I'm in the Humble Bumble! Or Turnbull Burmble www.humblebundle.com/books/ultima...

If you ever wondered what GOP gerrymandering looks like in red states with blue cities, I present:

For context, ChatGPT convo generates 3-4 g of carbon reclaimedsystems.substack.com/p/every-sora...

The tit-for-tat mid-decade redistricting isn't the problem The real problem is the Supreme Court defanging VRA Section 2. This will make the House have an R+5/6 structural advantage (R's control House even if Dems win by 5-6) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

So in Honduras, drug traffickers are good, get them in power? But in Venezuela drug traffickers bad, we need to do a regime change? And btw America First?

We love the moving chains that new housing create

GOODS: international freedom of movement CAPITAL: international freedom of movement LABOR: not so fast pal

I see we're fast approaching the Trump overreaction stage of any national tragedy

I thought Dems were bad at messaging. But the second Trump Admin is another level of incoherence America First! but attack Venezuala and help Argentina Deport Mamdani, but "we're going to help him succeed" Epsein files... Its clearly like half a dozen competing incoherent agendas

Maven has a FastTrack promotion this week 25% off the entire catalog Of course there's the two courses between me + Trey Grainger, threaded below:

A sneak peak at my reworked Maven course

There's an explosion of political content is a kind of "plausible hopium". We get sucked into a rational confirmation bias rabbit hole that helps us get through our day. Content like from Heather Cox Richardson, etc. It's not wrong--it's just skewed hopeful to appeal to an audience. I'm skeptical.

There's a short window to get a discount on Cheat at Search with Agents Want to learn how to apply agents and LLMs to information retrieval? Come to class in February! Discount code searchybird gives you a discount maven.com/softwaredoug...

The real politik nature of the shutdown isn't about the ACA. The longer it went on, the more Trump's callous, optional actions hurt people directly, the more the electorate turned on Trump Keeping that going is how you isolate a President who can't help but overplay every hand he's dealt

Sad... There's a lot of this going around www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclu...

Sounds like the squishes in the senate caucus are ready to pull the plug with no ACA changes. This is real. If you want to register your opinion you shld call yr senator in the next hour. They not only want to reopen w/nothing. They want cover from their colleagues who still want to hold out.

Damn the name "Cuck Schumer" has been there all along... I can't be the first that thought of it... www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/u...

👀 Animals have been assigned. Scheduled to print fall 2026! We have iterated on this with over 3k students (and continue to do so). We give our students access to the full draft as part of our evals course (link in bio)

If an OpenAI bailout happened, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be in the context of bankruptcy restructuring (like GM in 2008 crisis). So it wouldn’t really solve anything, it would just be taxpayers buying high on a distressed asset

I’m a product of big government. Everyone likes to shitpost the government. California taxpayers and the regents of the University of California saved my ass. fortune.com/2025/11/06/s...

lol

Signups permanently close today at 1PM! Come hang out with me and Trey! maven.com/search-schoo...

AI Powered Search late tickets available. Trey and I opened up signups to folks who missed the first class of our Maven course -which you can watch in video form - with a discount to cover missing that class: promocode: stragglers maven.com/search-schoo...

City of Charlottesville voters! I have seen a few posts online today about the polling place mixup and am sharing this over here for folks.

Cville arear friends — if you have family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, your kids friends ... so and so forth... who use SNAP benefits, please make sure they know about this City Market Special

Your AI chiropractor can tell you about AI Powered Search training

LLM as a judge is dead softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/11...

7 hours left to signup!! maven.com/search-schoo...

LLMs are not a good tool for labeling. They're a tool for feature engineering. (Use Traditional ML w/ LLM features for the labeling) softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/11...

Lightning Lessons on The march to Cheat at Search with *Agents* coming in Feb -- Coming Nov 17, Radu Gheorghe of Vespa.ai will share best practices on RAG chunking. Or really beyond RAG chunking :) maven.com/p/e2a6af/bey...

One week left for AI Powered Search! aipoweredsearch.com/articles/ai-...

I've been using agents for search rerankers, this was a lot of fun to work on softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

It doesn't take much to roll your own reusable agentic loop that uses just (annotated) Python functions as tools softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

I don't know what this means

EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in a 2022 interview warned supporters of reproductive rights that "one day it’s going to be your turn." "Murder is murder. And one day it's going to be your turn."

Surprised by the last minute signups for Cheat at Search with LLMs -- starting at 12:30PM ET! Signup below: maven.com/softwaredoug...

All the defenses of Jay Jones are whataboutiism (the GOP said similar bad thing, so we shouldn't hold Jones accountable). You either follow a moral principle or it’s meaningless. Threats of political violence should be disqualifying.

I measured the impact of letting an agent drive a dumb BM25 search tool. It improves NDCG 15-30% above just BM25 in two datasets softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

Happy to announce I'll be a guest speaker during @softwaredoug.bsky.social's Cheat at Search course on Maven - join here maven.com/softwaredoug... - I'm speaking on October 16th

It's always the peak of absurdity when you see a nice, long stretch of protected bike path like 29N between Polo Grounds -- Hollymead. But that ultimately doesn't connect to anything. So it goes unused. Nobody seems to plan these things from the perspective of getting bikes from A to B

You know who else went all week without driving? #weekwithoutdriving

Some good news in the City Council packet for Monday’s meeting: the city is planning to purchase 2000 Holiday Drive to use as a low-barrier homelessness shelter. More here: charlottesvilleva.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2511/f...

Yo pull over the car, new Tunkelang just dropped! maven.com/p/0ab1e3/ran...

It's vector search Vern

With support from my university's Office of Strategic Communications, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of international students to research at US universities. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it today. www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

I can recommend this for understanding lexical search and BM25! I'm pretty new to search in general, and had only used BM25, not really understood it. Now I understand what it does. 😁 Really cool when you're building a RAG pipeline. Looking forward to the vector search talk!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about vector retrieval, continuing Cheat at Search Essentials. Full details on my blog article softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/07...

Agents will be a bigger paradigm shift than RAG for search RAG is a lot of the same old search we've always built. Agents that reason actually do quite well with simple search tools. They turn a dumb keyword search into something much smarter. softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Recording for BM25 + Lexical Search now up maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

This Wednesday I'll be discussing how to Cheat at Query Understanding using LLMs with Jason Liu. If you want a taste of "Cheat at Search with LLMs", please come hang out! maven.com/p/eebe98