I want to share with you the advice an Indonesian chef just gave me regarding grinding spice mixes: the pastier the tastier

Never would have imagined the term “Butlerian Jihad” diffusing into everyday language

There’s a deeper skill that goes beyond specific technical expertise: can you articulate a problem you are facing with words such that others can understand it? You know the folks who just say “it’s not working” and give no details? They can’t prompt.

Finally, a sicko that I can identify with. Thanks to The Onion for this gem.

<rant> I can tell when a candidate is using an AI assistant in an interview. It’s obvious and insulting. It’s also incredibly common now. I’m at the point where if I saw a typo in a resume I would consider it a positive.

It is so nice to be living in Melbourne’s West where they have proper grocery stores selling the essentials

I judge people by whether they throw the ball for my dog when he asks

If it’s a personal tech blog you can just put in photos of whatever you want and no one can stop you. Anyone who reads my blog posts is also looking at my painted Warhammer models

Seeing a typo or an awkward phrasing in an email is like a breath of fresh air. A human being wrote this! This is an artisanal, organic, free-range email! I’m going to give it extra attention.

I’m YIMBY about housing and NIMBY about cars

I regret to inform you that consultants have started using the word “agentify”

New Murderbot and new Imperial Radch in May! It’s a good month to be a sci fi fan

What a lovely exploration of the sphere packing problem

I cannot believe this works. I’m both proud of my creation, and horrified by it.

I don’t have access to R in my CI/CD pipeline, so I’m recreating `R CMD build` in bash. This thing is going to be held together with duct tape and prayers

Pandoc is pure sorcery. Imagine all of the markdown -> HTML conversion pain we haven’t had to think about

Finally got around to removing this sign that the previous owners had installed in the shed. What herb do I need to burn to cleanse the space now?

Listening to NASA nerds talk about sensors and algorithms and receivers is so soothing

Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war

I watched Theroux’s manosphere documentary followed by a documentary on an eccentric Icelandic man running the world’s only phallological museum, and it felt like the message for men was “fill your heart with hate, or fill it with weird hobbies”. And the hobbies route looked so much healthier

After a decade of Game of Thrones style edginess (people are self-interested, trust no one, power is everything) I’m enjoying Strange New Worlds and The Pitt. Shows about highly skilled people with good values trying to get through impossible situations

Painted this one up as a gift. Tried to make the fire reflect on the armour and terrain

Here’s everything you need to know about AI that you can learn from people posting on LinkedIn:

Tableau files too! One time Tableau broke because of a change in database host, because for some reason Tableau hangs when data sources are unavailable (seriously). I wrote a little script to unzip, replace the database host, and rezip. Worked perfectly.

When I wake up at 2am for a meeting with the US and someone asks me how I’m doing

We turned away from the light when we invented a way to go online without the computer screaming in warning.

Google search has fallen so far. Searching for any sort of visa information on Google: an entire page of SEO junk from websites trying to sell visa middle-man services. Searching on Kagi: top result is the official Government website.

If you are ever building software that deals with peoples’ names please please please consider implementing support for “preferred name”

Look, I’m not anti-LLM or anything, but maybe this is a bit too much?

Cursed. Blasphemous. Heresy. An affront to the functional gods.

The sql database was doing some weird thing where it was swapping days with months, so I just swapped them in R before uploading and everything is all fixed now 👌🏻

I have to be involved in every part of the data science stack because someone else might get it wrong

My dog had his birthday last week, so now he’s middle-aged, and sure enough I see this…

Hey you know those 20 lines of painful data manipulation in your code? There’s a tidyr one-liner that does the same thing.

I think about this tweet whenever I’m stressed. Everything does, indeed, happen so much

I cannot get over just how bad a product Copilot is. I’m drafting an email, I click the Copilot button *in Outlook*, and Copilot doesn’t have access to the draft. I feel like I could accurately describe the Microsoft KPIs that lead to this disaster.

Oooh the Positron devtools::test() view is pretty neat! Especially if you ignore all the red crosses, whatever those mean.

I love APIs

Remembering the time my local council got rid of all the geese at the lake and claimed they took them “to a farm”. When pressed for proof of life, they posted a generic photo of some geese at a farm.

My wife is a victim of this. She married someone with no interest in Warhammer, and now he has three armies

There’s something so grim about seeing a high-schooler on LinkedIn. Like, you shouldn’t be subject to this. You shouldn’t be networking and boasting about 9-9-6 culture. You should be free.

I saw this idea on a random blog ages ago and I had to steal it for my own website. Rather than editing out tangents, use some CSS to put them in the margin!

Doing something a bit different this year. I’m writing blog posts that have nothing to do with code or corporate. Just a guy posting whatever he wants to his own website because that’s how the internet should be. So here’s a post about painting Warhammer! mdneuzerling.com/post/paintin...

It’s called ‘vs code’ because the code is an enemy you are fighting

Did you make a web app that redirects to the home page if the user turns their attention away from the app for more than a few seconds? If so, I hope you never get a good night of sleep ever again.

After 9 years, I thought it was time for another major release of the forecast package for #rstats! New modelling functions, missing values now handled in ETS models, and a more consistent interface. robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/fo...

Teams mobile has replaced the “mark as unread” button with a Copilot button so that’s nice

There are now at least 5 Microsoft products called “Copilot”

If I ever posted a picture of myself in a hospital bed on LinkedIn, I would want my friends and family to stage an intervention