> In one case, we ran a simple a/b test as a proof of concept on whether to pursue the idea further and it added an extra million bucks a year in revenue.
I'm with the people who decided to ship this. The organization will need to fund more maintenance than they would if they waited, but that has real costs. And "keep your 1mm/revenue idea to yourself" doesn't sound like a healthy engineering culture either.
> Not sure if there is some way to iterate given online feedback.
There have been a some novels and novel-length works written a chapter at a time in public. The Martian by Andy Weir, for example is probably the most commercially successful. Many works by qntm (https://qntm.org/fiction) that are popular in this community have been written that way too.
> The curse of dimensionality is not theoretical — it’s painfully practical. In high dimensions, naive distance metrics degrade quickly.
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> Scaling and normalization are not optional details. They fundamentally shape the geometry of the space.