now doable with an LLM and a weekend. I focus on the messy, ambiguous, regulation-heavy gnarly problems where nobody is sure what the right question is. Often it involves getting hands on to find the data and signal that's really needed.
What I've done:
- AI verification of building and architectural BIM/CAD against 400 page ESG standards. (Days of work down to minutes)
- Part failure prediciton, saving a German automaker from lemon law recalls. ($20M+ exposure avoided)
- Oil & gas well and lease production forecasting.
- Real-time emissions detection for industrial smokestacks. ($75K fines per incident prevented)
- Revenue optimization and persona identification for debt collections (15-20% net revenue lift)
- LLM-based legal document extraction (land runsheet), reducing due diligence turnaround from 3 days to 30 minutes
- Built vessel piracy risk engine that informed naval escort deployment, contributing to fewer hijackings
A major plot point in the Red Dwarf books is about Coca-Cola sending a fleet of space ships out to blow up stars so they can spell "Enjoy Coca-Cola" in the sky.
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
How could I forget this! He also recommended the name.
Wolfram had come up with some normal techie names "computron", "math-o-matic" or whatever. SJ said No those suck, use something simple like Mathematica.
I used Mathematica on a NeXT computer back in 1991. It was a beautiful machine to work on. I did a student project where I simulated the flow of the boundary of a plane region over time (like how the shape of a drop of oil in water changes over time) and it was very, very easy to write in Mathematica with cool graphics.
(Theo Gray is in there too; he built the notebook interface, was introduced by SJ to show it at some event. Theo's parents were math profs in Urbana and I studied under his dad one summer, house-sat, and I too had NeXTstep access and Mathematica since it was ubiquitous there)
I've gotten the north Korean wanting to use my upwork account... I'd have to create one first.
But now the Nigerian "format" scammers are into job scams. I got an email that reeked and played along a bit. I was "hired" after a curiously simple interview via signal, and had to wait for my "supervisor" to come train me.
Eventually I got the "boss" on the line to talk, he went absolutely postal when I asked if he was an African scammer. Apparently that's racist now.
> I've gotten the north Korean wanting to use my upwork account... I'd have to create one first.
I've gotten that too, now that everyone ITT is talking about it. I had no idea what was going on with it at the time and ignored it. Amusing to know that there could be state actors behind it.
The version I got explicitly suggested that I create such an account for the purpose if I don't already have one (I didn't, and of course still don't).
> But now the Nigerian "format" scammers are into job scams.
"format" is what Nigerian scammers call a playbook for each scam type. So a pig butchering "format", romance scam "format", inheritance scam "format", etc.
They offered to help me setup an Upwork account too. Tiresome creeps.
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