Just a few hours left to submit to PyCon AU!

If you have a #python and/or #Data and #AI idea you're keen to share with the community, why not consider a cheeky last minute submission? 🐍

Hey #python, #data and AI peeps! #pyconau 2026 is in Brisbane this year and the CFP is open!

Are you a (wrangler | engineer | curator | researcher) doing things with data or AI/ML? Consider sharing with the community--submit to the Data and AI specialist track!

2026.pycon.org.au/cfp/speciali...

I'm headed to San Diego this afternoon to attend the mech interp workshop at #NeurIPS! Really excited to give a lightning talk and catch up with everyone. 🌴

San Diego!

A selfie of me looking quizzically excited, in the poster hall of NeurIPS 2025, standing under the Deep Learning section sign hanging from the roof

I'm in town for NeurlPS all week. Wow this conference is biiiig. Anyone I know (or don't know!) up for a drink?

#NeurIPS #NeurIPS2025 #mlsky

A map of all the different names for woodlice in the United Kingdom

I like to think that this map of all the regional names for woodlice in the UK could also be a map illustrating the new tribes of humans to be found on the same landmass after The Great Digital Crash and ensuing breakdown of society.

Data Behind the Scenes 2025 - YouTube Data Behind the Scenes is a data conference by data practitioners, for data practitioners. We come together to share stories and experiences about the the me...

The videos from the #DataBS Conference have made it to YouTube!

Over the coming days, we'll highlight sessisons from the event -- one post per talk.

You can also sneak ahead by going straight to the YouTube playlist, here:

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Data Cleaning IS Analysis, Not Grunt Work Also, most data cleaning articles suck

I got introduced to @randyau.com's 'Data Cleaning IS Analysis, Not Grunt Work' post during the #dataBS Conf this week: www.counting-stuff.com/data-cleanin... . I just finished--it was a great read.

Here are some quotes and thoughts I'm walking away with 👇

1/9 #RStats

‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’ | Verlyn Klinkenborg Their striking intelligence makes octopuses tempting subjects for wishful anthropomorphism and uncanny reminders of nature’s mysteries.

“In humans, curiosity usually begins as a mental stirring, but in octopuses,… it’s a function of bodily design. In a sense, curiosity + intention are dispersed throughout an octopus’s tissues—right out to the tips of its tentacles. Inquisitiveness… ‘is built into the octopuses’ anatomy.’”

Chartle - A daily chart game Guess the country in red by analysing today's chart

Launch day 🚀

We’ve just released @chartlecc.bsky.social - a daily chart game!

Your job is to guess which country is represented by the red line in today's chart. You get 5 tries, no other clues!

Play today, come back tomorrow for a different chart with new data and share with your chart friends 📈

It's been a week since we launched @chartle.cc with @adnaanj.bsky.social and we had an amazing start!

- Average of 700 users/day
- Record 1.2K users yesterday
- From 78 countries
- 66% win overall
- 2m 18s average engagement

Thank you to all who played + shared the game
Any feedback, send our way!

📈 DuckDB 1.4.0 is out! This is our first LTS release which comes with *one year of community support*. It also supports database encryption, the MERGE SQL statement and Iceberg writes.

For more details, read the announcement blog post at
duckdb.org/2025/09/16/a...

Behold my latest keyboard, the JuggleKeyboard!

Just click the letters as they're juggled, it's an easy* way to type.

* it's not easy

Flowers of the Sky Depictions spanning almost a whole millennium — in chronological order — of comets, meteors, meteorites and shooting stars.

Does anyone want beautiful historical depictions of celestial phenomena? Anyone? Well, here you go publicdomainreview.org/collection/f...

“AI chat" icon collage from the Mac App Store

"AI" is going great!

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/mac-app...

AI Evals For Engineers & PMs by Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar on Maven Learn proven approaches for quickly improving AI applications. Build AI that works better than the competition, regardless of the use-case.

I'd recommend this course for anyone working on operational systems where LLM output may play a load-bearing role, even if you're not of the engineering persuasion, but are up for getting your hands dirty with some code.

maven.com/parlance-lab...

The course validated my intuitions that these foundations apply just as much to generative AI applications and has given me a road-tested pragmatic framework for applying them to the weird world of LLMs and AI engineering.

Their approach thoroughly resonates with my experience as a data scientist: look at your data, perform thorough error analysis, develop metrics that matter, and iterate via experimentation and user-feedback.

I recently completed @hamel.bsky.social and @sh-reya.bsky.social's AI Evals For Engineers & PMs, which presented practical frameworks for identifying appropriate dimensions of quality, creating automatic validators to measure at scale, and effective feedback loops that enable continual improvement

Assessing LLM output quality requires managing their vast input/output spaces and acute sensitivity to minor prompt changes, but many teams are still running on largely vibe-based evals, incurring considerable risk and preventing systematic product improvement.

We can do better! #databs #mlsky

If AI and workers were strong complements, what would we see? The answer is pretty much what the initial data is showing

If AI and workers were strong complements, what would we see?, by @joshgans open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga... Does the latest data tell us AI is a substitute for human work? Nope. Is that comforting? Also nope. My comments on @erikbryn and co. (and @Noahpinion

debugging new pretrain like

There is a reason why the introduction and first three chapters are required reading in weeks two and three of my law and technology course

Essential for understanding where we are

DuckDB is awesome and it’s a great tool to explore and transform data. But DuckDB doesn’t help you visualize and share data with others. That's why I built Shaper:

taleshape.com/blog/turn-yo...

#duckdb #databs #dataengineering

DataBS Conf "Data, Behind the Scenes" is a free-to-attend online-only, single track conference centered on the real stories of data work from the folks in the trenches. We’re not here for the latest AI hype, perf...

Data Behind the Scenes Conference free registration is open! Wed Sept 24, ~10am-5pm EDT. Online-only, single track.

Join data folks as they share experiences with how data work is done in production, thorns & disturbing hacks and all!
(Pls help get the word out 📈)

ti.to/databsconf/d...

#dataBS

DataBS Conf "Data, Behind the Scenes" is a free-to-attend online-only, single track conference centered on the real stories of data work from the folks in the trenches. We’re not here for the latest AI hype, perf...

I got my #DataBS Conf ticket todayyy! Come hangout with us!

ti.to/databsconf/d...

Is there any book for working professionals that teaches them how to dissect, compress, and traverse a domain quickly to come up with first principles of any domain?

To rapidly map any domain's knowledge structure in weeks, not years

Mythical agent month

Screenshot of embedding atlas showing the embedding view on the left, a table at the bottom and charts on the right.

🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.