Not a lot of people know it
But Putin’s administration had actually hired data scientists
They ran the algorithm
It said nothing bad is going to happen
Nothing bad is going to happen if you put something funny in the tea that will then be served
To someone you consider problematic
Annoying
Even dangerous for the state
Malfeasant if want to get really fancy with words
They did a series of complex calculations
Featuring surface integrals and multidimensional matrices
Requiring a lot of time
Even on a fairly fast computer
They measured the so-called amount of fuck
Using the proprietary big data library
Called CareOMeter.py
It was extremely sophisticated and utterly smart under the hood as they like to say
Bun on the surface it had only two tasks
Dry-run and fareal
The latter being a bastardised version of the colloquial expression “for real”
Favoured by the team’s lead Python developer
A huge fan of American hip-hop
Dry-run runs the algorithm on test samples
Just to see if everything is working correctly
And fareal obviously uses the real life data
Real people
Real language
Real skinny and pale faces
Filmed from several angles during the street manifestations of the last decade
Some alarmed and angry, covered with masks and hoods
Others shy and scaredy, staring at their phone screens
Scrolling the Facebook feed
Exploring skilled immigration programs
Monitoring foreign job market
Swiping handsome males in Florida
Reading headlines and obsessively checking email
Innumerable faces of the rootless generation
Spread across the vast nothingness
And immobility
Thousands of single bedroom apartments scattered around the immense territory
Let for prices teetering on the brink of unreasonableness
That increase exponentially as one gets closer to the inner circles of Moscow
Right there in one of those inner circles
To be precise in the smallest and the most impenetrable of them
Where the rent price reaches infinity
And even the brightest minds get trapped forever
Within the diameter of several nanometers
A semblance of needle the size of an atom
Jerked left and right, back and forth
Smeared in the space and time and not really existing in any particular location
It twitched rapidly for a non-lasting moment and then calmed down again
Emitting a quantum of light
Giving the lead data scientist a reliable indication
As well as the moral and legal authority to write an email to the strange man whom he never saw in person
Who purchased the research and paid for the office snacks and coffee beans
Based on our analysis of the data you provided we are able to predict with 85% confidence
That nothing bad is going to happen
Then close his laptop that got hot from CPU-heavy operations
Slide it in the backpack
Lock the door
Leave the building
Put the headphones on
Get in the subway
Take a seat in the empty train in front of the dark window
And stare thoughtlessly at his own distorted reflexion
Original post:
https://janvaschuk.com/2020/08/21/data-scientists/