@geddes

head of engineering @ affirm, views are my own

 New York, NY
Joined February 2008
  • Tweets11
  • Following902
  • Followers465
The top comment [1] on the GLM-Legal thread on HN gets into 'how will juniors learn legal things when the task that traditionally they did to learn are automated away' - the same problem we have been grappling with in tech. One of the answers is intentionality - as Claire, who just finished her new grad year at Affirm, writes up in this very real post: medium.com/affirmengineering… [1] news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

AI Reflections of a New Grad Engineer

Author: Claire Yang, Checkout Engineering, Affirm

medium.com
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geddes munson retweeted
allan carroll
@allancaOct 8
Replying to @levie
And that makes it different from the bubble in 2000. The demand is wayyyy ahead of the computer supply already and there appears to be no catching up. In 2000, we were building out fiber hoping the demand would come (and it did. Eventually).
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I often find myself pushing hiring managers to do more reference calls and to do them better. Lots of great advice on doing it right from @brettberson > At the end of every single reference call, I ask the reference for the names of other people who would have a perspective on the candidate and use that to expand my list of potential people to call.
Brett Berson
@brettbersonOct 7
Over the years, I’ve become obsessed with references, so I decided to sit down and write out some of what I’ve figured out.

References are the most underrated tool in hiring

Article · @brettberson
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Our tutorial on Tabular Foundation models was accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Education Track! Give it a try here to see how a pretrained model uses a table as context: affirm.github.io/tabular-fou… Really great stuff coming out of our ML and ZT1 teams at @Affirm

An Interactive Guide to Tabular Foundation Models

Learn how foundation models use labeled rows as context and predict new tables without task-specific training.

affirm.github.io
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geddes munson retweeted
Adam Prout
@a_proutOct 2
We've done some work on HorizonDB to simplify PostgreSQL's interactions with cloud storage. Using storage designed for PostgreSQL lets PostgreSQL focus on running queries and transactions while letting the storage layer deal with everything else (i.e., hardening the log across AZs, replicating data to read replica's and standbys, handling dirty page writing, handling torn pages, etc.). The result is simpler algorithms and simpler code. This is the best way to make a system more reliable and more performant.
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Everyone is trying to figure out how junior people will level up in a world where AI does the tasks we all used to do to learn. I don't think that 'simulated work' like the WSJ is reporting some companies are doing is going to be the winner. Curious what folks are trying though. wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/we…

We All Hated Busy Work. Now That It’s Disappearing, It Turns Out We Miss It.

Restructurings and AI are making entry-level work more efficient. But managers realize a lot is lost when people don’t get practice.

wsj.com
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Love what we can do with Transformers, like safely approve more folks without much credit history. tech.affirm.com/learning-ric…

Learning Richer Credit Representations with Transformers at Affirm

How we incorporated transformers with our existing underwriting system and brought a transformer-based model into real-time checkout.

tech.affirm.com
Nitesh Kumar
@kniteshSep 18
Replying to @knitesh @Affirm
Impact on thin file users. These consumers have credit reports, but insufficient history for a FICO score. Here, the gain was 2.1x that of the next XGBoost candidate. A missing score doesn’t mean the underlying accounts and payment histories have nothing useful to tell us.
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