WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

oof didn't realize the influencer leading the somali daycare conspiracy theory is LDS

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

Just found a drawing pad where the 8-year-old wrote out 67 67s

🤡🤡🤡

qatarcars is a great modern, internationally-focused, non-US-centric substitution for mtcars! And it has both an #rstats version and a Python version profmusgrave.github.io/qatarcars/

I can finally announce: I am in the next season (series) of Taskmaster! My favorite tv show! I’ve seen every season & some multiple times! Thrilled to be with this group of hilarious sweeties. Amy Gledhill Joanna Page Armando Iannucci Joel Dommett And me!

The Taskmaster New Years's Treat episode was delightful—and they have Kumail Nanjiani *and* Armando Iannucci for series 21!

the best addition to our first aid cabinet in recent years

Just used Claude Code and the Chrome devtools MCP to identify a gnarly CSS/HTML bug that has plagued me for months. I'm still not letting CC touch any of my real code—everything runs in a sandboxed account in placeholder fake projects—but it can sometimes be really useful.

Their messaging is so fucking incoherent. Maduro was an illegitimate leader who lost in 2024, which is why we're replacing him with his VP instead of the person who won in 2024. We did this to stop fentanyl, which is why he's indicted for cocaine. We're also occupying Venezuela via Zoom call.

Trump on Venezuela: We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.

what

Trump just announces the US will be running Venezuela now, until the can do a "safe, proper, and judicious" transfer of power. Announcing an occupation before you've occupied a country is a new one.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Feel free to update your beliefs about every single person and institution involved

fwiw it’s been about six weeks since Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of trafficking drugs into the US

Trump signals on Fox News that he may be invading Mexico and seizing Claudia Sheinbaum next. The message here is unequivocal: the Western Hemisphere is mine. I am the hegemon.

what

Republican leaders were briefed. Democratic leaders were not. This is the Trump approach.

"Mexico strongly condemns and rejects the military actions carried out unilaterally ... by armed forces of the United States of America against targets in the territory of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in clear violation of Article 2 of the [UN] Charter" www.gob.mx/sre/prensa/m...

we’ve been at war almost my entire life, and i’m sick of it

I remember Iraq, I grew up on Iraq, I cannot believe we’re doing this again and this time they are more bloodthirsty, more incompetent, and less interested in even pretending to justify it more than twenty years later and somehow we went backwards

I am not a categorical pacifist and would face a hard test of my ideals were my nation ever involved in a conflict I thought was just so I guess it’s fortunate that this is an idiotic and immoral war of choice that absolutely no one should support.

in a previous era the announcement of war was a SPECIAL BULLETIN breaking into the TV broadcast the a stentorian newscaster giving the skinny - now suddenly I note, like a switch being flicked every message in the feed is of bombing Caracas. what a world we have created.

The moderate position is indeed The Hague

What are we doing t.me/traficoGranC...

5 of 5 stars to Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

People are right to roll their eyes at this—another stupid and malicious effort to undermine universities. But don’t rest your opposition on the idea that scores “don’t predict outcomes”. Insofar as any measure is used to select a population, you have conditioned on it so it won’t predict outcomes.

now they're all singing "Soda Pop" in unison, this rules

we've got seven 12–13-year-olds playing DnD in the basement and they are ~*~loud~*~

He’s good

Anderson Cooper cannot keep it together during his dramatic reading of the lyrics to Taylor Swift's "Wood" (r @vineyarddawg.bsky.social)

13 minutes into 2026 and it’s fine

Outlook for the new year ...

This is fascinating data! (got 51 this year, so I’m way up in the 97+th percentile I guess)

every YouTube video I find on claude code is like “Here’s how to make $10 billion in a month with NO PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE!!!1!” instead of “here’s how normal people use this with normal smaller data science-related normal projects”

looking for a good overview/tutorial (text or video) on MCPs and code agents for #rstats / Positron (and maybe Claude Code) so I can see how that world is shaping up—any good ones out there?

I do the same general thing: 1. Quarto website per class with syllabus/assignments/slides/readings/etc. (see www.andrewheiss.com/teaching/) 2. Discord for class forum 3. LMS only for having students turn stuff in + distributing answer keys & article PDFs Super nice to not deal with the clunky LMS

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

If you use Positron / VS Code and the Material Icon theme (which is nice!), it sometimes guesses folder icons wrong / doesn't know about #rstats things like targets or renv or Quarto. Just found out that you can set your own custom folder icons! gist.github.com/rupeshtiwari...

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

If you use Positron / VS Code and the Material Icon theme (which is nice!), it sometimes guesses folder icons wrong / doesn't know about #rstats things like targets or renv or Quarto. Just found out that you can set your own custom folder icons! gist.github.com/rupeshtiwari...

thanks ai

Oh no!

BTW, and then it'll be time to tuck this away for a year: A great thing about this great essay is that the author is actually reading and illuminating what's on the screen, not devising spurious, fantastic alternatives.

This is so great

Finally got around to finishing the Khan audio drama podcast and it’s a fun little jaunt into the Star Trek universe (and it has Tuvok and Sulu!)

4 of 5 stars to Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney