I think a lot about how @matt-levine.bsky.social writes Money Stuff so any curious person can understand what's happening Lots of "here's the most basic unit of this topic -> here's how we expect that basic unit to work -> here's how those expectations can break down in weird, fascinating ways"

Rafe Meager (they/them)@economeager.bsky.social · 2w ago

ok so you know how we all get like that overwhelming horror when we consider how many people in applied quant classes do not know what a file directory is or what a filepath is or etc. my question is, how do these people ordinarily retrieve saved files. search? like they remember the filenames?

So much this! How do we solve it? Is there an existing good explainer (for Mac and PC) especially for new coders? Should we make one if there isn’t? This is how we address it in the #PsyTeachR Applied Data Skills book: psyteachr.github.io/ads-v3/02-re...

Rafe Meager (they/them)@economeager.bsky.social · 2w ago

ok so you know how we all get like that overwhelming horror when we consider how many people in applied quant classes do not know what a file directory is or what a filepath is or etc. my question is, how do these people ordinarily retrieve saved files. search? like they remember the filenames?

I’ve alway’s thought it’s a shame that WebAssembly has the word “web” in it. Gives it a connotation that it’s “only for browsers” or something.

 Meanwhile, NASA’s over here with a flight-compliant derivative (SpaceWASM) intended for spacecraft!

1 single norwegian commando destroyed all the heavy water that the nazis could have used for their uranium enrichment exercises. ONE GUY. i learned this and then i was like, how the f is this not a movie. well it is a movie, in norwegian. AND THE GUY PLAYED HIMSELF en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Ha...

Knut Haukelid - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

there are two wolves inside you. one is a bear

c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 3w ago

If you want to read more, and see the rest of the photo set, the best source I've found is here:

Enjoyed talking to @psychscience.bsky.social about my group’s new(ish) paper for the Observer. I’ve talked about this on here at an earlier stage. In 4 studies, we found no evidence that asking young adults to cut back on their social media improves well-being. Small thread 🧵 follows:

For Young Adults, Limiting Social Media Use Doesn’t Improve Well-Being

What happens when young adults are asked to slash their social media use to 30 minutes a day? In a new set of studies, most did not follow through, and those who did cut back …

psychologicalscience.org

i swear to god, asking: “what is the problem you are trying to solve? followed by: “what information or data do you need to solve this problem?” are like, some of the single most important questions you need to ask a stakeholder on all kinds of projects, and so many people skip it

I like cultivating generalist skills. I think generalists can bring needed perspectives to fields where niche expertise already exists. And "being a generalist" ≠ "posts confidently about a ton of unrelated topics" When someone does that they will get important stuff wrong + come off weird at best

Wrote about boring wins and how context-dependent "boring" is

Find the boring wins

They might not be so boring to others

buttondown.com

Calling everything a measurement problem flattens out other difficulties too much And guessing "measurement problem" every time works better than it should

Daniel P. Moriarity@dpmoriarity.bsky.social · 3w ago

Psychology has been riding the intensive longitudinal train for a bit, but what about immunology? Now live @brainbehavimm.bsky.social, our physiometric report on the stability of inflammatory proteins collected every 3 days for 22 days during a natural stressor 1/X

Data de-duplication

Hope Jahren@realhopejahren.bsky.social · 3w ago

Data Center

Within the past day we've gotten: - A ~Fable level model at ~Haiku level pricing (GLM 5.3) - An ~Opus 4.6 level model runnable on local hardware (Qwen 3.8 Max 27b) I switched to an open model stack as my daily driver after GLM 5.2 dropped. That move felt like a risk, and so far it's paid off

Charlie Gao@shikokuchuo.net · 4w ago

Some of us at Posit have switched to Kimi K3 as a daily driver. Really proud that my colleagues host this open weights model in Posit AI. I've not had to reach for Fable all week!

Given the OSF news (shout out to them forever, they made what felt impossible possible for a long time) If you could summon a software tool to help you deal with the upcoming changes, what would it be? I promise nothing + know there are great existing tools. I'm just curious where gaps might be

I wrote about the Last of Us and grappling with which details matter

Which details matter?

The answer can't be all of them

buttondown.com

People use a ton of tools already. Convincing them to add something you built to their stack means fighting uphill Wrote about how creating drop-in replacement tools can level that playing field "Rewrite in Rust to make tool go fast" is only part of the story!

The unreasonable effectiveness of drop-in replacements

Building a better tool is not enough

buttondown.com

If you write code for a living you've probably heard a lot about "taste" This newsletter post dives into what to do if everyone is talking about something but no one quite agrees what it means

Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · last mo.

I promise I was looking for the share button before I realized you linked my post @mcmullarkey.bsky.social I really liked this one. Provocative! buttondown.com/datadash/arc...

I promise I was looking for the share button before I realized you linked my post @mcmullarkey.bsky.social I really liked this one. Provocative! buttondown.com/datadash/arc...

Coding taste is like depression

And we should stop pretending otherwise

buttondown.com

Fun post by @randyau.com on the delicacies of testing balance + creating narrative in a world-building game

More fun with world generation

Hi subscribers, I've spent much of this week chipping away at the worldgen game in the small gaps of free time that I have, so here's an update on this bit of silliness. It's gotten to a surprisingly ...

counting-stuff.com

The idea that there's an easy abundance of free resources to learn to code is laughable once you've done what I've done and been a VP of research at a company that helped thousands of people break into tech careers. There's an abundance of *beginner tutorials*

Programming tip: never type out a 10-character command when you could instead press the up arrow for 5 minutes until you find that command in your history

This week on Counting Stuff, how does locating lightning work? There's sensor networks, some run by volunteer hobbyists, that are able to pinpoint where lightning strikes to within a few hundred meters. I dug into how they do that #dataBS www.counting-stuff.com/so-how-does-...

So how does lightning locating work?

Between advanced math and radio sensors, it's possible to locate where lightning strikes from hundreds to thousands of kilometers away. It's wild.

counting-stuff.com

Great thread People focused only on the "irrationality" of talking a guaranteed $50,000 over a 50% chance at $1,000,000 underrate the risk of ruin imo

rain 🌦️@sunshowers.io · 2mo ago

One of the things strategy games like slay the spire teach you is that the last HP is the only one that truly matters. More allows you to take on greater risks. Something to think about re the coin flip question

@mcmullarkey.bsky.social has been expanding on comprehension techniques here bsky.app/profile/mcmu...

Michael Mullarkey@mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you're lucky enough to follow @grimalkina.bsky.social (buy The Psychology of Software Teams!) you've probably bought into self-quizzing as a learning technique My newsletter today gives a little heuristic to improve self-quizzing questions

I'm happy to share `ir`, a new command-line tool for running portable R scripts and Quarto documents. It's inspired by my two favorite parts of `uv`: self-describing scripts and tools you can run without installing first. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07...

ir 0.1.0: self-describing R scripts and Quarto documents

`ir` is a new command-line tool for running portable R scripts and rendering Quarto documents whose package requirements, and optional R selection, live inside the file itself.

opensource.posit.co

Not every open-source project wants more contributors right now, and that's fine. Four shapes maintainers run — walled castle, clique, university, hippie commune — and your `CONTRIBUTING.md` is saying the quiet part out loud. No wrong answer, just an honest one. blog.stdlib.io/do-you-want-...

Do you WANT contributors?

Four ways to run an open-source project—castle, clique, university, commune—and which one you're really running.

blog.stdlib.io

I like htmx. I like Rust. I'm going to have to keep myself from using this framework everywhere

AstraKernel 💫@astrakernel.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🦀 Topcoat: a framework for building full-stack reactive web apps with Rust - By Tokio team - entirely server-rendered - HTML snippets in the server and adding "reactive instructions" as metadata (similar in idea to HTMX) tokio.rs/blog/2026-07... #rustlang #programming

If you're lucky enough to follow @grimalkina.bsky.social (buy The Psychology of Software Teams!) you've probably bought into self-quizzing as a learning technique My newsletter today gives a little heuristic to improve self-quizzing questions

Quiz yourself on concepts

Why asking yourself "why" will improve your learning process

buttondown.com

Scores of promising projects rot at the bottom of the sea, wrecked by the jagged rocks of measurement error

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this is like the rosetta stone for how I went from philosophy to UI development. what people think they believe is very different from what they act like they believe and is highly sensitive to how you ask

when i’m in too deep into a new side project

Jeff Weiss@passionweiss.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Herbie Hancock literally in the studio

When I said I was writing regularly again, I meant it! New newsletter where we all admit together that the sensation of "I'm learning everything all at once!!" ≠ actual learning As a 2x+ video tutorial enjoyer, I am kind of devastated

Quiz yourself sooner

Look, I don't want to either There's nothing quite like tearing through a bunch of learning material. Maybe you're a sicko like me and watch video tutorials...

buttondown.com