What does "probability" mean in your profession?

Looked for a concise definition in the books in my office… “Probability (definition of)” was usually pointing to 3 or 4 pages.

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That’s why I only play once a year.

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Depends on if it’s the weekend, right?

Right?

It’s why I only play every 50 days.

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Or if it has the words “mission critical” in the task name.

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Anecdotally, the only people I see buying lottery tickets appear to be at the top of the list of people who shouldn’t be wasting their income on such things. Had an old landlord who would, one week, be borrowing money from me to make ends meet, and then the next week I’d see him walking into his house with a strip of lottery tickets. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.

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I’ve heard lotteries called a tax on stupidity, but in reality they are a tax on desperation - something we shouldn’t really be taxing.

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Whenever I see someone buying lottery tickets, I nearly always ask them if they think they’re going to win. It the one area where I can stick to the socratic method and not lose my cool.

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I sometimes buy a lottery ticket, but with numbers that are like:

  • 1 2 3 4 5
    Or
  • 8 0 0 8 1 3 5

Cause I want to be the guy on TV that won with the stupidest sequence.

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These are the people who sort of get “The probability A or not A is equal to 1”; but have seriously over-generalized that lesson!

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If I ever went on Deal or No Deal, I’d pick the boxes in numerical order.

And then I’d punch Noel Edmonds in his stupid gnome face.

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It isn’t about winning or losing, its about punking the game

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Of course you are correct, I was just internally griping about frequentist vs. Bayesian stats.

It should be added that picking 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in the lottery isn’t a good idea. Not becuase it’s less likely than any other combination, but because if it comes up, you’ll have to share the jackpot with thousands of other people.

And if you’re ever in a syndicate, buy your syndicate ticket numbers independently too, so you won’t have to share so much if they do come up.

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It is split across 2 well manned teams. On call week was sometimes hellish but it wasn’t often thanks to a decent sized team and we had good hand off procedure so if you were up till 6am working something the regular shift would take over and you could go get rest and not work during the day and make dumb mistakes cause you are tired. But yeah it was an exercise of what is broken today over what might break today. Hopefully they got the weekend ‘server busy/drive full’ alerts under control. DBAs scheduling things rightly on the weekend but all the jobs were done and temp files gone by Monday morning. Mondays were pretty much closing out all the alert tickets and sometimes Monday and Tuesday.

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Gawd, working in NOCs is hellish. Give me devops any day. (Still hellish, but you support what you know initimately)

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Oh yeah that was just the Windows servers. There are whole other teams for RedHat, Solaris and HP-UX boxes, and I have no clue what the server count is on those other than next to nothing for Solaris and HP-UX.
And things like the domain servers and exchange servers have dedicated teams as well and I have no clue how many exchange boxes there are other than lots.

And isn’t it great with Docker and containers we take take semi virtualized OSs (well, namespaced) up another order of magnitude? We are entering a brave (trembling) new (yeah, same old just bigger) world.

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Yeah guys from smaller places boggle at me when they find out how specialized things are at Boeing. When I get asked why I don’t know much about things like fiddly bits of networking I answer there is a team of like 10 guys just for network support in the Everett factory, never mind the rest of the site. Once the packet goes away from the server I have to get other guys to help with tracking things beyond a simple traceroute.

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Boeing is damn big. I don’t know if eBay/PayPal is bigger or smaller, but same class.

“Where is your data center?”
“Which one?”
“The one here in town?”
Which one?”
“Primary failover!”
“You see that 60k sq foot building surrounded by armed guards and razorwire? BTW, they don’t understand jokes, so just… Don’t”

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