At last, the Rob Reiner / Chris Nolan connection we’ve all been searching for.

- Folkloristics - Story structure - microeconomics - statistics - social media technologies as information systems (in 2000!) Fascinating exercise to look back at those!

Melody Joy Kramer@mkramer.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Curious what high school or college classes still stick with you decades later. For me, it’s: - the literature of the Great Migration - a course on the cholera epidemic in Philadelphia - a course on reproductive rights law - Jewish humor

Proving that Poes Law predates the internet, I genuinely have no idea whether this letter is a ribbing or tongue in cheek pride.

NY Times Pitchbot@nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Breaking character: In memory of Ted Turner, the amazing letter his dad wrote him when he decided to major in the classics. Yankees just can't write this, my friends. www.bu.edu/arion/files/...

I want to talk a little more about discoverability. I often find that the creators of AI-driven services have a very specific set of scenarios in their minds -- but then advertise extremely broadly. Unlike a button on a UI, there's no way to know what the creators have in mind!

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is a guessing game -- "can the user guess the scope of the tool?" It's the opposite of good discoverability! Worse, the user needs to type an entire sentence -- "please book me a plane flight on Wednesday from Dallas airport...", so its inefficient! (And it's almost always slow.)

I'm interested in Anthropic's Qualitative AI study, with lots of questions about both what they learn and how to use the results. www.anthropic.com/features/81k... But from a visualization point of view, there's something I noticed that's bothering me. Those dots are impressive.

Dumb heart. Barely spins a yarn, much less telling a tale.

Jesse Clark@modusponens.org · 5mo ago

Don’t even tell me about the letter unless it’s purloined

Um … we don’t have children practice handwriting because there’s a shortage of the letter ‘a’ in the world. We don’t have them learn times tables because the economy needs a piece of notebook paper that says “4x3=12.”

404 Media@404media.co · 5mo ago

Quote from Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein: “I think about horses. They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free... It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

I’m less enchanted with the question “what does a lefty with the power of Trump” look like, because the best possible outcome is a world where every few years we lurch between lefty utopia and corrupt dictatorship.

The American Prospect@prospect.org · 9mo ago

Lefty think tank @cmmonwealth.bsky.social is homing in on Democrats' response to the affordability crisis and figuring out what a future Democratic president must do to pick up the pieces once the Trump administration is out of the White House. From @ryanlcooper.com: trib.al/a5JDVBG

more and more frequently, trump makes comments that make it seem like he is vaguely aware of the fact that his entire inner circle and cabinet are all scheming viziers, he's just sort of indifferent about it

I carried out the same exercise in metric, too: the number of hours during which the temperature (in C) is the latitude. Cooler equatorial oceans -- and a long span of northern Africa and south America. danyelf.github.io/degree-degree/

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Last, this blog entry talks through the process of creating the visualization, and what I learned. It was a fun data science exercise! danyelfisher.info/blog/2025/8/...

A friend posted a photo, sunbathing from Scandanavia a little bit ago, captioned "60 degrees at 60 degrees!" That made me wonder how often that really happens -- where on earth is the temperature the same as the latitude, and how often? I answered that at danyel.github.io/degree-degree

The other day, I watched a (small local) LLM melt itself down. I was testing out Ollama with the 8b Deepseek model. I gave it a moderately-challenging technical question -- how to make a Javascript and Python package talk to each other -- and hit "go". Three hours later...

Strunk & White stole all their ideas from that spider

This is hilarious - ChatGPT hallucinates repeatedly about a nonexistent feature on another website (confusing people), eventually leading the site's owners to implement the feature. www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

Given that these grotesque abuses are being conducted for our supposed benefit, what do you imagine they'll do when Jews are not sufficiently grateful? What will be the punishment? And which Jews and Jewish orgs will cooperate? May God give us soft hearts and strong spines.

Bend the Arc: Jewish Action@bendthearc.bsky.social · last yr.

BREAKING: The Trump administration will begin screening immigrants’ social media for “antisemitism.” This will NOT fight antisemitism. This is simply using Jews as an excuse to move a cruel, anti-immigrant, authoritarian agenda. We refuse to be used this way. www.uscis.gov/newsroom/new...

Oh, my God, it's the HUD sucker proxy.

The White House is pretty much issuing revised official photographs that no longer show out of favor politburo members.

Peter Elkind@peterelkind.bsky.social · last yr.

www.military.com/daily-news/2...

If something reduces death by 30%, then removing that thing increases death by 50%. There are about 40,000 deaths by flu annually, placing it just behind liver disease and self-harm as a leading cause of death. With no vaccine, I bet we could make it up to 60k and hop 3 steps in the rankings!

I suspect that the person at OpenAI who saves 5% on a power cost gets a much smaller promotion than the person who shows how to get a 5% increase on a loss function. Cost isn’t the issue, so cost isn’t an issue.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · 2y ago

Newsletter: The DeepSeek situation is a moment that should fill Silicon Valley with shame, a monument to the lack of vision and herd mentality of the American tech industry. OpenAI and Anthropic have no moat, no business, no innovation, and I believe no future. www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/

I seem to have two different blog entries -- or, perhaps, rants -- half-written. Help pull me off the fence before I go away for vacation! Which would you rather see? Option 1: Visualization Is About Comparison (and anyone who disagrees is trying to sell you a gauge)

Finally got a chance to read these comments on box plots. I think it’s really important to realize that the visualization forms of the mid 20th century were doing really different work than 2”we do today.

Nick Desbarats@nickdesb.bsky.social · 2y ago

1. Wrote "Practical Charts" (Amazon #1 New Release, used at Yale) www.practicalreporting.com/pc-book 2. Might have killed box plots nightingaledvs.com/ive-stopped-... and bullet graphs nightingaledvs.com/why-i-stoppe... 3. Saw the pie chart light nightingaledvs.com/have-i-resol...

For #30DayChartChallenge - day 26 - ai I wanted to make a chart that showed generative AI generates expected seeming results consistent with the kind of corpus associated with the prompt, with no understanding of truth, facts, logic, or causality. So I had chatGPT supply the data for the graph.

It’s surreal. Vaccination is one of the easiest-to-quantify, mind-boggling successful health discoveries ever. A solid “w” ticked on the human column.

Micah@rincewind.run · 2y ago

between this and RFK Jr telling us that he’s going to be in charge of the health agencies, it sure looks like a second Trump administration is going to try to pull federal approval for vaccines I don’t mean Covid vaccines, I mean all of them seems pretty fucking high stakes to me

We tried. It’s weirdly unavailable to stream right now.

Carly Gay Stepson@amcnal.bsky.social · 2y ago

Teri Garr dying two days before halloween is going to lead to an incredible uptick in people watching Young Frankenstein tonight. RIP queen 👑

Hi new website! I'm Alper and I work on the Power BI Core Visuals team as an software engineer at Microsoft. I try to bridge the gap between research and practice in driving effective visualization authoring and consumption experiences for people of varying data and visual fluency.

I've been blogging for a big about the concept of "genre" in data visualization -- and this final entry helped me clarify why I think it's a useful tool. Does this breakdown make sense to you? danyelfisher.info/blog/2024/10...

Designing for Genre — Danyel Fisher - Visualization and User Experience

The last few entries in this blog introduced the concept of “genre” as a way to frame visualization. I analogized visualization to literary genres: different genres of visualizations use the same perc...

danyelfisher.info

I've been thinking a lot about how to interview for UX well recently. Smarter people than me have written books on this, but I've run into a few recurrent issues. Here's a few big ones: danyelfisher.info/blog/2024/2/...

How to Ask the Right Question — Danyel Fisher

danyelfisher.info

I never understood survivorship bias and I turned out okay.

I feel like new frontiers in data visualization can be explored with this approach. (Or did Tamara Munzner already cover this? graphics.stanford.edu/papers/webvi... )

Randall Munroe@xkcd.com · 3y ago

Log Alignment xkcd.com/2884