Accurate search results + privacy + no advertising (or incentive to push advertising to the top of the results) + the ability to upweight/downweight/block domains.

I haven’t seen a Pinterest search result since I signed up.

I think I have a 3-month gift code still? Assuming it’s not expired.

I will sing the praises of Kagi to the day I die

New Murderbot and new Imperial Radch in May! It’s a good month to be a sci fi fan

What a lovely exploration of the sphere packing problem

I cannot believe this works. I’m both proud of my creation, and horrified by it.

I don’t have access to R in my CI/CD pipeline, so I’m recreating `R CMD build` in bash. This thing is going to be held together with duct tape and prayers

Pandoc is pure sorcery. Imagine all of the markdown -> HTML conversion pain we haven’t had to think about

A novelty warning sign that reads: “Man cave. We interrupt this marriage for football season.”

Finally got around to removing this sign that the previous owners had installed in the shed. What herb do I need to burn to cleanse the space now?

Listening to NASA nerds talk about sensors and algorithms and receivers is so soothing

This is really really good

Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem

Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war

The eccentric penis museum guy didn’t have time for misogyny because he was too busy translating literature written by 15th century monks. Couldn’t make room in his schedule for bigotry because he had a book to write on why foxes and humans are friends. Unironically a role model for men everywhere.

I watched Theroux’s manosphere documentary followed by a documentary on an eccentric Icelandic man running the world’s only phallological museum, and it felt like the message for men was “fill your heart with hate, or fill it with weird hobbies”. And the hobbies route looked so much healthier

After a decade of Game of Thrones style edginess (people are self-interested, trust no one, power is everything) I’m enjoying Strange New Worlds and The Pitt. Shows about highly skilled people with good values trying to get through impossible situations

A photo of a painted Warhammer 40K miniature. Green space marine of the Salamanders chapter, infernus marine. The model is equipped with a flamethrower. The flame is modelled and painted yellow and orange, with orange reflected back on the space marine’s armour.

Painted this one up as a gift. Tried to make the fire reflect on the armour and terrain

Here’s everything you need to know about AI that you can learn from people posting on LinkedIn:

Tableau files too!

One time Tableau broke because of a change in database host, because for some reason Tableau hangs when data sources are unavailable (seriously). I wrote a little script to unzip, replace the database host, and rezip. Worked perfectly.

A screenshot of a video game. The subject is a pale, ghostly looking Pikachu with droopy eyes and ears, giving a thumbs up and half-smile. It stands in a field of flowers at night.

When I wake up at 2am for a meeting with the US and someone asks me how I’m doing

We turned away from the light when we invented a way to go online without the computer screaming in warning.

Find something you like and stick to it.

For example, I may not enjoy manipulating data with Python, but I do enjoy decorators and namespaces.

Google search has fallen so far.

Searching for any sort of visa information on Google: an entire page of SEO junk from websites trying to sell visa middle-man services.

Searching on Kagi: top result is the official Government website.

If you are ever building software that deals with peoples’ names please please please consider implementing support for “preferred name”

Microsoft support page with header “Enhance your writing with AI in Notepad” followed by marketing/instructions on how to use AI in Notepad

Look, I’m not anti-LLM or anything, but maybe this is a bit too much?

Cursed. Blasphemous. Heresy. An affront to the functional gods.

The sql database was doing some weird thing where it was swapping days with months, so I just swapped them in R before uploading and everything is all fixed now 👌🏻

Picture of Mordin Solas from the Mass Effect video game series, with caption: “Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”

When they ask me why I insisted on writing the Dockerfile for the model deployment

I have to be involved in every part of the data science stack because someone else might get it wrong

I cancelled my Age/SMH subscription recently because every single opinion piece on *certain topics* was a paraphrase of the one before it.

Insiders is the same. Every journalist paraphrases the one to their left.

Thanks for the heads up. I reckon I’ll skip this week’s episode.

Always struck as me as a weird name for a media show. A journalist who wants to be an “insider” can’t criticise the Government, or they’ll lose insider-status.

A corgi carrying a box of Warhammer 40K (T’au Commander) in his mouth

My dog had his birthday last week, so now he’s middle-aged, and sure enough I see this…