I just learned about mapspast.org.nz So cool. Go wherever and then use the layers control to explore what old maps are available there.

scientists rule www.bbc.com/news/article...

Also … the better your data, the less fancy your analysis needs to be. You can do good work by spending a lot of effort to collect really good data.

Always. Count. The. Rows. It has saved me from so many stupid mistakes.

Genuine life-changing opportunity to become the Programme Manager for the Pacific Data Hub. Based in lovely Nouméa, New Caledonia; responsible for driving regional data stewardship, innovation and sustainable impact. And free of income tax. careers.spc.int/xMiWgK/progr...

Consumer prices rose 3.3% year on year, with prices for imported goods rising by *tackled by an FCC employee*

Jumping on AI just as the bubble is about to burst ...

Ouch, NZ real GDP per capita was -2.1% for the year ended June 2025 vs the year ended June 2024. Since percentages are a bit abstract, that's about -$1,700 per person in today's money.

MBIE has released the external economic advice it received about banning credit card surcharges. I haven't read the full report but here are the key findings. Basically, it's a bad idea because it will reduce competition and benefit the credit card operators. www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/...

Good news; bad news www.stats.govt.nz/news/annual-...

The world is shit. I planted seeds.

A visualisation of typical R code for data cleaning with |>

Local candidates: it's not much help telling us you're married with 3 kids and have run your own business. I need to know where you stand on issues: fluoridation, cycleways, water, homelessness, climate change mitigation, housing density, libraries, and which issues you care about most.

You seldom see an army of jellyfish attacking a solar farm, do you?

Got routine blood test results back on the same day. Some parts of the NZ public health system seem to be still functioning well.

Today in data janitor land: This number in Excel appears to have leading spaces. But TRIM() won't remove them. Why? Because they're non-breaking spaces. But SUBSTITUTE() with CHAR(160) (non-breaking space) won't remove them either. Why?! Because they're actually CHAR(202). Why??! F*cked if I know.

was reminded today of the greatness that is ohshitgit.com and how it consistently saves my ass whenever I get into git trouble - the memorable domain name certainly helps! (thank you @ksylor.bsky.social)

Expertise is having fucked up in enough different ways that you become able to anticipate it.

Coder tests his productivity with and without AI, collects data and makes charts to argue AI assisted coding is a hype. Great data journalism

3 more months! And this is pretty funny from Auckland Council. I presume they mean the first opening day rather than being open in general. But still, not something that a properly functioning city should say. www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

Hey, so, it now costs $63.60 to ship a tshirt to US, where it cost $32 before. It’s also going to cost me an upgraded Shopify plan (way more expensive) and hours to rework my shipping system to integrate the new changes I just can’t do that right now and I also doubt anyone wants to pay that much.

Speculators gonna speculate

"This is one of the clumsiest and most embarrassing attempts to evade answering a question I’ve seen from any business leader, for a long time." is what you get with expert reporting commentary that is not just repeating press releases.

I don't think its even unfreezing. the project has been going ahead for some time, i think it's just a re-announcement of a thing that's already happening. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/tec...

The newly announced $7.5 billion Amazon data centre investment in NZ is just the unfreezing of its investment announced in 2021 that was paused in 2024, right? newsroom.co.nz/2024/03/01/a...

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Today's working at home highlight was watching the road marking truck repaint the lines on our street. It looks like they use a UV light or something to instantly cure the paint 😎

We always thought the problem with AI was that it was going to be smarter than us and replace us. But now, we're staring down the barrel of AI that stunt our learning, starve our artists, and replace our knowledge with slop. It'll become smarter than us just by making us dumber.

I was the executive director of U.S. Open Data, a non-profit that I created at the behest of the Obama White House. I worked as one of the nation's leading experts in open data. Putting open data on the blockchain is a profoundly stupid idea that fails nearly every test of good open data.

Also where are the product safety and consumer protection regulators in this? Compare AI with children’s pyjamas for example.

This is what $8 worth of potatoes looks like in a NZ supermarket. 🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔

This is the best macroeconomic meme I’ve seen. Hands down.

Things you can monger: 1) War 2) Fear 3) Hate 4) Rumour 5) Cheese

We can have lower tariffs now please? www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

I would really like to help Watercare improve their usage estimation algorithm

I'm seeing a lot of 5 percent flying around about #AI. The productivity commission estimated this would be approximately the impact in Australia. Jack Clarke from Anthropic estimates a 3-5 percent impact on growth. Acemoglu estimated less than 2%. I'd be very surprised if it's more than this.

Why use AI in Excel when you can just use =RAND() ?

I feel slightly off kilter every time I get an email from a real person that reads like it's in the "AI voice". Maybe it's something I'll get used to and stop noticing? Maybe it's a fad that will pass and people will stop doing that? Maybe the AI will get better and be less noticeable?

I don't think children should have phones. They should have huge beige desktop computer with "Windows 9x Operating System", "Dedicated 3D accelerator", and "SoundBlaster compatible sound card"

Weekend gardening at our house

Tuning in to the White House press conference livestream from Alaska and the thought actually crossed my mind that I should find a more reliable source?

This is good and helps to explain why LLM text is so meh hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/how-to-tel...

If you buy online from Nutrition Warehouse NZ, beware they will sneakily add a $3 “shipping insurance” to your cart

After all these years, I am still discovering maddening things about Excel. Here the true and false values are text, but SUMIFS insists on treating "true" as a logical TRUE, so it fails.

co-signed (in my 8 years of statistical consulting, clustering has not solved anyone’s problem)

Please share this article I wrote with any person who seeks answers for AI chatbot malfunctions by asking the chatbots themselves: arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/w... They don't know, they can't tell you, so don't ask.

Ihaka Lectures poster in the wild! Details here: www.auckland.ac.nz/en/science/a...

For context, here's the statistics that the BLS produces (from Wikipedia)

Is it normal for dental treatment plans to swap left and right, and does this ever lead to mistakes?!

Maybe it's just our school, but voting in the board election this year (run by a private company) has been a total shemozzle