Sean Carney

Category: 🧩 Miscellanea

  • Thoughts on Hiring

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    Sean Carney
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    Thinking about hiring, the typical process for screening candidates using written applications is likely to become far less effective as it becomes a game of adversarial bots both creating applications for positions and evaluating them. In light of this I see one possibility being less emphasis on written applications going forward, resulting in more emphasis…

  • Recapturing the Magic of the Early Blogging Days

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    Sean Carney
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    Chuck Grimmett’s post on recapturing the magic of the early blogging days describes a lot of my intentions with the latest changes to my website. The one thing I would add from my philosophy is: ‘spend less time building, more time using and maintaining’

  • December 2024

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    Sean Carney
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    This website After reading a number of thought provoking articles on sharing work and connecting with people, I’ve decided to become more intentional with this website and share more of what I’m doing, what I’m reading, and what I’m thinking about. This necessitates a bit of a redesign of the website so apologies in advance,…

  • Fire Insurance Maps of Calgary

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    Sean Carney
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    Back in the early days of fire insurance, when you wanted to insure a building, the insurance company would send a underwriter to view the building and gain a first hand appreciation of the risk. As cities began to expand at the turn of the century, this became less practical and a new solution came…

  • NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD

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    Sean Carney
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    Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a new album this fall, and it’s already playing on continuous repeat in my office. This album is surprisingly positive in tone, covering a range between melancholy and upbeat. While still the kings of crescendo-core, this album feels a bit more fast paced with transitions flowing faster than previous albums…

  • Bryan Jarrell on Self Care

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    Sean Carney
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    The whole concept of self-care puts the onus of stress management on the individual when the problem is living in a stressful world … Self-care can be a sort of social gaslighting, where we blame humans for struggling in the midst of inhumane conditions. Sometimes, the problem isn’t our inability to measure up to life’s…

  • Don Hertzfeldt on Hunting vs Being Fed

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    Sean Carney
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    Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m…

  • Remembrance Day in Bankhead

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    Sean Carney
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    Today I took Dima to see Banff’s ghost town: Bankhead. Through some odd coincidence, we arrived just as a Remembrance Day ceremony was starting at a nearby monument to the residents of Bankhead who lost their lives in war. It made for a surreal experience, walking through the foundations of old buildings, in the middle…

  • Infill Housing Analysis Idea

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    Sean Carney
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    Multi-unit infill housing is becoming very popular for developers in Calgary, but are the prices of the new individual units more or less affordable than the former residence which was bulldozed? Idea: Analyze the pre-teardown sale price and post-construction sales prices to determine if infill housing is driving inflation of prices at a housing-unit level.

  • Thoughts on AI Agents

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    Sean Carney
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    There’s talk of having AI agents which are trained on one’s own work to assist with tasks. The interesting question is who would have ownership and control of these models, the worker or the employer. Imagine a world where your current and former employers maintain models of you in perpetuity after you leave positions, and…