Kwe kwe 🇨🇦!
➡️ Taking full advantage of the latest AI coding tools takes a bit of getting used to. This short article offers some pro tips. Just like us humans, these AI tools find it easier to handle problems when they're broken down into bite-sized pieces. Ines Montani, co-creator of the spaCy NLP software library, reminds us never to forget the creative side of coding. Meanwhile, other experts stress the importance of understanding the limitations and risks of these tools.
➡️ Now, let's hop over to Heidelberg 🇩🇪! At a recent local PyData meetup, Gaël Varoquaux (remember him from ⚡️Trendbreak #21⚡️?), research director at INRIA 🇫🇷 and one of the brains behind scikit-learn (that super famous machine learning software library), unveiled his latest open source project, skrub 🧽. It's designed to be the data scientist's wingman, helping out with the vital yet underappreciated task of data prep and clean-up before model training.
Skrub is the natural evolution of the ground-breaking work done by the DirtyData research project in recent years. After acknowledging the hurdles data scientists face in the real-world industry, the project zeroed in on data quality problems, gave birth to robust methodologies, and came up with elegant, effective solutions.
I had the good fortune of being part of DirtyData early stages and was blown away by Gaël and his team's razor-sharp vision and insightful reasoning. I strongly urge you to watch the recorded presentation - it's a solid hour of epiphanies and tech wisdom. And hey, skrub is growing and on the lookout for contributors 📣!
➡️ To wrap things up, we're switching gears to a less techy topic: how will AI photo editing tools shape our individual and collective memories 📸🧠? Jason Kottke asks this thought-provoking question on his blog, drawing from a video essay by Nerdwriter and the insights of various thinkers and philosophers. If you're not yet familiar with Google's Magic Eraser or Photoshop's new Generative Fill feature, you're in for a wild ride! 🤯
Here's to a fantastic weekend, and catch you later! 🏖️
