Rubin's gonna Rubin, but Robins Rubins harder.

virtue signalling is good actually

This, to me, is Blueskyism

someone call georg

sometimes i like to lecture kids about the lost discipline of human factors: 'they used to watch users interact with the program and then they'd *make the program work the way the users needed it to* instead of making users adapt to random, meaningless changes'

The camcorder package helps. Check this out from @rfortherestofus.com : rfortherestofus.com/2024/09/prev...

Nintendo Gamma Boy

Haha, this from the New Yorker is getting passed around the math dork community. I did a comic about this kind of thought a few years ago: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/commut...

Finnur Dellsén got a nice pic of me on my standard Q&A slide, so now I have a stock reply to any time anyone disagrees with me.

people often confuse sentimentality with kindness. being sentimental is easy and common. being kind is hard and rare

AI tells you what you want to hear, statisticians usually tell you what you don't want to hear

The advances we've made in statistics, experimental study design, and causal inference over the past century are remarkably useful for understanding our world. But there is never been a push to make people use them like we are seeing with generative AI. Perhaps take a moment to consider why.

FUCK YEAH

instantly knew what paper this was from because we used to use it as a teaching example

I do wish Australian businesses would stop using the American “Black Friday Sale” Black Friday has a whole other meaning in Australia it’s an insult to the dead en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_F...

i don't know half of you half as well as i'd like, and i like less than half of you half as well as you deserve

I've long criticised the dehumanising and patriarchal partner income test embedded everywhere in the Australian welfare state. The tax on love really does hurt families, and has a real impact on relationship formation or termination. www.reddit.com/r/Centrelink...

in an editorial meeting this morning I got to introduce two people to this, one of my all-time favourites, relevant to infinite subjects in science, writing, and intellectual life

responding to reviewers like

they're just making Mamdani sound even cooler than he is tbh

I don't think men should live and die in Los Angeles. I think when they do it they're reinforcing necromancy.

this is so confusing, surely people born in the 90s aren't even eligible to vote yet, let alone run for office *checks calendar* oh shit, turns out I'm just Old

Oh

happy 11th anniversary to this email sent to all staff at the School of Mathematics and Statistics

“it’s 2025, surely nobody could still be using ‘password’ as their password” the louvre: hold our baguette

all i can see is goatse dot cx

fortunately (?) I became a homeowner during a global pandemic so I'm pretty sure I'll be immune to this particular form of centrism

Obviously biased here but I recently restarted my PhD, similar topic but different supervisors I was very much against restarting it until I realized I had no good reasons left not to restart it: I have funding, excellent and supportive supervisors, a lot of academic freedom, etc.

Just over 2 weeks to go until the Australian Trials Methodology Conference! Join us on 20th November in Melbourne (or online) to hear the latest developments in clinical trial methodology! #atmc25 @austrim-cre.bsky.social www.atmc25.com/home

once again seeking others' opinions to guide my life choices: of those who dropped out of a PhD or converted to Masters, did anyone subsequently complete a PhD with a different topic and supervisors? thoughts for or against this path?

found the random seeds used in the opening scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

occasionally UTC inserts leap seconds to keep time in sync with the earth's rotation, which is not quite exactly 24 hours. computers HATE this one weird trick

i know of no reason why November season should ever be forgot

I'm not lazy, I'm just executive dysfunction maxxing.

Mirror by Rita Dove 🤍 #poetry #sunday #poetrysky #smallpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

While outlining what LLM uses they are allowed, I told my current students that I will never use LLMs for any class related activities, including correspondence and marking/feedback. They seemed reassured. Why I should even need to say that is just nuts though.

im ngl "weirdo" is a word that reeks of subtle biphobia and we should probably expunge it from our vocabularies.

If it's really about the predictions, make it relevant to the workflow. If it's more about spurring critical thinking, focus on what information adds value (I now disagree with some of the findings from my own paper :( pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39223512/)

from a person, it would be obviously manipulative (not just chatgpt, from my experience gemini and claude are ~the same) and I'd hope everyone is capable of recognising it as such someone sucking up that hard does not have your best interests at heart

i have no idea what this is about but i'm pretty sure i have an ikea jokkmokk in my dining room. yay jokkmokk!

do any of my (bio)stats folks have experience making a "here's a clinical prediction model" paper actually useful? wondering about doing something like providing an html-based risk predictor? anything but "ayyyyy here's a table of logistic regression coefficients, glhf"

The thing that henry cavil did well as the witcher is play a guy extremely annoyed at being asked to help with your dumb side quest, a vibe that perfectly captures my feeling playing witcher 3

I've made a new RStudio theme based on these nice logs. Enjoy #rstats! benharrap.com/post/2025-10...

from now on every paper needs to have a Tigure 1

We spun up a massive academic apparatus to integrate the vast talent Germany sloughed off in its berserk rampage, and then used it to drop two miniature suns on Japan. We invented dozens of major academic fields along the way, from computer science to operations research to nuclear energy to etc...

if you're a geriatric millennial who has been injured by this post, you may be entitled to compensation