It’s nearly time for our 100th Meetup! 🥳 Looking forward to a full roster of lightning talks, reflections from organisers past and present (including many of the OG crew!) and of course well-deserved celebrations--maybe even with cake! 🎂

*deep breath* the fact that these models produce plausible output and also hallucinate (e.g. produce completely novel but reasonable output) has always been why they're so exciting for computational social scientists

Incidentally, my personal favorite interpretation of advancements in computer science is that most of the progress we've made has been in defining the problems themselves. Many successes correlate to clearer definitions of what "good" means or abstracting the task away from weak definitions.

Great to hear Customs House will be redeveloped! Such a grand building in an amazing location by the Thames, but today you have to follow a rickety walkway and peer at it through railings. Big improvement for the Thames Path there. customhouse2024.co.uk www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/his...

Python: The Documentary | An origin story What began as a side project in the 1990s now powers AI, data science and some of the world's biggest companies. But Python almost disappeared at one point. Featuring Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more! youtu.be/GfH4QL4VqJ0?...

I was particularly pleased to hear Ruby Waller tell us about apprenticeships in data. I had no idea this was a possible route into DS until she told me at the conference this year. So glad she agreed to share her journey!

Had a great PyData London tonight! Was a real treat to hear from @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social on @skrub-data.bsky.social and the real world data pains its solving. (Try it if you haven’t already; super easy to get going!)

PyData London 2025 keynote: Tony Mears -- Innovation is Dead Innovation gets stifled in the public sector by risk aversion and punishment for failure. But there is hope: Tony shares a way forward, drawing on his experience directing operations in the NHS and UK Space Agency. youtu.be/XMLbJYM46xo

on.ft.com/4oVBaBe My day trip to medieval England Jousting is back in vogue after a 500 year absence. Fantastic pictures too!

Fascinating interview from Odd Lots on what happens when a startup dies. Not often formal bankruptcy. Finding buyers for some company assets can be challenging—like human skulls! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...

Excited about this one!

Today at #EuroScipy2025, @glemaitre58.bsky.social and I presented a tutorial on pitfalls of machine learning for imbalanced classification problems. We discussed what (not) to do when fitting a classifier and obtaining degenerate precision or recall values. probabl-ai.github.io/calibration-...

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

Fusion energy start-up claims to have cracked alchemy This is really cool: modifying the fusion process could produce gold from mercury almost as a side effect, worth almost as much as the electricity produced each year. on.ft.com/3IXXlWD

Whisper bug report: 'Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic which translates as "Translation by Nancy Qunqar"' social.coop/@brainwane/1... It's fun, but as the thread points out not a new problem, e.g. fanfare -> "subscribe"—and would be fixed in English already.

Visited a few Sculpture in the City exhibits on my afternoon cycle today. Will see if I can find the rest over the next few weeks! www.sculptureinthecity.org.uk

Lovely evening for a cycle yesterday.

Great panel on driving meaningful change to developer experience. "We need better measures than satisfaction that connect directly to things *under our responsibility*, like are people able to access their best problem solving selves, is wellbeing being protected, and quality of problem solving"

Excited the videos are coming out so I can catch up on the talks I wanted to see at the time (like this one) but missed!

Good Science xkcd.com/3101/

Poundland sold for less than a pound on.ft.com/4kWnJOy The article doesn’t say if they went into a shop to complete the transaction, but I choose to believe they did.

Really good keynote from Leanne Fitzpatrick @financialtimes.com at @pydatalondon.bsky.social this morning. AI slop: gen AI is the perfect marketer’s tool. But with a lot of negative externalities!

Welcome to the PyData main conference! 🎉 @jaspajjr.bsky.social getting things going with opening remarks alongside Andy Terrel from @numfocus.bsky.social

LAST CALL! PyData London starts TOMORROW! Looking forward to being part of all the conversations and human connections you just can't get online--so make sure you're in the room. A few last-minute tickets still available if you're quick. See you there! pydata.org/london2025

I’m really* fun at parties, and today a complete stranger made the mistake of telling me they play Civilization, so I broke out one of my favorite topics: 🧠The psychology of randomness in video games *(completely not)

Late spring flowers catching the sun. I wish I could grow these on my balcony!

Some innovative house designs that cater for disabilities and make living there a pleasure, rather than feeling like a clinical and begrudging afterthought. And they're nicer for everyone! The aesthetics of accessibility: design for disability that’s dynamic not dreary on.ft.com/43lRYbH

Just 23 days to the PyData London conference! 🚨 FIRST RELEASE SOLD OUT 🚨 Ready to soak in the knowledge, meet smart folks, discuss AI hot takes, and groan at some questionable data jokes? 6-8 June at Convene Sancroft, St. Paul's Check out the schedule and get tickets here pydata.org/london2025

Published some notes on Microsoft's phi4-reasoning model, an 11GB download (via Ollama) which may well overthink things... it produced 56 sentences of reasoning output in response to my prompt of "hi" simonwillison.net/2025/May/6/p...

One of my very favorite things about consulting with engineering organizations, for all the difficulties we face in our tech cultures, is that so many people with such different backgrounds from my own, share my value of wanting to be in the reality game. I truly believe many of us want to be there.

The PyData Global 2024 videos are now up on YouTube! To kick things off with a bang, here's Wes McKinney's talk on Retooling for a Smaller Data Era (He had connectivity issues; talk starts 7:45) youtu.be/w4aYrav8-zE?...

After last year's sellout, PyData London 2025 is happening 6-8 June at Convene Sancroft, St Paul's. Join us for 3 days of tutorials, talks and the chance to meet and hang out with a great group of data enthusiasts! Tickets already selling fast--get yours here today! pydata.org/london2025

Kicking off tonight’s PyData London with @johnsandall.bsky.social telling us about Death by RMSE: Cautionary Tales of Metrics Gone Wild Choosing the wrong eval metrics can look great but give terrible real world performance—it’s always a trade off!

If you're a fan of Isochrone maps and US census data (and who isn't?) Dan Snow just released opentimes.org and it's spectacular - I published some notes about it here, there's some very clever data engineering going on under the hood simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/17/...

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

The new GOV.UK login system is the first step in a radical transformation of the British state (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/login-to-a...

DEADLINE TODAY(23:59 GMT) to get your talk or tutorial in for PyData London 2025! Register as a speaker here pydata.org/london2025/cfp

Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs. “That’s 240 browser tabs in a tight 8x30 grid. And they’re running pong!” [eieio.games]

Jony Ive on Desert Island Discs talking about childhood, the huge influence of his dad and, of course, his work at Apple. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Prompting is a weird art that rewards language, logic, and computing experience. Impossible requests get silly answers, but you have to notice that the request is impossible. Somehow I am both: - "you can't just prompt, you need to evaluate" - "oh you think you can't prompt for that? let me try"

I hadn’t realised Apple had moved so much to India already in their China + 1 strategy. Apple’s quiet pivot to India on.ft.com/42ZRiZG

In today's Odd Lots Newsletter, i wrote about Walter Ong Thought, and how as we return to Orality, we're completely re-wiring the logic engine of the human brain. Get the newsletter here: www.bloomberg.com/account/news...

Have something great to share? Tell us about it at the PyData London 2025 conference! Submit your talk or tutorial proposal here by 24 February. pydata.org/london2025/cfp

The 93rd PyData London Meetup is here! Join us on Tue 4 Feb from 19:00 for informative talks, interesting conversations and great company! meetu.ps/e/NNLKV/5p7c...

This rings a little too true sadly… Britain should stop pretending it wants more economic growth on.ft.com/4hexEgz

Part of the reason people are glum about AI is that researchers themselves represent the goal as full equivalence for human agency (“AGI”). While I get the theoretical interest, I think what most customers want (and what we’ve really produced so far) is closer to “prosthetics for thinking.”

Because 2025 = 45² and 45 is a triangle number, we get these lovely sums: 2025 = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² 2025 = 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ Pleasingly the next triangle number 55 is 10 more, so get ready for a repeat of this fact in the year 3025.

Something to keep in mind for 2025 Written by James Miller of A Small Fiction

Something I don't understand is: why can't LLMs write novel-length fiction yet? They've got the context length for it. And new models seem capable of the multi-hop reasoning required for plot. So why hasn't anyone demoed a model that can write long interesting stories? I do have a theory ... +