Javier Cancela
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javiercancela.com
Javier Cancela
@javiercancela.com
98 followers 680 following 55 posts
Interested in data and AI (mostly LLMs).
Mainly in English, but sometimes in Spanish or Galician.
Director of Data Analytics @ Joor
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Javier Cancela
Si por casualidad alguien necesita a alguien con amplia experiencia en sistemas, cloud, kubernetes.... Y alguna otra cosilla por aquí estoy :)
January 11, 2025 at 8:41 AM
javiercancela.com
This is a hard read. On depression, drugs, and suicide from Felix Hill, a DeepMind researcher, before taking his own life.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
On mental health, psychedelics and life
On mental health, psychedelics and life This is a story about mental health, psychedelics, psychology and the mind. It is a story about the joy of family, the joy of friends, the joy of being in love...
docs.google.com
January 4, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
rakhim.org
I love sci-fi, and I read and watch a lot of it.

Made a list of some good, lesser-known science fiction movies → rakhim.exotext.com/lesser-known...

Shorter version in the thread below 🧵
Still from the movie "Upstream Color". A woman and a man looking at each other, clear dusk sky in the background, silhouettes of birds in the sky.
December 15, 2024 at 2:21 PM
javiercancela.com
I liked this post: acalustra.com/less-11-meet... (I found the blog via @antonmry.bsky.social)
Improving Team Communication: Why I Replaced Weekly 1:1s with Status Emails and Monthly Check-ins
Discover why I transitioned from weekly 1:1 meetings to a more effective communication strategy involving weekly status emails and monthly performance check-ins. Learn how this change improved team dy...
acalustra.com
December 14, 2024 at 12:54 PM
javiercancela.com
Oops
Percentage of people 65 or older in the Iberian Peninsula. In Galicia we are f*cked.
December 13, 2024 at 6:57 PM
javiercancela.com
I knew my bug-fixing deployments were "magical thinking"...
cyrilcoste.com Cyril Coste @cyrilcoste.com · Dec 10
"Manifest" hit #Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2024!

However, @Cambridge_Uni warns this "magical thinking" lacks scientific backing and can promote risky behaviors.

www.cam.ac.uk/news/manifes...
‘Manifest’ is Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year | University of Cambridge
www.cam.ac.uk
December 10, 2024 at 5:03 PM
javiercancela.com
I don't think young people understand how mind-blowing things like this would look to college-me (back in the 90s): www.youtube.com/@CMUDatabase...

Top quality education for free.
CMU Database Group
Carnegie Mellon University Database Group
www.youtube.com
December 10, 2024 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
eddache.bsky.social
Uh oh...
December 2, 2023 at 7:14 PM
javiercancela.com
Companies die from a lack of cash, which in your average SaaS company means a lack of product market fit.
kentbeck.com Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · Dec 4
Engineering waste is not the biggest problem with most 100-engineer orgs, lack of product market fit is. If you can't get 100 geeks pointed in the same direction, roughly aligned with the rest of the company, you're already toast but the smoke alarm just hasn't beeped yet.
December 4, 2024 at 2:03 PM
javiercancela.com
I need an emoji for “skeptical interest”
davidberenstein.bsky.social David Berenstein @davidberenstein.bsky.social · Dec 4
Got data problems? Relax. Synthetic data is here to help.

Slides on some fundamentals of synthetic data, showing how companies use synthetic data to speed up their development processes. Sometimes the best solution isn't finding the right data—it's creating it.

Slides:
No data? No problem! Synthetic data to the rescue
Got data problems? Relax. Synthetic data is here to help.
buff.ly
December 4, 2024 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
benburtenshaw.bsky.social
For anyone interested in fine-tuning or aligning LLMs, I’m running this free and open course called smol course. It’s not a big deal, it’s just smol.

🧵>>
December 3, 2024 at 9:21 AM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
itseieio.bsky.social
you: why'd it take so long to remake your website
me: needed a physics engine for my text
you: ???
me:
December 2, 2024 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
bibcoruna.bsky.social
Un día coma hoxe, o 2 de decembro de 1906, abría as súas portas na Coruña o Dispensario Antituberculoso, situado na emblemática Casa do Sol, fronte ao Paseo do Orzán. Un pequeno edificio que agocha unha gran historia! Segue lendo👇

#ACoruña #PedroMariño #HistoriadaCoruña
Dispensario antituberculosis Casa Sol na rúa do Orzán na Coruña
December 2, 2024 at 10:19 AM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
eatonphil.bsky.social
7 databases in 7 weeks

cool idea :)

matt.blwt.io/post/7-datab...
December 1, 2024 at 3:15 PM
javiercancela.com
Speaking of this, the original MapReduce paper contains what I imagine are the first versions of Borg, Jupiter, and Colossus.
(1) Machines are typically dual-processor x86 processors running Linux, with 2-4 GB of memory per machine. > (2) Commodity networking hardware is used – typically either 100 megabits/second or 1 gigabit/second at the machine level, but averaging considerably less in overall bisection bandwidth. > (3) A cluster consists of hundreds or thousands of machines, and therefore machine failures are common. > (4) Storage is provided by inexpensive IDE disks attached directly to individual machines. A distributed file system [8] developed in-house is used to manage the data stored on these disks. The file system uses replication to provide availability and reliability on top of unreliable hardware. > (5) Users submit jobs to a scheduling system. Each job consists of a set of tasks, and is mapped by the scheduler to a set of available machines within a cluster.
December 1, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
civio.es
El recibo de la opacidad lo pagamos juntos. 💸

Cada contrato oculto, cada euro malgastado, cada acción en la sombra engordan una factura que aceptamos sin rechistar. Pero no tiene por qué ser así.

Podemos investigar más. Informarnos mejor. Exigir cuentas. Incluso aliarnos para cambiar esto.
Lo que no sabemos nos cuesta demasiado
November 30, 2024 at 8:00 PM
javiercancela.com
I just found out that the + button to the left of the language selector allows you to create threads 🤦.
November 30, 2024 at 9:37 PM
javiercancela.com
Reviewing BigQuery technical info, I see that Borg orchestrates the communitcation between Dremel, Jupiter, and Colossus.

But what about Galactus???
www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8On...
Microservices
YouTube video by KRAZAM
www.youtube.com
November 30, 2024 at 9:10 PM
javiercancela.com
Damn this is good
javisantana.bsky.social Javi Santana @javisantana.bsky.social · Nov 30
Some learnings after helping +50 companies in high performance data engineering projects

javisantana.com/2024/11/30/l...
javisantana.com
javisantana.com
November 30, 2024 at 5:57 PM
javiercancela.com
Andrej is one of the reasons why I still check Twitter.
Text from Andrej Karpathy in Twitter: People have too inflated sense of what it means to "ask an AI" about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of "asking an AI", think of it more as "asking the average data labeler" on the internet. Few caveats apply because e.g. in many domains (e.g. code, math, creative writing) the companies hire skilled data labelers (so think of it as asking them instead), and this is not 100% true when reinforcement learning is involved, though I have an earlier rant on how RLHF is just barely RL, and "actual RL" is still too early and/or constrained to domains that offer easy reward functions (math etc.). But roughly speaking (and today), you're not asking some magical AI. You're asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful ofc ourse. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you're not asking an AI, you're asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.
November 29, 2024 at 8:54 PM
javiercancela.com
This is really nice!
josephbenita.bsky.social Joseph Benita @josephbenita.bsky.social · Nov 28
#30DayMapChallenge Jour28/ Day28 - Planète bleue / Bonne journée de la Méditerranée
November 29, 2024 at 5:06 PM
javiercancela.com
Recuerdo la vez que leí a alguien contando que el valor de no sé qué era menor que X para todos los subgrupos (por edad) de una cierta población, pero era mayor que X para la población total.
picanumeros.bsky.social 📊⛏️ Picanúmeros @picanumeros.bsky.social · Nov 29
Definitivamente la experiencia de Bluesky para mí es idéntica a la experiencia de Twitter... la cual era una reverenda mierda, las cosas como son. Mucha gente leyéndome, muy poquita interactuando, y la poquita gente que me responde rara vez es para decirme algo positivo.
November 29, 2024 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
harryeccles.bsky.social
Repost if BlueSky is now your primary social media site.
November 28, 2024 at 8:06 PM
Reposted by Javier Cancela
pcastr.bsky.social
Happy "I'm still working and nobody is writing me" day to all who celebrate!
November 28, 2024 at 10:13 PM