Oct
7
Cost of false positives (Laughing Meme)
I’ve had this browser window open for weeks, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. It connects the difficulty of eradicating spam (where falsely labeling something as spam is much worse than accidentally letting one through) to the challenge of screening for very rare things in general, whether you’re screening for diseases or trying to identify terrorists.
I went to college with Kellan. I have a clear recollection from ~1995 of walking into a computer lab and gently making fun of him for learning Perl out of a big book. Turned out, he was about eight months ahead of me, and over the years that gap has somewhat widened.
