got accosted by a crazy road rage lady while trying to run some errands. cool cool cool cool cool

LOOK at them!!

november's marbled polecat illustration does not adequately convey just how cute they are

a photo of me wearing a yukata, sitting seiza on a tatami mat, pointing while i explain something to a beginner student who is performing tea ceremony

my chadō teacher told me to teach irekodate to our beginner students, and then i was too locked in to notice her taking some candid shots. it felt illegal to be in her spot!

trauma center!!

graffiti that says "deleuze respire toujours"

THE PLOT THICKENS?!

(new graffiti down the block from my house)

overheard at the pharmacy

old lady: the AI told me my medication would be ready on tuesday, but when i came, the pharmacy hadn't even received the prescription. could you help me not have that issue again?

pharmacist, after a long pause: well, if i can speak frankly about that AI...

Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra - Grown Man Cry (Lyric Video) YouTube video by Amanda Palmer

music.youtube.com/watch?v=_X8G...

you're cute and fun to be around!! always have been

horror

the activate games leaderboard with my name in the #1 slot

flower smelling champion

photo of me. black dress, black stockings, black boots with heels.

come to chicago activate in the next 15 minutes for an ass kicking

PSA for the person next to me on this plane: no one wants to listen to you audibly smacking your gum with your mouth wide open

if you're incapable of chewing gum in a less revolting manner, at least wait until there aren't several strangers trapped shoulder-to-shoulder with you, jfc

as do i! some other favorites (or, excerpts therefrom):

1) i never turned anyone into a pig / some people are pigs; i make them / look like pigs

2) you have not been completely / perfect either; with your troublesome body / you have done things you shouldn't / discuss in poems

yours?

you are the first to recognize them!

fast and thorough and sharp as a tack

wym wrong answers, these are just literal photos of you

i fear this means we are Old

still don't know who the philosophical vandal was, but i now have no fewer than three of my friends asking me to explain deleuze to them anyway

which one of you vandalized the snow on my front porch demanding answers about french philosophy? serious question.

i am mostly amused, a teeny bit creeped out (affectionate), and ready to put on my best metaphysical lecturing hat for you.

they better fix this in the next patch

love when i try to get my glasses off my headboard in the morning but i have no depth perception because i'm not wearing my glasses and then i smoodge my fingers all over the lenses trying to pick them up

my stylist: so what are we doing today?
me: gonna cut it all off
stylist: oh my god. oh my god. how are you feeling about the big chop?
me: terrified!
stylist: what's driving such a big change?
me, shrugging: bored

my hand holding up over a foot of my green and brown hair, cut off and braided.

they say that hair holds memory

a selfie of myself. my hair is very long and dark brown, dyed green and blue-ish in the front.

a selfie of myself. my hair is very long and dark brown, dyed green and blue-ish in the front.

possibly getting the hang of Having Hair

can't believe you posted this without a photo

aforementioned blog: stephenramsay.net/posts/index....

“How A led to B” is among the elemental narratives of the humanistic endeavor, and every part of that quaint, broken syllogism is a bottomless exegetical pit. What is A? What is B? What does “led to” mean? What are we even talking about? Yet as the old song puts it, “Somethin’s happenin’ here / What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

came across @sramsay2.bsky.social's charming blog tonight. as siken beautifully says:

We have not been given all the words necessary.
We have not been given anything at all.
[...]
Is there an acceptable result?
Do we mean something when we talk?
Is it enough that we are shuddering
from the sound?

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

i went outside today, i deserve a medal