stochastastic

Thanks for making and sharing DVC! It’s been a big help.

Is there any support that would be helpful? I’ll look at the project page too.

It doesn’t force you to use any of the extra functionality. My team has been using it just for the version control part for a couple years and it has worked great.

> I live in Oregon and that's not true…

Argh, that makes it even worse!

> I say all of this as someone who has lost a lot of friends to the opioid crisis and has watched Portland's meth problem first hand.

Sorry to hear that. I’ve been fortunate not to have friends or family caught up in it, but we lost a neighbor last year.

I hope you’re right that things will get better.

In the meantime, it feels disingenuous to act like the impact so far has been positive for everyone, or like legalizing and hard-nose crap are the only options. I think it undermines trust and pits different parts of Portland against each other. It’s easy to get a laugh or an eye roll from my neighbors on the north side of town when I pass along some of the ”obvious” solutions my friends and colleagues from the west side have shared with me. Please consider our perspective: even if we double the police force and start addressing crime more promptly, our neighborhood is still worse off because we have more crime. Other parts of the city don’t seem to appreciate that.

I don’t think legalization is better for everyone, though. I live in Oregon and I’ve been very disappointed with the impact of decriminalizing possession. Cases are no longer clogging the courts, instead we have people using in my neighborhood park and on public transit. I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person). It was, apparently, not his first time.

You seem to support it, how would you address the externalities?

Yes, they typically will buy insurance to deal with risks outside their core business (like the health insurer having liability coverage).

It’s different when you have people depending on you! Not OP but I’d love to spend a sabbatical with my family… if I could afford it. I’d need a much bigger cushion.

I’ll be joining you for “see how far I can Haskell (for great good)” this year!

Then I’ll probably fall back on Python. :)

This doesn’t seem cynical to me. Maybe it’s just that I’m too far gone, but I think it’s a matter of subtractive vs additive perspectives on work.

I think it’s the other way around — tack this number on the back of anything and the result is composite.

Okay, I can totally see it now. We are still at the stage where people seem to think that I’m neurotic for worrying about the python side of things, so DLLs have not been on the radar. ;)

Thanks! That totally makes sense. If I had to pick a pain point for getting people started with Python tools it would be environments. Comments here make me think my team is working with a lot less data too.

I’ll second klelatti’s question about R vs Python. From my perspective Python is just as practical for actuarial calcs and better for building general purpose tools. Is there a reason Anaconda didn’t click?

Hey fellow reinsurance actuary! I totally agree that Excel has its place in modeling, especially one-offs, and your criticisms make sense. That said, we have been moving a lot of our calculations to Python. We have had way too many rickety tools to move files or send emails (“first you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then...”), and way too many version control issues over the years. Python solves those nicely.

I’m curious about docker + pip, why do you like that better than poetry or pipenv?