"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu (disputed)
Back in France at the time of Richelieu, there wasn't a concept of free speech or religious freedom. Thus if you said that you thought the king was an idiot, you could be hanged. Or you doubted the Church, or doubted God existed.
Remember, blasphemy could be punished by death at that time.
Nowadays, in most free democracies you are free to say you don't believe in religion, or think the leaders are idiots and there are minimal consequences.
If you're genuinely eager to learn probabilistic programming then by far the best resource I've found is a book called Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath. His (almost finished) draft for the second edition is up here:
http://xcelab.net/rmpubs/sr2/statisticalrethinking2_08dec19....
Dr. McElreath also posts his lectures on youtube. The R code in the book and his lectures use a library/package he wrote which provides a wrapper to simplify building Stan models. The code has also been translated to PyMC3 on Python.
It might look like a huge amount of content but this course leads you very gently through key concepts, keeping the mathematics to a minimum. Don't be put off if you don't know the R language. The concepts are more important than the programming language and the code examples are kept simple.
If you make it through Statistical Rethinking then you might consider picking up Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by John Kruschke (a.k.a. the puppies book). I've found DBDA to be heavier going than SR but Kruschke takes a different approach to McElreath which can be useful if you get stuck on a concept, need more detail or just want a different angle on the subject.
But you haven't answered OP's question. Why would one want to invest several months of learning PP without seeing any clear examples of how it could be useful?
While Kalman and Bayesian Filters in Python is a superb resource, probably the best out there, my recommendation for anyone new to the field would be to do Sebastian Thrun's free Artificial Intelligence for Robotics course [1] as an intro, then go through Labbe's work afterwards.
Thrun's course is more accessible and even more hands-on than Labbe's content. As a bonus he also covers Particle Filters,PID control, Search and SLAM (which cam out of Thrun's PhD thesis).
If Firefox had treated TabMixPlus (TMP) and other extensions as first-class citizens when they introduced quantum, I can guarantee I'd be using Firefox today (along with all the less technical people in my extended network, who I'd install it for).
Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly the transition took place, just added insult to injury.
It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018 visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen, still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial.
Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons then I would enthusiastically consider switching.
The XUL "let you do anything you want to the browser UI DOM" extensions model had to die in order to solve a host of problems, most importantly Firefox performance issues. If that had happened later than it did, Mozilla would be in a much worse position now.
The real failure was that WebExtensions should have been started several years earlier, but for various reasons that can was kicked down the road. That is an interesting untold story.
the chrome UI is vastly more restrictive than the Firefox one (addons effectively can not modify it in any way), so i'm not sure what you are saying here.
It shouldn't take three plus years to fix an upgrade. The goal was good, WebExtensions are a significant step forward as a concept. Planning, execution and post-transition management sucked.
If Firefox had treated TabMixPlus (TMP) and other extensions as first-class citizens when they introduced quantum, I can guarantee I'd be using Firefox today (along with all the less technical people in my extended network, who I'd install it for).
Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly the transition took place, just added insult to injury.
It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018 visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen, still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial.
Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons then I would enthusiastically consider switching.
scenario modeling is useful when you have a set of uncertain inputs and you want to estimate the range of possible output values.
the monte carlo part is providing random sets of inputs that conform to the distributions for each input (often estimated as just a normal distribution for each). you run thousands (or more, depending on the margin of error you wish to achieve) of these random input sets to generate the mean, variance and estimated error of the output variable.
in financial modeling, the inputs are typically estimates of future revenue, costs, cost of capital, etc., and NPV (net present value) of the enterprise as the output. sometimes you even include environmental or regulatory uncertainty (as a binomial value) in the model.
Clearfactr was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2018.
It's been used internally in Goldman since then and they don't make it available outside the company unfortunately.
[1] https://www.clearfactr.com/