I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

Actually... from my reading of the artists' basic income report, the government did not earn money back from the scheme (although its costs were offset 37%) Most gains were societal and came from putting the artists' improvements in wellbeing in € terms assets.gov.ie/static/docum...

"Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a $440,000 report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement."

This is the single most overrated image on the internet. Pisses me off how every time I see it, it has thousands of Likes.

I went to the new Book Hero store today. It's not huge or fancy but it makes me so happy that an actual physical real-life book store has opened near where I live bookhero.co.nz

Ah, the joy of freelance life. A couple of 2026 funding pools have just dried up, so if anyoneʻs interested in a project with a Wikipedian, now’s the time to get in touch. www.rove.wiki

Thanks to you Aaron, I now have the Bee Gees stuck in my head: It’s just your vibe workin’, you’re telling me lies, yeah; vibe workin’, you wear a disguise…

There is absolutely no way I am ever doing something called “vibe working”. Apart from sounding stupid, it demeans the people who pay for my work. www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros...

Good news! Or at least, not bad news www.ft.com/content/6e0e...

Am I missing something, or is Woolworths New Zealand really selling wrapped onions for about 2.5x the price of loose onions?

Payment surcharge ban will raise prices www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/payment-s... Payment surcharge ban will raise prices, reduce competition between big and small businesses, officials warned We warned you. Hiding the problem doesn’t fix the problem.

These words that Nigel Latta wrote in 2015 have always stayed with me

Enes Yilmazer usually does tours of luxury properties and superyachts but this tour of a container ship is pretty interesting youtu.be/10bTq3KhjaY

Craig Mod walks are some of my favourite things

Great pointer from @nrennie.bsky.social on making data visualisations We as makers spend hours with the data and creating the visualisation, but we need to consider those who are looking for 5 seconds #WOMBAT2025 #dataviz

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Looks like my favorite paper on the age trajectory of happiness is finally out!!! So happy for the authors. Go check it out, it’s great.

Data Science programs often put too little emphasis on causal inference, and it’s hurting their graduates on the job market! The econometrics people are coming for your jobs lol

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.