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by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

You probably don’t need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

It’s always fun when I speak to founders and potential founders and they are quick to tell me how they want to use AI/ML to improve customer retention and improve LTV. Truth is, they don’t even need ML. A properly written SQL is what you need.
In a former life, I used to write SQL to extract customer of the week. Basically, select from orders table where basket size is the biggest. We will then email a nice thank you note to this customer and attach a small coupon/voucher….
…Guess what? 99% of these people became repeat customers. We never needed ML. We just wrote a simple SQL and got this information. We did the same thing for customers who last shopped 3 or so months ago….
…I will write a query like select from order table where last shop date is 3 or greater months. When we get this information, we will send a nice “we miss you, come back and here’s X Naira voucher” email. The conversation rate for this one was always greater than 50%.

Source: Thread by @cyberomin: “It’s always fun when I speak to founders and potential founders and they are quick to tell me how they want to use AI/ML to improve customer […]”

 
by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees – Mindset

Progress, Precision and Profit

 

Elon Musk

 

Everybody

 

Progress

 

First, congratulations are in order! We have now completed our third full week of producing over 2000 Model 3 vehicles. The first week was 2020, the second was 2070 and we just completed 2250 last week, along with 2000 Model S/X vehicles.

 

This is more than double Tesla’s weekly production rate last year and an amazing feat in the face of many challenges! It is extremely rare for an automotive company to grow the production rate by over 100% from one year to the next. Moreover, there has simultaneously been a significant improvement in quality and build accuracy, which is reflected in positive owner feedback.

 

Starting today at Giga and tomorrow at Fremont, we will be stopping for three to five days to do a comprehensive set of upgrades. This should set us up for Model 3 production of 3000 to 4000 per week next month.

 

Another set of upgrades starting in late May should be enough to unlock production capacity of 6000 Model 3 vehicles per week by the end of June. Please note that all areas of Tesla and our suppliers will be required to demonstrate a Model 3 capacity of ~6000/week by building 850 sets of car parts in 24 hours no later than June 30th.

 

Any Tesla department or supplier that is unable to do this will need to have a very good explanation why not, along with a plan for fixing the problem and present that to me directly. If anyone needs help achieving this, please let me know as soon as possible. We are going to find a way or make a way to get there.

Source: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees – Mindset

 
by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

The illusion of time

The illusion of time

PDF version

The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018)

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.

So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.

Rovelli is one of the creators and champions of loop quantum gravity theory, one of several ongoing attempts to marry quantum mechanics with general relativity. In contrast to the better-known string theory, loop quantum gravity does not attempt to be a ‘theory of everything’ out of which we can generate all of particle physics and gravitation. Nevertheless, its agenda of joining up these two fundamentally differing laws is incredibly ambitious.

Source: The illusion of time