I love the framing of AI users as nannies of the LLMs. "Misbehavior is blamed on the nanny, or the parents, never the little boy." It's so true that especially in AI hype circles every mistake the thing makes is a "skill issue". #databs #datasky

I keep a Trello board of random project ideas I want to do at some point. About two months ago I created one titled: Raspberry Pi "idea generator" box Please help - what on earth did I mean by that? 🤣

Saw a data analyst ad that had "Familiarity with ChatGPT or other AI tools for data analysis" as a nice to have 🤪 I guess we're at the point where employers think ChatGPT is a tool for data analysis. Cool cool cool cool cool. #databs #datasky

Here’s the thing about folks speedrunning the creative process with AI: I could go to the beach every morning and put a grain of sand in a cup. They’d take their cup to the beach and fill it one day; but the point isn’t to have a cup of sand. It’s to fill my life with a thousand trips to the beach.

👋This is also how I feel! Hello friends, please enjoy my dumb little thoughts ❤️

Trying to break my addiction of checking football news multiple times a day even though I don't really watch football anymore. But I will briefly break my attempted football hiatus to say: it would be SO funny if Arsenal bottled it and didn't win the league. That is all.

One of my biggest fears as a data educator is running my "Intro to APIs" material in preparation for a class only to find that the API has been deprecated since the last time I used it. Didn't happen today but it's happened enough times! #databs #datasky

One dark UX pattern that really irritates me is when the logout/sign out button is hidden deep in Settings. It's not a setting, it's a primary action! Insert "old man yells at cloud" meme.

Researchers face this dilemma all the time. You can talk to the media with care & nuance, but you will always be outflanked by anyone willing to simplify, exaggerate, speak with undue certainty, answer questions outside their expertise & extrapolate in ways unsupported by the data.

Are you using open models on a regular basis? If yes, I’d love to hear about it! - what’s your use-case? - local or through an inference provider? - how has the experience evolved over time? - anything you miss from the closed models, if you’ve used them? Would appreciate reposts for visibility 🙏

Louder for those at the back: once you start to think about LLM outputs as optimising for *plausibility*, it's easier to put into context what LLMs can/can't do and how to use them properly. #databs #datasky

A succinct and useful list of rules for teaching data science, including some of my favourites: "teach with real data" and "have students do projects". #databs #datasky

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAJAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *breathes* AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA

We recorded an end of year review episode. We talked about what happened on the podcast, the world of AI, and what great sci-fi we read in 2025. Listen wherever you listen! Looking forward to recording more in 2026! #databs #datasky

I just thought everyone should see this

When your friend makes a claim about Hungarian football and you get the compelling urge to check WITH DATA 😤 #databs #datasky

The state of LinkedIn man... I see posts like: "I used <AI technology X> for the first time today. [...] Follow for more tips using <AI technology X>!" I realise the irony of saying people on LinkedIn shouldn't be posers, but this immediate need to be seen as experts in something is excruciating.

When I say I love seeing other people's wild ideas for data projects come to life, this is what I mean. Seriously cool idea.

LinkedIn notification: "You have one of the most-viewed profiles. Add verification to boost trust." 1. I don't need to see the data to know I *don't* have one of the most-viewed profiles unless it's a weird subpopulation 2. If I already have one of the most-viewed profiles, why take any action?

Posting this article as a bookmark to myself. Damn, it really hit home. "instead of causing consolation, screens only make us feel more distant and disconnected and lonely, as an apathy sets in that is increasingly abstract, a kind of stomach-level sadness" www.tommydixon.ca/p/how-to-end...

One of the things I said in my 2025 review is how I want to spend less time on social media. One point of internal resistance has always been "but what about the community?" but as much as I loved Data Twitter and its reincarnations, it's not the same as your *local* community.

Today I felt somewhat compelled to write up my year in review. Featuring: - things I did - people we spoke to on the podcast - talks I've given - books I loved and more! Happy new year everyone and especially the #databs community! davidasboth.com/2025-year-in...

It has been nice to avoid social media entirely for a few days. As a belated Christmas present, I was delighted to discover that one of my favourite magic routines on Penn & Teller Fool Us is now back on YouTube so you can all have it as a treat: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRfl...

LinkedIn must be up there in the list of "websites that absolutely do not need a Year in Review".

Ouch. Little did we know that just 18 short years later we'd not even manage a win away to Malta...

Thanks for everyone who recommended something! My gift to you is this piano rendition of The Beatles's Blackbird by Hiromi, quite possibly my favourite jazz pianist. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUC3gm4KA_o

Recently, I started a tiny experiment: - coming up with a data challenge - livestreaming my own ongoing solution (~once a week) The topic I picked was "are there films rated higher than the books they're based on?" Here's a sneak peek, will livestream a write up at some point! #databs #datasky

Hey @profanity.accountant how am I doing?

A lot of the AI culture wars seem to stem from: 1) calling everything under the sun "AI", lumping ChatGPT in with random forests 2) not making a distinction between AI the technology and the AI that's the companies stealing copyright and shoving chatbots where they don't belong #databs #datasky

I can't explain it, but one of my comfort viewings is panel shows where Kevin Bridges is a guest and none of the other guests understand a word he's saying. A fine example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cK_...

Important thread. I think I only really rediscovered the power of play after becoming a parent, which is a shame because I should never have forgotten! Now, as an educator, I lean towards the playful and fun as much as possible. Life's too short not to have as much fun as you can.

Jazz aficionados of Bluesky! Can you recommend a jazz album for me and my friend's "album club" (like a book club but for jazz albums)? It's my turn to pick and I'd like some inspiration!

This is an incredible fact. It might even replace my current favourite fact, which is that Gary Numan is older than Gary Oldman (also an excellent fact).

Honestly it's a breath of fresh air seeing students pissed off by lecturers using AI-generated slides especially when there's a double standard whereby students can't use the same tools. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

If I get another email from Dropbox telling me my ❗storage ❗is ❗nearly ❗full ❗when I have AN ENTIRE GIGABYTE FREE, I'm gonna start flipping some tables. (I realise they probably calculate it on percentages, but some common sense wouldn't go amiss)

Vindication that entity resolution is still a Hard Problem in data science. We're still throwing all our latest tools at it! #databs

Yes yes yes!

"You don't have to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with non-readers, non-learners, non-knowers?" Fahrenheit 451, afterword (Ray Bradbury, 1953) #AI

A movie you've seen more than seven times with a gif.

The Guardian's "how deprived is your area" interactive page is pretty neat, but the best part is this note: "A technical issue in an earlier version meant localities containing a comma produced incorrect results." No avoiding the bad data! Here it is: www.theguardian.com/society/ng-i... #databs

Another fun data problem with my bot. The Wikipedia data has both Serbia & Montenegro AND Yugoslavia as opponents of the same game, so my SPARQL query picked them up as two separate games. Yugoslavia itself didn't even exist anymore in '97 but apparently the football team still used the name!

Do you like any of the following: data science, real life data case studies, musings on our AI future, philosophy? If you answered yes to any of the above, my talk at @databsconf.com might be of interest to you! #databs #datasky

This is beyond awful. Danya was a huge influence on me not even as a chess player but as an educator. His speedruns are a gold standard of teaching for me. Seemed like a genuinely lovely guy. Someone somewhere commented "I just assumed I'd be learning from Danya my whole life, you know?" 💔

#dataBS I need to hear your favourite dataset you've used for teaching data topics. My criteria: - smallish, in the order of 10k rows, not millions - wide enough with a mix of data types to allow open-ended questions - not seen in your typical online data tutorials 🚫No ocean liners🚫

Today's #databs mishap. Tableau can automatically convert strings to dates, right? Turns out if your date is in the form "Jan-88", then the ONLY short code for September that Tableau will accept is "Sept", NOT "Sep". This explains all the NULL values and gaps in my time series 😭 #datasky

Apparently there are a bunch of new people coming over from Twitter... Drop your data science starter packs in the replies for people to follow!

"Time to browse LinkedIn" (not limited to my profession of course)

The problem with having ideas, writing them down, and not acting on them for ages is that I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking. I have a blog post idea written down that just says: learning "experiences" What does that mean?????

Worth reading this deeper dive into how well GenAI tools do with dataviz problems, by @nrennie.bsky.social #databs #datasky

The videos from the #DataBS Conference have made it to YouTube! Over the coming days, we'll highlight sessisons from the event -- one post per talk. You can also sneak ahead by going straight to the YouTube playlist, here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...