dpananos.github.io/posts/2026-0... Some more bullshit from me

Me: AI is an echo chamber. I hate it. I add instructions to make sure it doesn’t flatter me or simply confirm everything I say. Also me: <checks the AI reasoning trace for compliments>

The moment after you’ve pushed through layers of bugs, hot fixes, refactors, etc. and the code, everything, finally works. (scene from Mythic Quest)

Stephen Walt destroys Mike Pompeo: youtu.be/ntiLygd0ihE?...

As a developer, my best ROI comes from knowledge engineering and note taking.

It’s shocking to me how popular DJT is.

Grand Bargain: - Blockade lifted ↔ Iran stands down Strait threat - No-attack guarantee (US + best-effort on Israel) ↔ Indefinite enrichment moratorium, conditional on guarantee holding - Enrichment right preserved at ≤20% (down-blend required), strict IAEA oversight, excess shipped to Kazakhstan

15/10 adorable

I’m most productive with AI when I’m using my critical thinking and communication skills. Sure, my coding skills are probably atrophying. But I only developed those to talk to machines anyway. Am I wrong?

I’m not sure what’s more frustrating about this presidency the fact that he won despite being an objectively terrible leader or the fact that he is an objectively terrible leader.

Gas is at $4.99/gallon here. #MAGA

How many more people need to leave Trump’s cabinet before it’s “regime change” or are we already there?

I’m finally convinced that eventually AI will be smart enough for almost any context, emotionally aware, efficient, and able to juggle complex long/short-term tasks and relationships. But at that point it’ll take 9-10 months to train each model, then 18 years to fine-tune into its mature form.

Version Lobotomy Syndrome (VLS) — *The tendency to perceive a newly released software or AI model as less intelligent than its predecessor, despite objective evidence of improvement, caused by selective testing, rosy memory of the old version, and resistance to change.

Has anyone interviewed someone they suspected was using AI during a live video interview? I experienced someone whose answers were a maybe too perfect given their experience level and, what really got me concerned, was that their answer quality seemed to improve the longer they spoke on a question.

etc

Folks have trouble imagining how purely transactional Trump is. Because most of us have never met someone so completely transactional with no desire at all for coherency of ideas or stances. Pure transactionalism.

The Dunning-Kruger peak for AI-adjacent folks: watching a demo and asking about model selection for a product they haven’t started yet.

I 💚 this especially the first one: "The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code" by Ally Piechowski piechowski.io/post/git-com...

Someone ask Trump if the Generals agree with him that there has already been regime change in Iran. Make sure you name some of the Generals.

Every time I ask AI about the Iran war, I think of the movie 50 First Dates and about how every day Drew Barrymore has to learn about how she got into this terrible accident and this is her life now.

Speculate as necessary. Be decisive. In one short (160 characters) sentence tell me what will be the state of the Iran war on May 1st?

Are KPIs reductionist, imperfect, and sometimes even silly? Obviously. Do people put too much weight into them? Sure. Are they effective?

Fix inflation ✅ End wars ✅ Reduce deficit ✅ Gas below $2 ✅

2012–2020: R 2019–2026: Python Anyone else have a similar timeline?

I hope AI is wrong.

Sometimes I like to imagine how my life would be different if I had pursued and landed an RStudio (Posit) internship.

What annoys me about Claude code is that people seemingly achieve something similar to what I did — the excitement from gaining a software engineering/programming superpower — but they’re doing it overnight and without any actual skill. And then rushing to internet to talk about it. So…I’m jealous?

Use robust Tukey losses there is no downside. All you have to do is write some scipy code, run a few Huber iterations, and then switch to Tukey.

3 inch hail here!!!

Someone Claude-code a web app that tracks how many times in the past year someone has called an AI tool “game-changing.” Better yet, make it auto reply to social media posts with their annual counts each time people do it.

If you’ve never run anything locally and have no idea the cloud is randomly shuffling your data into partitions behind the scenes, you probably think the cluster just needs to warm up sometimes.

I thought Emperor Palpatine’s lines were poorly written. I guess *I* was wrong.

AI models seem to all agree on the likely outcomes of Trump’s war on Iran: loss of life, failed regime change, high probability of economic recession, and multi-year delay in Iranian nuclear proliferation. Cool.

Remember that movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis where the world experienced a new breakthrough technology and everyone acted like it’d change everything but ultimately people were just walking around twiddling coins in their hands? Just thought of it no reason.

what's a "pipes" ?? #rstats

Also now that they have drafts here we are so back

bsky giving vibes like it’s Twitter circa 2018

❗️Our next workshop will be on March 19th , 2 pm CET on Oops, Git! How to recover from common mistakes by @masalmon.eu Register or sponsor a student by donating to support Ukraine! Details: bit.ly/3wBeY4S Please share! #AcademicSky #EconSky

Been in a tough work situation for a year, trying to “fix it” in increasingly clever ways. Realized I was still just litigating right/wrong. Cheesy but true: I need to stop trying to be right and start building the systems I actually want.

random.seed(42) </cringe>

Remember when OpenAI’s board tried to fire Sam Altman over safety concerns? In retrospect, it backfired pretty spectacularly and actually consolidated power for Altman and Brockman.

Anthropic and Google have started to outperform OpenAI Microsoft (*huge* investor in OpenAI) stock has dropped over 15% in the last 2 weeks We’re going to see some erratic stuff from OpenAI. I can’t imagine these decisions will be thoughtful and good.

Theory: man wanted in women mentor group. Was told no, prompting reverse discrimination complaint. Meanwhile, OpenAI is losing ground fast to Anthropic and Google and its Policy Lead was very reasonably opposing GPT’s porn mode.

Me: Do you have 10,000 dollars? Daughter: Is that the rectangle ones or the circle ones?

Anyone interested in 1-year contract remote work as a lead data scientist let me know. #rstats ~~ 🧠 🧠 but work will be in python (pyspark), sql, mlflow.

Happy to share I’ve moved into a new role at Meijer as a Principal Data Scientist. I’m grateful to have led such an incredible team, and I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned back in an IC role!

I tried to get AI to generate an image of Jalen Brunson gifting the Knicks NBA cup trophy to Trump. It just leads me to believe these AI models (gpt5.2, claude-sonnet-4.5, grok-4.1, and gemini-3-flash) are …

She coached her little sister to do “makeups.”