August 2024 at Titanium Birch
We’re hiring!; TJ speaks at the latest Singapore dbt Meetup event; becoming a supple leopard…?
Hello, readers! Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to this past month.
We’re hiring!
We have three open roles at the moment:
If you know anybody who might find these roles interesting, we’d be delighted if you could forward this email to them!
A bit of what we’ve been up to
Last week, TJ gave a talk at a Singapore dbt Meetup event on automating accounting and investment reporting with dbt. He explained how we use dbt to make it possible (and easy!) to find insights about our investment portfolio, why we use dbt, as well as how we’re going about building more accurate systems. (Spoiler alert: It has to do with robots and double-entry bookkeeping.) 🤖🤖🤖
Read the summary and check out TJ’s slide deck.
What we’re reading
TJ: I am reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In the book, a neurologist writes about his patients with peculiar neurological problems (such as mistaking his wife for a hat, standing with a 20-degree lean, or losing all sense of one’s own body). It makes me think of how humans have many more senses beyond the five, and how cameras, gyroscopes, and chemical sensors serve as senses for robots. Closer to the present, I wonder what failure modes LLMs have, if, say, part or whole of the inference process is impaired - does it resemble a human with neurological deficits? 🤖
Justina: I just finished Building Strong Brands by David Aaker. Although it feels a bit dated (it’s from the 1990s and the author talks at length about the now-defunct Saturn Corporation), I’ve still found its insights on brand identity to be very useful. I’ll be chewing on these questions over the next while: What do we stand for? How do we want to be perceived? (Well, we know what we stand for, but the challenge now is in communicating it to the rest of the world.) So, dear reader, watch this space, because in the coming months, you might notice some iterations and changes here and there as we bring our brand in line with who we are and want to be. ✨
Peter: I recently read The Squat Bible and parts of Becoming a Supple Leopard. I found them useful in understanding body mechanics a bit better. Hopefully that translates to less injury risk down the road. 🐆
We hope you’ve enjoyed this latest edition of the Titanium Birch newsletter. If you haven’t yet, follow us on LinkedIn for our latest updates.
All the best,
The team at Titanium Birch
Disclaimer: The materials linked in this newsletter do not reflect the views of Titanium Birch and should not be taken as investment advice.