News and Views

When I was 13 or so, I started a Livejournal. I don’t remember who got me into Livejournal, but I spent hours writing updates, working on my background, color scheme, and profile pics. (I think if you had the unpaid version you got a total of three profile picture slots. Memory was pretty sparse back then it seems.) When facebook came around, I gradually transitioned over. (I remember feeling strongly about the fact that facebook was stupid and would never catch on.) Like all of us, as Facebook got bigger, I stopped updating by livejournal, or the blogger that replaced it. And then I moved to Twitter. Oh, and then I got married, and I had someone to talk to, so I didn’t have this compulsion to write down all my thoughts on a carefully designed page. So this all feels like a return to form, albeit 18 years later.

Recently, I’ve been interested in the idea of being able to afford the cost of living in California, so I’ve been looking at industry jobs. There are plenty of generic data science jobs that I am qualified for and may very well apply for, but it always seems a shame to not take advantage of the past decade I’ve spent analyzing behavior from video data, so I’m trying to track down a job in that realm, and last week I saw that this climbing startup, Belay AI, is maybe hiring soon. Being able to merge climbing and behavioral quantification would be sort of a dream job for me, so I’ve been reflecting on what computer vision has to offer climbers. I’ve spent a lot of time sorting through joint angle data and other metrics of behavior, and it’s not always straightforward to get things out beyond what is already obvious to human observers. I think it’s cool to see yourself tracked, no doubt, but what’s the actual value added?