So many layers in Daisy Hay’s essay about the friendship between Edmund Burke and Charles Fox. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I enjoyed (insofar as one can enjoy something so sobering) Meager’s latest missive, and cackled at the Drake bits. And having only read the Headley Beowulf, I must now seek out the others!

to be honest half the reason i wrote this post is that about a year ago i wrote this sick series of disses on drake and i got tired of having them buried on my hard drive but i needed a vehicle worthy of them

This week on Counting Stuff. Layoffs! I'm in search for a job now! It sucks but here we are! Now's the ideal time to give me money in exchange for time or a project. Or if you just have leads in quantitative/data/researchy positions across NYC or remotely www.counting-stuff.com/looking-for-...

NEW: Anthropic will start training its AI models on user data, including new chat transcripts & coding sessions, unless users choose to opt out by 9/28 (it's a pop-up window that will give you the choice). It’s also extending its data retention to 5 years. www.theverge.com/anthropic/76...

it's been a long time coming, but i'm happy to share that my latest creative project is finally here... @anisota.net is an experimental social client (and game!) for Bluesky and the AT Protocol i built it for me because i'm kinda weird and needed an equally weird way to experience social media 🕯️

Welcome. Anisota is here. Step inside. 🕯️ anisota.net 🕯️

Great concert review or the greatest concert review? www.instagram.com/p/DNBn_gGSJ9...

Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters. Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page name to find interesting starting points for exploration. lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

It published! "How to Create Your Own RAG Applications in R" This uses the latest version of the {ragnar} #RStats 📦 - there were a lot of changes this month - and also {ellmer}. It even uses dplyr-like metadata filtering! www.infoworld.com/article/4020... #GenAI

Anthropic let Claude run a vending machine business at their HQ. People tricked it into buying a bunch of tungsten steel cubes that it sold at a loss. www.anthropic.com/research/pro...

I put together an annotated version of the new Claude 4 system prompt, covering both the prompt Anthropic published and the missing, leaked sections that describe its various tools It's basically the secret missing manual for Claude 4, it's fascinating! simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/...

Causation requires explicit direct effects. It is not causation for two events to be associated unless all confounders are eliminated, all mediators controlled, and a direct effect isolated—a true causal relationship. Terms matter. Scientific rigor matters. Regardless of what "common sense" wants.

What a massively disappointing article. We have research on the effectiveness of fertility policies. Surprise surprise, it’s the policy they fail to mention even once in the piece: child care. Why solicit ideas when they can solicit proven solutions? www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/u...

Eliminating Head Start. Laying off all the CDC employs who work on lead poisoning. Discrediting childhood vaccines during a measles outbreak. Cutting funds for school lunches. A look at some of the under-the-radar ways the Trump administration is waging war on America's children: wapo.st/4jcUg2f

A friend asked what he should do about his obsession with seaweed. I said, “Sea Kelp”.

Draft “A Practical Guide to Estimating Conditional Marginal Effects: Modern Approaches” is on arXiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01355 w/ two amazing grad students, Jiehan_Liu & Ziyi Liu 🧵

You probably don't often turn to the survey methodology world for a good detective story, but here is one from my colleague Anna Brown pewrsr.ch/4isAu2s

PEOPLE OF BLUESKY! Ahhhhhh, it smells good here. Behold a trailer for season 2 of Poker Face! It’s gonna be a good one. May 8th on the almighty Peacock!

Within government institutions, for private research orgs and universities, the result will be the same: fewer researchers, less research.

Whelp ed research orgs had mass lay-offs yesterday Mathematica: www.linkedin.com/posts/mathem... MDRC: www.linkedin.com/posts/mdrc_t... NORC: www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-ga... RTI: www.linkedin.com/posts/no%C3%... Westat: www.linkedin.com/posts/westat... WestEd: www.linkedin.com/posts/amyhre...

Subsidizing child care is bad, and letting people get guns to shoot up elementary schools is good, that's the world we live in now.

Enthralling set from John Holiday on NPR Tiny Desk that really deserves more views. I was enraptured by his rendition of Strange Fruit youtu.be/PYcn36-k7lw

Fellow US immigrants and nonimmigrants: INA 264(e) requires us to keep our “evidence of registration” on our person at all times. I am sure you have always scrupulously observed that requirement, but it’s extra important now. List of acceptable evidence:

Some rough notes on how I program with LLMs and on how tooling can make it better. crawshaw.io/blog/program...

I tried the streaming mode as Simon suggested and was astonished. Simon's demo (link in thread below) is very neat too.

Last year I started an annual "R Trivia Night" at our org's R Users Group as a fun way to close out the year. In prepping for this year's, I'm reviewing my (diabolical) questions from the inaugural event. Enjoy. #rstats (answers as of Dec. 18, 2023)

I have a joke about sampling, but not everyone gets it.

Anthropic released a "computer use" feature for Claude earlier this week. The idea is that you spin up a VM and Claude interacts with it via a virtual mouse/keyboard. Being in the surveys business I immediately wondered if Claude would be good at doing web surveys and... sorta? youtu.be/wGtZA1oIE5I

A useful suggestion when I asked how to avoid my feed being dominated by a few very frequent posters was the Quiet Posters feed. bsky.app/profile/why.... A satisfying one-feed solution doesn't seem to exist (at least yet). None are perfect, so I toggle between a few, including this one.

Econ's hottest new club is "Blue Sky," it's got everything: @jmorenocruz.bsky.social, GIF capability, and 3 new @dacemoglumit.bsky.social papers written since he announced moving over

No, thank you for letting me go off.