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

Migrating from Goodreads to StoryGraph and the latter lets me mark a book as DNF. It’s a small feature but I appreciate it!

New blog post: Death, taxes, and tech workers hounding you to raise a ticket. In which I share some thoughts on those ticketing systems that everyone hates but that must exist. mdneuzerling.com/post/death-t...

I ended up vibe coding a new static site generator. 1100 lines of bash. Zero JavaScript. Pages load in under a second: mdneuzerling.com

Going through some old blog posts and I think this is my greatest contribution to data visualisation

My blog is completely broken. Years of neglecting hugo updates have caught up with me. Even setting up a new theme won’t work. I’m at the point where I strongly suspect that vibe coding a new static site generator might be easier.

Currently reading a book, 30% of the way through, and they’ve killed off FOUR wives to motivate the male characters. Perhaps writers will one day discover a way to motivate male characters without killing off wives. Not today, though.

When I was house hunting last year I came across a listing with a car space. There was no car space. I asked the real estate agent and they said that, in theory, you could knock down the back fence and install a parking space in the courtyard, so they listed it as having one.

I thought I’d play a nice pirate-themed video game to relax during my break from work. But one of the side quests involves hiring a management consultant to take you and your crew through compliance training. They brought a white board onto my pirate ship.

I regret to inform you that I made aspic salad for Christmas

One of the reasons I get pushback on using the targets R package is because of complexity. People see a pipeline and think it’s complex because of targets, but actually it uses targets because it’s complex! You have to use *something* to manage that.

Many hours of carefully highlighting horse musculature

“the hidden, back-alley world of the online forum Discord” - from Australia’s preeminent newspaper for geriatrics, the AFR

How do y’all discover new release books, particularly sci fi and fantasy? Every source I can find online seems to be marketing or astroturfed. Is there a secret society of nerds who like space ships and books?

Called it

Python whinge: it is absolutely bizarre to me that Python packages can be named things that the language itself considers invalid, eg. I write `pip install scikit-learn` but I can’t write `import scikit-learn`

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

My picks for Game of the Year GotY: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Best Narrative: COE33 Best Score and Music: COE33 Best Role Playing Game: COE33 Best Art Direction: COE33 Best game that made me feel like I was a child again and playing Final Fantasy X for the first time: COE33

I would have thought that the trick of having my LinkedIn name as “📊 David” to identify spammers would have stopped working after 5 years, but it’s still going strong. “Hi 📊 David, I was reading your profile and you would be perfect for this role…”

‘Instead of “I’d be grateful for any help you can provide”, you could say “Any guidance you could share would be greatly appreciated” to sound even more collaborative and appreciative’ Wow, thanks Copilot. You’ve upped my email game. Cannot believe how uncollaborative I was being before /s

Everyone is talking about AI and ignoring the biggest technological innovation of our time: the Bureau of Meteorology finally setting up SSL

Any system that allows exchanging real money for stuff with an element of chance is morally equivalent to a casino. Corollary: Pokémon cards, Roblox, Labubus, and even claw machines should all be 18+

It is morally acceptable to deface or obscure any advertising material in public spaces

Yesssss random forests. Gradient boosting the is the stage where I mostly get the concept but my understanding isn’t 100% clear. But random forests are the most complicated models where I feel like I properly understand them top to the bottom.

I’d already bought this new Warhammer 40K book but now it’s shot straight to the top of my reading list

Today I’m going back to the true data science, the core aspect that defines data science, the very root of all things data science (trawling through xml files for data)

Just saw a romcom novel described as “strangers-to-lovers” and I am genuinely confused as to what the alternative would be?

Aw yeah that’s what charts were designed for

Experimenting with a custom made static site generator. Super simple stuff: a build script that uses pandoc to convert markdown to HTML and then spatchcock it into a template file. Surprisingly successful so far

At this point I’ve just made peace with the fact that divs cannot be centred and I’m much happier for it. Blessed is the mind too small for CSS

LLMs have got me doubting my sanity. Y’all call spronions “spronions”, don’t you?

The worst thing about notebooks isn’t that they’re an incentive to write horrendously unstructured code, but that they displace proper IDEs. Lots of data science tooling is built with a mindset of “data scientists only use Jupyter”. Plz I just want directories and plain-text files

I don’t want kids “pushing to main”. What are they pushing? It could be drugs.

No, Australia does not need new cities. My new essay sets the record straight: we have a lot of cities, but we aren’t using them as well as we could be. To make our cities more successful, we have to open up a lot more land for commercial uses to enable agglomeration.

Once again explaining to my overseas colleagues that we have public holidays for football and for celebrating animal abuse. One day they’re going to call me out on this

Every programmer dreams about this day and it’s finally happening to me: one of my bullshit abstractions made a future change easier than it would have been otherwise

Why is it that universities don’t want to offer their Master of Economics course online, but are willing to offer a degree in clinical ultrasound online? How does that work?

Why do you think this NIMBY considers London, New York and Los Angeles to be good, but Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Mexico City are bad? What's the difference? What could be the distinguishing factors there? What a mystery!

The neighbourhood kids have invented a game called “Wizards vs. Snipers”. The Wizards have summoned zombies, which is a rookie error because the Snipers are “casting headshot”

I’m running trouble with Python’s philosophy of “there should be multiple ways to do it”. I want a function to work with both pandas and polars columns, so I need to import both in my module even though users will only be importing one? That can’t possibly be right.