Ads in ChatGPT? I cannot *wait* to fail an essay because it says "Times v Sullivan is the backbone of press freedom in the United States, just like the Ford F-150 is the backbone of the American worker. F-150: Built Ford Tough."

Always fun to dust off some old code ...

I'll give you @kleinmatic.bsky.social with the shot: www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/show...

We made a better fake image of this in less than 5 minutes during a class on the evolution of fake news yesterday. Buckle up, society. bsky.app/profile/jour...

What I was confronted with:

In the spirit of using AI to do dishes so I can do art, I tested out Antigravity/Gemini 3 with a gnarly PDF parsing job. What I got back was orders of magnitude better than any other tool I've used over a period of years: mattwaite.github.io/posts/2025-1...

We all know transfers rule college basketball … but to what extent? And how different is today vs. the past? We quantified it by analyzing the careers of rotation players on every men’s & women’s NCAA tournament team since 2010. That’s 10,000 players! Check it out (gift link): wapo.st/41By62h

Midwest living in 2025: it is 75 degrees out. The sun is shining. The school district just called. School is cancelled tomorrow because of the blizzard coming.

For those who can't be in the room for my AI Starter Pack in R session, here's some notes/code examples we'll work through. If you can be there at 3:30, more demos in the session. #NICAR25 mattwaite.github.io/posts/r-llm-...

Back in 2009, when I somehow convinced a Florida newspaper to let me move to Nebraska and work remotely, we used to have a computer with Skype running all the time in the small office my group worked in. We could just talk like I was still in the room. It was really nice. www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/t...

Last week, the Nebraska R User Group hosted a presentation by Matt Waite (@mattwaite.bsky.social) on "Talking to LLMs through R". Check out a summary of the talk at neb-rug.github.io/posts/talkin.... #rstats #llms

New report on the state of journalism in Nebraska: There are 9 counties without a single news organization in them. There are 16 county seats with no local news organization in them. More than half of the state's counties are covered by two or fewer journalists. newsmap.unl.edu

Asked AI for a header image for my AI + Journalism class to put into the LMS. Asked for something evocative of journalism's past and future, colorful and futuristic. What I got vs what my Gen X ass sees:

How big is the Palisades fire compared to where you live? This will tell you: calmatters.org/environment/... For me, probably 80% of Lincoln is wiped out centering the fire on campus. Everything from far West O east past 84th Street, from Pioneers in the south to Cornhusker Highway in the north.

The ability to reverse engineer a shitty agency's shitty website structure so I can make obviously public data usable is not the superpower I wanted, but it's the one I got.

If you're interested in attending #NICAR25 in Minneapolis in early March, you can apply for a fellowship that covers registration, 4 nights of hotel and $500 for travel. Applications are due by Jan. 6! www.ire.org/training/con...

Hey fellow academics, do you find course evaluations to be terrible (in all the ways) but your institution still uses them in decisions? Do you also find LLM writing to be flat and lifeless? Here's a bonkers idea: Put your course evals into NotebookLM and let it summarize them for you. A short🧵

Hello Canvas, my old friend I've come to talk with you again Because a learning outcome softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of a syllabus

My dog vs AI image analysis: FIGHT

Rosemary Garlic Focaccia rolls are fire.

Watching my wife try to help her parents de-enshittify Facebook as much as possible because it still matters to them and they want what they used to have on the platform back is just sad.

The circles of Hell: 1. Limbo 2. Lust 3. Gluttony 4. South Lincoln Trader Joe’s parking lot on a normal Saturday 5. Anger 6. Heresy 7. Violence 8. South Lincoln Trader Joe’s parking lot, today. 9. Treachery

I have major opinions about this driven entirely by the realities of having to drag 65 not-entirely-willing undergrads from zero to making stuff in 16 weeks starting next month. bsky.app/profile/alex...

"What’s the point of the exercise here?" @mattwaite.bsky.social asks. "Is it to inform people, or to show off what we know and how sophisticated we sound?"

📦 {flashr} 0.2.0 is out! ⚡ {flashr} creates flashcards for learning #RStats functions or other things. The new version can extract R functions from R Markdown and #QuartoPub documents, which can be used to create flashcard decks. Blogpost: jeffreyrstevens.github.io/posts/flashr/ @quarto.org

The @niemanlab.org annual predictions are always fun and a lot to think about. Here's mine: We need to stop writing like everyone went to grad school and build a new foundation on things everyone does care about. www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/the-...

Hashtag motherfreakin’ volleyball school.

Interested in upping your ggplot2 game? Check out a blog post on Dr. Heike Hofmann's talk "Extensions to ggplot2 are easy – right?" neb-rug.github.io/posts/ggplot... This was the inaugural talk for the new Nebraska R User Group. Register for future talks at www.meetup.com/neb-rug/ #RStats #DataViz

Hate that I felt I had to tell students this fall about how to guard themselves against AI detectors and the false positives they produce. Really hate that a student who didn't cheat is now being forced to use those defenses against someone who believes the random number generator.

"We need to ask people what they need from us," Francesco Zaffarano writes. "We need to show them how journalism can be a vital part of their lives, and how paying for news can become something essential rather than optional."

Me: Hello AI model. I need a logo for a website. Here are the details. AI model: Here are some ideas for you. (provides one). Me: Truthfully, I kinda like it. Can I have it as a png file with a transparent background? AI model: Sure. (changes the entire thing, outputs a jpg).

I'm always jealous of everyone's Spotify Wrapped stats bc I'm an Elder Millennial who still buys music and listens w/iTunes/Music, so I've always missed out. BUT NOT THIS YEAR. I exported my library on January 1 and used #rstats to make my own www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/12...

If you teach a basic data analysis class, Spotify Wrapped is a fun way to show your students you can create billions in PR value with what amounts to a filter, a group by, a count and a sort.

Only God can judge me.

Wrote up how to create an academic integrity-friendly local LLM plugin to R Studio. Uses Ollama, qwen2.5-coder and pal to make a tool that won't write code, but will put error messages into more friendly language. It works, but it's an classroom equity nightmare: mattwaite.github.io/posts/an-aca...

Please tell me why I know the name of the French military award given to a pigeon in World War I but I can’t remember to send a goddamned email without a reminder.

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization? We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

You're free, Nebraska. It's over.

A poem for my last day working at the writing center for the semester (by Joseph Fasano)

If your AI strategy is More Content To Sell Ads Against, no one wants this, a continuing series: bsky.app/profile/mid-...

Without spending a dime, I just downloaded an LLM trained for code (qwen2.5-coder), ran it locally (Ollama), added a library that creates an interface to the LLM in R Studio (pal) and wrote my own "pal" to replace my words with code. And it works on an aging M1 Mac. Demo:

If someone tries to sell you a product where the pitch goes blah blah AI blah blah More Content blah blah Ads Will Pay For It All, the answer is no one wants this: www.wired.com/story/the-ai...

Trying something new: A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?" It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social 🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...

Playing with local vision models this morning and it is convinced that the consolidated financial statement of the local housing authority contains a whole lot of stuff that is not there. Off to a great start.

Great moments in midwestern interview transcripts.

Civic duty ✅

I'm playing with using R and AI to do some data journalism tasks. Come for the third-degree-burn of Husker football haikus, stay for the nuclear powered choropleth maps: mattwaite.github.io/posts/a-simp...

I may genuinely miss the Dumb Siri Era.

AI hype is stupid and out of control and meaningless all at the same time, washer/dryer combo edition: Let AI wash and dry your clothes, not those silly cycles we’ve had for decades.

in honor of D-Day, I'd like to drop maybe my favorite piece of college football shit talk from the 1940s. This is a leaflet that UCLA folks were passing out to visiting Nebraska fans when they came to visit in 1946.