“I hate opus 4.8 and it hates me” yes!!! Yes!!!!! Sickos dot jpeg

New paper "To select or not to select: predictively consistent priors instead of model selection" with Anna Elisabeth Riha, Leevi Lindgren, @davidkohns.bsky.social, @paulbuerkner.com arxiv.org/abs/2606.22850 Model selection is not a substitute for building good models in the first place 1/

My friend Kash Ramli at UNICEF is looking to put together a list of pre-approved behavioural data science consultants to work with on a regular basis. He is thoughtful, smart and down to earth & I keep trying to work with him myself. You can apply here: www.linkedin.com/posts/kashra...

"He's been having the mullet" Proof that migrant families understand the essence of Australian cultural life better than a certain senator. Go Socceroos. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Going to start explaining heated rivalry to Australians by saying imagine if Shane Warne and Mike Gatting had also somehow been in a secret relationship when the ball of the century happened

"In somewhat different ways, they desperately want a movement of big, burly steelworkers and rugged coalminers. But there are more manicurists than miners in the UK by a 2:1 margin. Their image of the working class is an aesthetic...unconnected from the reality of life for most working people."

I continue to be impressed by the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, focusing on important innovations, rather than always trying to tease out individuals. Here it is given to the R project. Particular shout out to Brian Ripley whose contribution to the statistical commons was massive.

good adam grant is back

Your now-monthly reminder that "normal" people in both the Early Modern Period and Middle Ages married at roughly the same age as we do, and that to the best of our knowledge *no* Western European society has *ever had* an average age at first marriage below 20 years old:

Yet again www.nber.org/papers/w3535...

philosophy mutuals how bad is it if i semi jokingly refer to spinoza as the person who invented minding your own business

Early Modern Social Media in situ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The 8-y.o. called me morally bankrupt this morning, so I had to explain the difference between insolvency and illiquidity.

i love it when orwell deploys "heterogeneous" in his writing. tremendous.

i think there are a lot of people who would find it very hard to believe that the field of economics could produce this paper. and yet! Acemoglu is like the mainstreamest and most successful economist working today. some priors could use an update. www.nber.org/papers/w35336

i have verified to my own satisfaction that passports did not used to say your gender (eg library.csun.edu/sca/peek-sta...) but does anyone have a credible source for why and how it got added? I assume this happened with the standardisation in the 80s.... so .... the 80s ruined ... everything....

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing." (from essay 1)

"On screens we live a life starved of cyans."

Today I went to a citizenship party for a Somali friend who came by boat as a 17yo & was on Christmas Island for nearly a year. While there she started a newsletter to cheer up other detainees there. 13 years later she is finally safe 1/ www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

In memory of the great David Hockney here’s his 1971 drawing of the anthropologist Edmund Leach of @kingscollege.bsky.social I love the focus on the frames of his glasses

lmao poor yorick. they got his ass

Bayesian summer school!!!!

“I’m a Gemini, too. But not like this.”

Administration is stumbling towards a debacle. Millions of U.S. businesses & local govts use the threatened data to make better investment decisions. It's like gouging out our own eyes for no reason. www.npr.org/2026/06/12/n...

"When Alaric the Visigoth held Rome to ransom in 408 ad, he demanded, on top of gold, not silk but 3000 lbs of black pepper." www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

🫡

why is MCR's Teenagers so good. I was never a big MCR fan and not sure i could name another song of theirs (maybe black parade... maybe i have heard others...) but that song is just so good.

It's masked in language designed to evoke sympathy but in reality, this person is saying, "I found out this product I own is defective. Can I take it back and get a new one?"

“Possibly” selfishly ???????

I simply do not believe that Microsoft can lose 20000000000 bazilblahlahblah on AI every month but needs to fire everyone who makes videogames for them like they’re a mom and pop diner

Troubling reports out of England of 30 year-olds being socially transitioned into same-sex attraction without parental consent! One can only hope that the UK bans coming out as gay until a child is at least 35!

This is just way too common. The activities of the administration are considered above reproach and not in need of justification or even recording. Meanwhile teaching, research and learning, the core functions of the institution, are scrutinized officiously.

I love weird little sliding doors moments in history 🥹 Bob Brown tries to join the Libs but can't be arsed going back later, goes on to become one of Australia's best brains ( Inside the Greens from Paddy Manning, very good, very chunky)

The trillion-dimensional Brownian motion that determines the cosmic order of all things is one sick son of a bitch

let the under 16s on bluesky so that i can educate them about corner quotes

NZ should be able to do a haka before they start, like in the rugby. As a compromise, maybe a soccer version, where after the initial challenge they grip their ankle and fall to the ground in apparent agony.

prof Meager with the pedagogy the people yearn for (Bayesian diss tracks)

it's just because he went to law school at Yale. however, he is so dumb and feckless that it should force you to negatively update on Yale law, not positively update on him.

The djinn that lives inside the English language !

My annoying preachy World Cup-inspired take: African-Australians are doing so much for this country and there is close to 0 organised African studies in Australian universities.

If you are in the audience of a talk and your laptop makes a noise and you don’t immediately slam the mute button — ideally with a sense of harried shame — then I have nothing in common with you and i never want to

My aunt reporting on her morning in Zaporizhzhia: ‘made my coffee just as the air raid sirens started blaring and explosions began. Went to stand in the corridor as recommended for safety. But the coffee was getting cold, so I thought eff it and went back to the kitchen.’ Ukrainian resilience

the reactionary centrists have found a home on the political compass

I'm in Rabat for the ESA / Bayesian Experimental Summer School and I just heard a maghreb owl call! There's a lot of greenery near the UM6P campus. Incredible way to start.

People will be like ‘I think tantric bdsm is weird’ and then try to publish in peer-reviewed journals

Maybe we don’t have to report on provocative new working papers

I just realised that this is basically the issue in all democracies because normies don't pay attention to politics and are insane. Huh.

While many appreciate waffles, and in this paper I offer no objections to them, my present purposes allow me nevertheless to focus exclusively on pancakes.* *My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.

bringing back the Shakespearean "coz"