As promised, here’s my tax day rant.
For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS already has the data to send you an almost fully completed 1040 for you to add a few pieces of data to, automatically recalculate, be done.
It doesn’t because of Intuit.
The DHS form search (www.pa.gov/agencies/dhs...) has no records of the form and only refers back the SNAP form that we're trying to fill out!
Hey @governor.pa.gov, so PA DHS memorandum (www.pa.gov/content/dam/...) 'The CAO may also provide form PA 1795, “Household Members/Living Expenses” to applicants or recipients to be completed by a landlord or
housing agency.' The link to PA 1795 is dead hhsdoc.dhs.pa.lcl/docushare/ds...
Are any politicians proposing to reduce the minimum limit for HSA eligible insurance plans?
Don’t think so, why?
The U.S. war on Iran is now estimated to cost $1 billion per day. Meanwhile Americans are told there’s no money for healthcare, hospitals, or basic social programs.
“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”
A screenshot of NYT spelling bee showing “tibble” is not an accepted word.
As an R user and tidyverse devotee, I take issue with this. #Rstats
Bayes Rule in a Super Bowl ad: ✅
If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
Democracy dies in oligarchy.
I support term limits for Congress, the Senate and SCOTUS.
Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC
I just thought everyone should see this
I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place
A bar chart showing the electricity use of several daily activities with the subtitle "The 'typical query' is not a useful way to think about coding agents' energy use." The bar for a 'typical ChatGPT query' is not even visible. My median Claude Code session is somewhere between the average US household per minute and toasting bread for three minutes. My median day with Claude Code is something like running a dishwasher.
Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day.
On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...
UX design so focused on optimizing for a given user task, while completely ignoring:
- goal achieved, i want to get back to where i was
- i want to immediately do goal again
- i want to switch to different goal
Way too many times is 3-4 clicks/touches just to... do more stuff with the same app.
why I have trust issues
reddit post from a presumably young person who watched sex and the city and couldn’t get over how much people smoked indoors. “wouldn’t everything smell bad?” they asked
this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will
Redacted Epstein files
Redacted Epstein files. Basically completely blank
Redacted Epstein files. Basically completely blank
Redacted Epstein files. Basically completely blank
Journal article: “the data are available on request”
The data:
Whenever I teach this, I like to remind my students that #rstats was informed by a lot of statisticians and NA means “I don’t know” so most logical tests and operators return “I don’t know”. x> 5? I don’t know. I have to know x first.
Yes, exactly. Each missing value is equal to itself and unequal to other values. In contrast, R's NA is neither equal nor unequal to anything, including itself
From a senior faculty this morning: "As you get older you become 'former'. I'm the former chair of ..."
It's a good time of year to unsubscribe. A lot of happy holiday messages are showing me what lists my emails are on
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.
April 14 #ChatGPT prompt tsunami: “ fill out my tax return that maximize my refund with the lowest probability I get audited”
If students and post-docs are workers, then academia may have some of worst turnover rates in any industry.
How long until the AI Chatbots start inserting ads in the responses?
This is an ifixit email of an iPhone 6 user saying: iPhone 6, black screen problem solve With the tagline under saying was this useful?
AI teaching iPhones to fix themselves:
Still on Rstudio but I have it on machine. Does it simply go via the diff or does it read the whole repo? We’ve been discussing Claude and codex but they don’t seem to respect ignore directories (e.g. data)
Does AI write commit messages yet?
