(This post was originally published on my personal blog.) 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…

(This was first posted on my personal blog.) 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…

This article was first posted on my personal web site. 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…

(This post was first published on my personal blog.) The “best practice”, when evaluating the results of an online controlled experiment (A/B test), is to use classical statistical tests, proceeding with a change if (and only if) the result of the test includes a p value of less than 0.05…

(this article was first posted on my personal blog) A/B testing is a tool for supporting decision-making in business, and so in addition to getting the statistics right, it’s really important to communicate well with the non-statisticians who will have the final say on the go/no-go decision. Most A/B tests…

(this post was also published on my personal blog site) I recently read Will Larson’s excellent book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. Larson covers the individual contributor (IC, not management) roles that software engineers fill after they are promoted past Senior Software Engineer, with titles like Staff and…

(this post was also published on my personal blog) Suppose you’re a data scientist at an e-commerce web site that sells shoes, responsible for supporting A/B tests. Many A/B tests are easy, and there are a number of companies that sell tools that make the easy cases as simple as…

This was first posted on my personal blog. A thing that I do when I cook is to re-write the recipes I’m using (whether they’re from a cookbook or my own invention) onto a piece of paper in a very specific way. I think the approach I use is handy…

For many years, long before Medium came around, I wrote personal and professional blogs on Blogspot and Wordpress. My web domain, harlan.harris.name has been pointed at a Wordpress site since 2008. But it’s time for a change. As of this afternoon, I’m now using Blogdown, a tool for generating Markdown-based static web sites, written in R. My first (new) post there is up, about the migration itself.