NYC Data #343: The Atlantic, Ramp, AI Centers of Excellence, Optimizing SQL, Data for Good Roundtable, Housing Preservation, Data Journalism
Plus, Anthropic on how Claude thinks and avoids jailbreaks!
Hi friends, and especially welcome to all the new subscribers. It's wonderful to have you, just in time for the springtime rush of events!
As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. If you know someone who might enjoy or benefit from this newsletter, please share it with them. [image credit: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens]
Good Local Posts
Ilan Man of Emergent Ventures wrote about creating AI Centers of Excellence, with the core concepts of “Centralized Governance” and “Decentralized Execution”. Very interesting for organizations looking to develop their own practice!
Andrew Lamb & Mustafa Akur of influxDB wrote a two-part series about Optimizing SQL and Query Optimizers, in particular for Apache DataFusion. I learned a lot from the 2nd piece, which covers a number of optimization strategies and links to example implementations!
You may have seen people claiming recently that all the best AI models performed very poorly on the 2025 USA Mathematical Olympiad tests: Greg Burnham took a look and saw that they did pretty well (though still managed to get most of the questions wrong).
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
3/21 - 4/6: Corpus: Bodies of Data
4/4: Data Science & Analytics Meetup and Chat New York
4/10: Data for Good Roundtable: Challenges and Opportunities in an Age of Uncertainty
4/14: Ignite: Data Quality
4/15 - 4/16: AI in Finance Summit New York
4/17: AI Meetup (April): GenAI, LLMs and Agents
4/17: Info We Trust: The Craft of Data Graphics
5/15: AI Summit NYC: The Technology Conference For Non-Tech Professionals
5/15: Data Science Salon New York
5/28 - 5/30: Lifetime Data Science Conference
Open Roles
Squarespace is hiring for several data roles, including a Senior Data Scientist and multiple Data Analysts.
Friends at The Atlantic are looking for a Data Engineer and an AI Engineer. Solid roles at a great publication!
Friends at Ramp are looking for Data Engineers.
Alaffia Health is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer.
The Arena Group is looking for a VP, Business Intelligence.
The NYC Department of Housing Preservation is looking for a Senior Data Analyst.
The Financial Times is seeking a Data Journalist.
Miscellany
I read Anthropic’s piece on tracing the thoughts of a large language model (and the larger paper here, which I recommend if you have some time). The logic around responses to attempted jailbreaks and dangerous prompts were particularly interesting!
These tweets on opening federal land, including Floyd Bennett Field, definitely got my attention!
I hope this New Yorker interview of Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan, gets all the attention it deserves. Some great lines in here. Probably my favorite:
Presidents—we’re not usually honest with each other. It’s just the nature of the job. You’re always trying to put your institution in the best possible light. I always joke that I see a president I haven’t seen in a few years, and he used to have two arms and now only has one —“What the hell happened, Charlie?” “Oh, I hated that arm! I feel so much freer!”
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