An aquaintance asked, “Which is faster, pandas get_dummies or scikit’s label_encoder?” and I had to pause for two reasons. First, they do two different things. A better comparison would be between one-hot, get_dummies and ordinal_encoder. Second, I really didn’t have a sense …

I was watching the Clone Wars with The Kid. At the beginning of most of the episodes there is an aphorism and most I think are pretty good. And, not that I think the folks in Ukraine would need this or read it, but it did make me think they might be motivational and would make a good “little …

We’ve all seen this before. A piece of technology that seems interesting yet never really seems to catch on. For a few of these examples, like Sony’s Betamax, they were demonstrably better in some form or another. Yet they still lost. There is another sort of example. Cases where …

I inadvertently mistyped the name of a new miniforge environment and didn’t catch it until I went to activate it. Not a huge deal as it’s a quick fix. conda create -n new_name --clone old_name conda remove -n old_name --all One other detail – you can’t be in the environment, …

We don’t have enough coders in the area. Why is this a problem? Well, for one coding is the closest thing to having a superpower. You can do some magical things with it. Aside for creating games, automating boring tasks, interacting and controlling machines, and making what’s in you head …

If you’re around us, you’ve probably heard this before but we can really push into new areas in one of two ways. Some of us can go get PhDs, work to attract funding and, in a mere decade or two, really get to pushing the limits on things. Not gonna happen. The second option is to use the …

[Note: This was the intro page for Full Spectrum Works. I lightly edited the links.] What’s a Makerspace? A makerspace is a physical place for people to share equipment, knowledge and enthusiasm. It’s a place to experiment and learn with a broad spectrum of technologies in a relatively …