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Ian

@iwsmith.bsky.social

Bad artist. Dog valet. So very tired. Partially Liminal.

300 Followers  |  204 Following  |  36 Posts  |  Joined: 30.07.2023  |  2.342

Latest posts by iwsmith.bsky.social on Bluesky


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Personalization at Bluesky | Gaurav Chakravorty If you’re interested in building personalization systems where architecture still matters, this is worth a read. Ian Wesley-Smith β€” someone I hired at Discord and worked closely with β€” just published ...

Posted here as well. www.linkedin.com/posts/gaurav...
I hope this gets the visibility to the the right audience

27.02.2026 17:46 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Also thanks to @recsysml.bsky.social for proofreading and providing me a platform to post. Follow them for more great recsys content.

23.02.2026 22:38 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
A picture of the bluesky discover feed from the Apple App Store, showing a post by Jerry, and more importantly, a very cute corgi.

A picture of the bluesky discover feed from the Apple App Store, showing a post by Jerry, and more importantly, a very cute corgi.

you and my dog are equally famous

23.02.2026 22:06 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Bluesky Jobs Bluesky Jobs

If this post interests you come work with me!
jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...

23.02.2026 20:29 β€” πŸ‘ 12    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Personalization at Bluesky The past, present, and future of personalization of the Discover feed

I made a post about personalization at Bluesky.

open.substack.com/pub/recsysml...

23.02.2026 20:29 β€” πŸ‘ 99    πŸ” 14    πŸ’¬ 14    πŸ“Œ 4
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Bluesky Jobs Bluesky Jobs

jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...

04.02.2026 16:26 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

It’s impossible to watch any political thriller now because whatever incident is generating dramatic tension pales in comparison to reality.

27.01.2026 03:47 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Sign in PRO for presumed liability. app.leg.wa.gov/csi/House?se...

14.01.2026 01:06 β€” πŸ‘ 40    πŸ” 13    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 1

its on the roadmap!

12.01.2026 16:48 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A picture of house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.

A picture of house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.

03.01.2026 19:21 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Every time I get in a Lyft they cal me Lan. Serifs could fix this very specific me problem.

01.01.2026 20:18 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Op-Ed: It’s Time to Imagine a Safer, More Connected Rainier Avenue Β» The Urbanist # Rainier Avenue has too many cars traveling at dangerous speeds, but conventional planning practices make it hard to change that and design a future where Rainier Avenue thrives. Let's stop making ha...

If we want to create a more affordable, livable Seattle, we need to design for *reducing* car volumes. This is the only way to meet our climate, public health, vision zero, accessibility and housing goals. Our fight to design highway on-ramps with LESS capacity epitomizes why it's still hard.

16.12.2025 01:30 β€” πŸ‘ 114    πŸ” 20    πŸ’¬ 4    πŸ“Œ 1
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Ranking Models explained: Deep Dive into RecSys Architecture (Features, Embeddings, & Attention) Watch now (18 mins) | What happens post retrieval in a recommender system

In this three part series I compare #LLM and #RecommenderSystems to show the gaps and opportunities. They are surprisingly fewer than one would think.

Part 1 open.substack.com/pub/recsysml...

06.12.2025 17:52 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
20.11.2025 17:55 β€” πŸ‘ 256    πŸ” 33    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
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GitHub - vec2text/vec2text: utilities for decoding deep representations (like sentence embeddings) back to text utilities for decoding deep representations (like sentence embeddings) back to text - vec2text/vec2text

This project is absolutely nuts. You can take the vector embeddings for text and convert them back to the text that generated them.

github.com/vec2text/vec...

19.11.2025 18:27 β€” πŸ‘ 27    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

hah maybe. I feel like I would start with TransAct, and maybe PinSage to cover the world of recs at Pintrest

19.11.2025 18:23 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

also a bunch of practical stuff on how they serve these long user histories. Clearly a lot of work went into this, and a lot of goodies in this paper.

19.11.2025 06:47 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

- ranking model that tried to predict the next user action in a sequence. Use a cross-entropy loss to predict labels/actions on the sample and a next action loss to predict the next action the user will take.
- impression based negative sampling doubled some offline metrics

19.11.2025 06:47 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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TransAct V2: Lifelong User Action Sequence Modeling on Pinterest Recommendation Modeling user action sequences has become a popular focus in industrial recommendation system research, particularly for Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction tasks. However, industry-scale CTR models o...

Read Xia et al., β€œTransAct V2.” earlier today, some notes:
- long and short term user histories (long term [10k items], short term [100], impressions [100])
- sampled soft max loss function seems useful in environments with very weak negatives

#recsys #ml
arxiv.org/abs/2506.02267

19.11.2025 06:47 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
A corgi lying on the ground facing the camera. A red ball is sitting next to his snoot.

A corgi lying on the ground facing the camera. A red ball is sitting next to his snoot.

Atticus wants to play

14.11.2025 19:42 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

but some more than others

04.11.2025 02:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

you most of all

04.11.2025 02:30 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

watching Alien: Earth and I think I'm rooting for the alien

18.08.2025 05:18 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

todays discover outage was brought to you by the letter <SPACE>

27.07.2025 05:52 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

anyone got opinions on data orchestration tools? Specifically Dagster vs Temporal?

21.07.2025 17:27 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

This person has clearly never used protobufs, especially in python.

05.07.2025 03:47 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Vouchers | Katie Wilson Each Seattle voter has $100 worth of Democracy Vouchers to give to their candidate(s) of choice. We would love if you assigned your vouchers to our campaign!

To celebrate Zohran Mamdani's apparent win in NYC I donated my democracy vouchers to my choice for mayor, Katie Wilson @wilsonforseattle.bsky.social . If you live in Seattle you can too! www.wilsonforseattle.com/democracy-vo...

25.06.2025 05:10 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Hah a friend and I managed to get something out of it. Though mostly Cronenberg isn’t ok. And I guess tech enables unhealthy obsessions

24.05.2025 03:40 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image 24.05.2025 00:47 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
a test image

a test image

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
testing

09.05.2025 01:19 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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