meztez

The best language for AI agents is the one YOU believe is the best.

Maybe some, there are also people who cheer for the capacity of humanity to figure out solutions that can benefits humanity. I view the perspective you describe as people externalizing their own insecurity. I do not view it as a critic towards people who have an excess of stored potential energy, but merely a signal that they haven't made peace with their own internal feelings about themselves. They need love, acceptance. They are on their own journey, everyone has the capacity to grow. Let's help everyone.

Seems complicated, although this is the best description of depression I've ever read, go outside and start walking.

A commercial food scale from Kilotech; quicker, more robust, always on, stainless, larger scale area and clear display.

For anyone who thinks about doing these, here are a few tips for the advanced CAS exams.

- Time is your enemy. - Use memorization techniques, like a memory palace. - Grader are looking for key words, be succinct. - If you do not know, skip. Your brain will figure it out while you work other questions. - Create your own study material from the syllabus. Anything that is remotely mathematical will be tested at some point. - Practice being efficient with the tool used to take the exam. Pen or keyboard.

Hated/Loved doing the exams to get my FCAS. It allowed me to explore my mental capacity. It teaches you how to learn fast, how to memorize, how to be quick at solving problems.

It has been a while, but after getting involved with the exam question writing/grading part, I felt the CAS was too entrenched in their processes. I stopped paying my dues since I did not plan to sign any acturial statement anyway.

I now do data engineering for other actuaries and maintain our tech stack. Think rating engine and ML in production. Code is mostly on github now, we have peer reviews, deploy to kubernetes. It is really is no different than SWE, except we know a lot more about the business side.

Life is great work wise.

5 years in. No regret so far. How long before you had regrets?

So this is the new bluetooth?

Fully agreed. Add `sessionInfo()` output as an appendix to your publication. Should not be too hard to rebuild from that.

GPU integration was broken for a long time. Managing VMs / Environments. The absolutely horrible integration with git/Github.

Having to rebuild your environment from scratch when your workspace crashed. Imagine starting a notebook with a 45 minutes compile time. No go.

One click deploy, let's just forget about it.

It came down to IDE, workflow and data.table.

RStudio is an absolute killer solution from the get go. Package management in R is simple and robust. Shiny is the new Excel pivot table on performance enhancing code.

Python has more contributors, more users. It also creates a lot more noise. Business people may feel like it is a a programmer tool. R feel more approachable.

In the end, both are great solutions but we decided on R because we believe in the people contributing to the ecosystem, mostly RStudio. Somewhere down the line, there might be a transition to julia.

I'm pushing for our actuarial team to transition to more R + Git. After 3 years of preaching, most of the actuaries now use RStudio + git as their primary work tool. It is happening.

What we did :

1) Provide documentation on everything from install to using internal R libraries for ETL.

2) Provide mostly problem free, always updated VMs with RStudio Server/ Shiny Server.

3) Establish an hotline channel for instant help on R or git.

4) A couple members on the team developed really close working relationship with IT and we have great respect for each other work.

What we provide is way better and by being active, we built users trust in the tools.

We are phasing out SAS and proprietary modeling tools. Python never took hold even if we bought Anaconda entreprise. Excel is there to stay for sure but since actuarial student learn R in school, it is easier to onboard new hire.

If you want to go down this path and have a chat, hit me up. I'm in P&C. We use R both in development and production environments. We use it for pricing, spatial contractual obligation, claims assignment and a couple more models.