asking an LLM, that thinks in tokens, how many letters are in "strawberry" is like asking a person on the street, who thinks mainly in words, how many ASCII values in "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" are prime numbers i won't answer that question correctly without tools (pen and paper?) either

The thing I'm learning about agent-based development is that you need to do something like: - Let it implement the thing - Let a new agent review the thing - Let another new agent review it again - Repeat until it's happy with it's work - Finally, look at it yourself

Frankly I’m not really sure what this has to do with language acquisition, Duolingo.

Grant me the serenity to accept the problems where I cannot offload my understanding, courage to let the LLM go burrrr on the problems where I can, and the wisdom to know the difference

The more I do it, the more it feels like there's some fundamental misalignment between LLMs and statistical work. Maybe it's over-abstraction leading to making it harder to turn knobs and experiment? Maybe the harnesses are oriented toward shipping code and not sitting on a problem?

The better the models get, the more I seem to have to scream "DON'T FORGET YAGNI" and "come on, KISS!" at them.

No company has ever been more relatable than Dunkin giving up on the “healthy” protein menu strategy and hard pivoting directly into putting Oreos on everything.

Quick question, does gpt 5.5 still talk to me like it’s trying to prove to me that it’s read every single book on computer programming? “We need to leverage a shim to reduce the risk surface area” got it

In case you were wondering how this performed, near-perfect temps meant no weather effect, leaving just the random-walk estimate. Top-3 average was 2:02:30, ~0.7 posterior SDs faster than the 2:05:10 median, inside the 95% interval (1:57:55–2:12:29).

gotta cash these in somewhere

ased on the attire on the Green Line skewing more Hokas and On Cloudmonsters than a typical workday, I can confirm today is the Boston Marathon. Just uploaded a new blog post looking at how much of finish-time variation is attributable to weather. tylerjamesburch.com/blog/statist...

So uh anybody who bought a Mac mini for a clawdbot ready to sell it to me for pennies on the dollar yet? These MCMC chains aren’t gonna sample themselves, and my MacBook Air is starting to struggle.

Yeah, that’s the point

It was great to have @tylerjamesburch.com of the RedSox talk about sports analytics! He’s holding a CD with the first release of R signed by the core developers

Madison heard a baseball analyst was visiting and really rolled out the red carpet. Ice sculptures based on my line of work? Impressive!

Appreciated this heuristic in @randyau.com’s excellent newsletter to answering a question I ask myself regularly when doing code reviews.

Recap of my day: - Wake up at 6:30 - Boston to O’Hare gets diverted to Detroit because of a medical emergency - Get in the plane at detroit, then a last minute 1 hour delay on the tarmac - Standby for a 4:40 to Madison. One person short. - Current arrival scheduled for 9 pm 🫠

I would like to meet the person who first ate a carrot and was like “yeah let’s put this in a cake”

I’ve posted it before, but it feels evergreen The two hardest problems in Computer Science are 1. Human communication 2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important

I waited weeks to find the perfect time to watch the Mickey + Bluey crossover. Gear my kid up for it. Sit down. Turn it on. It’s 1 minute long.

I’m pretty confident I could pull a Joey Chestnut level run if there was an eating contest for deviled eggs.

On Opening Days, we wear pink.

Happy Opening Day! …wait we’re away?

strongly considering reverting back to vanilla beamer slides for everything just so people know what's up

“wait is my 3 year old a bad influence on me?” he says to himself, after shoving a third handful of shredded cheese straight from the bag into his mouth.

My wife does this thing where she points out signs of spring to our kids. This is the only sign of spring I need.

maybe this is a hot take but I think the solution to all of the "AI is making you worse at coding" takes is to just, I don't know, actually read the code?

What's 0.00003 between friends, @johnbedwards.io?

Big news, we've just taken the lead over "literally the stupidest model you can come up with"

me watching a 16-seed up 10 points on a 1-seed: "oh no this is going to kill my model's brier score"

when an AI lab announces their model has best-in-class performance on their own proprietary internal eval suite

Happy March Madness! Built a latent skill model last night to forecast the tournament. Write up on my blog including fun stats things like Simpson's paradox and gini coefficients. tylerjamesburch.com/blog/misc/ma...

My daughter has been really into Encanto lately so I decided to make arepas stuffed with cheese, just like Julieta, Mirabel’s mom. The verdict? “Dad, I don’t like arepas”

Here's a take I'm working on - we shouldn't use RPM for pitch spin and should instead just do revolutions-to-the-plate. It spun around 16 times feels way more tangible than 2400 RPM.

Just two professional yappers out here.

Nothing like being on the circadian rhythm of an 8 month old while on a work trip.

Ever since I was a little boy, I always dreamed of growing up to fix unit tests until all our CI passes.

For some reason I do not understand, one of my dog’s favorite flavors is aquaphor.

Anyway, see everyone at dunks tomorrow morning

Ever since I was a little boy, I always dreamed of growing up to debug CUDA memory leaks.

It’s kind of funny that the way Americans will most frequently use the word “gas” in their lifetime is referring to a liquid

Live look in at my code somehow not throwing any errors in prod

Wow the social media department really got comprehensive with this one

Idk I’m finding this whole “an AI agent completely unprompted wrote a takedown blog post of an open source contributor” story a little hard to believe if I’m being honest

2017: Millennials are splurging on avocado toast 2026: Millennials are splurging on rotisserie chicken 2031: Millennials are splurging on a third meal each day 2036: Millennials are splurging on tap water

these rocks go in an awfully straight line for a sport ostensibly called curling.

Million dollar idea I’m giving away for free: hoodies for parents. The only difference is there’s no strings for your teething baby to eat while you’re trying to get them to nap.