AI isn’t going anywhere, and neither should your skills. Do you know where the gaps are in your AI knowledge? NVIDIA already offers certifications in Generative AI and LLMs & Multimodal Generative AI, and now they are raising the bar with two new certifications: Agentic AI and Generative AI LLMs.

Spent the day getting local models running on my laptop and hooking up Aider to it. (Some might find it interesting that AI was useless in helping me do this. Needed to use old-fashioned sleuthing skills.) (Nor is this documented anywhere that I could find.)

By my calculation, @anthropic.com owes me around $60,000. There was a recent settlement where Anthropic is paying authors $3,000 per book that they illegally acquired and used for their training data. I've written a few books and can find almost 20 of mine in their stolen content.

Loved adding "Ancombe's Quintet" to my curve fitting exercise in my class this week. Thanks Carl McBride Ellis, PhD

I'm teaching two Pandas courses this week. Here's a "whiteboard" from one of them. Looks like I need to correct it now as @pola.rs spans from small to big data now! Congrats to Ritchie Vink and team!

Really busy teaching recently. This week I'm teaching two Pandas/data analytics courses. Here's a drawing I made during last week's ML course.

I'm teaching a machine learning class this week. One of my favorite parts of teaching is helping technical folks not just learn the concepts, but also see how they apply directly to their own domains.

What do you think of my newest shirt?

Optimize your environment. I've spent a lot of time optimizing my environment for the type of work I do. "Your video quality and background look great" is a common piece of unsolicited feedback.

I get a lot of questions about my office video and teleprompter setup. Here is a video that shows what I use and how I use it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG-H... I used an @insta360official.bsky.social x5 to film this

Don't make this mistake with your billion-dollar release! There has been considerable commentary about the visualizations emerging from the recent GPT-5.

Starting to schedule training for next year. If your team needs help learning how to leverage AI, Python, machine learning, data pipeline, testing, or visualization, reach out.

Important plot for folks concerned with balancing model performance and cost.

Grinding along...

Back to the grind...

After a nice break, I'm back at the home "office" for a bit. Working on the next book

I had my most frequent dream (nightmare) again last night. Apparently, this is a common trope among humans. Mine goes like this: I'm back in college (25+ years later), and finals are just around the corner. I've signed up for some bio/science class heavy on reading and rote memorization.

Now I'm in the steepest canyon in the US! Keep on rocking in the free world.

Most plots fail before they even leave the notebook. Too much clutter. Too many colors. Too little context. I have a stack of visualization books that teach theory, but none of them walk through the tools.

Some thoughts on model choice...

A rant from my afternoon work... Folks asked me what was wrong with Grid Search last week.

We live in a world where folks are riffing with AI without even bothering to check the output... This is an upcoming book that I'm assuming is heavily inspired by my work. 🤯

If you haven't already, you should watch this video discussing how technology will impact software. What are your takeaways? www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEm...

Modern bike trails might have a "flow" section. This describes rolling portions of the trail. To the naive mind, this is weird- why not just make the trail flat? Especially on a downhill?

XGBoost has a problem, and many of my clients don't know it. Don't get me wrong, I wrote a book about the library. It's an effective library. However, it generally overfits out of the box.

Can anyone help me out with an introduction to Devrel at OpenAI , @anthropic.com , Google or other relevant providers? I'm heads down focused on real-world application of AI to Python and Data Science workflows (books/courses) and would appreciate any connections.

I learned an expensive lesson. Before every ride, I check the pressure of my tires. (Tubeless tires offer many benefits, but one drawback is that they seem to leak more than an old-fashioned tube). I came back from a ride with a big dent in my rim.

Two courses down, flight home to go!

A problem with vibe-based development is the single point of failure. When the API is down, the vibe is lost...

How would you label these quadrants? Where is the sweet spot? Where is the danger zone(s)?

Beach thoughts. Where are you running?

How would you label these quadrants? Where is the sweet spot? Where is the danger zone(s)?

One course down... One to go

I believe I just vibe-coded a fix to a five-year-old bug on a major project. I did not write any code... (Still need to perform the human validation. The tests are passing).

Current workspace...

Are you kicking against the prick or going with the flow?

Just vibe coded a PDF slide viewer with line drawing capabilities in 30 minutes while waiting for my plane. I didn't write a single line of code... (I attempted this two years ago and failed.)

Is RAG a relic of the past?

Here is the OpenAI model performance over time...

My summary of OpenAI naming conventions and models...

Didn't know I needed me some Bruce this morning. Perhaps more relevant than ever. Now back to book writing... youtube.com/watch?v=gO3r...

Climbing thoughts... What are some of your knowledge gaps? Who or what can help you discover them?

Biking thoughts...

One of the most important visualizations technical folks need to be aware of right now. (Showing the version where I applied the CLEAR principles straight out of my Effective Visualization book) and the AI-generated version. (One took 60s and the other 30m). What are your takeaways from this vis?

My thoughts on @pycon.us

I have created a few open spaces at PyCon. Two tabular sessions. The second is more focused on ML. The third session is a run/walk Saturday morning.

Good morning Pittsburgh. Made it in on an unexpectedly late flight and am itching to teach some Polars at @pycon.us today. Reach out if you are around. Will try to organize some bofs and will be doing an Effective Visualization book signing at the @jetbrains.com booth on Friday.

Traveling is a great way to expand your mind. I just got back from two wonderful weeks in Hong Kong (& Macau) with my wife and daughter. I took some time off from posting on social during our vacation but had many thoughts (jetlag is painful but the mind wandering/refragging can be amazing).

In Hong Kong! Please send dining (and other) recommendations. And come to my Polars presentation on the 30th

I've been reading that using AI as an advisor or counselor is the number one usage. Perhaps I need to do this more...