Kevin Watanabe-Smith

Also a pretty telling indictment of modern unitary executive theory

A screenshot from the New York Stock Exchange website saying that America 250 is ringing the opening bell tomorrow at 6:26 a.m.

I shit you not America 250 is ringing the opening bell at the NYSE tomorrow www.nyse.com/_events/NDE1...

Relevant xkcd
xkcd.com/3184/

The logic has to be "surely the court only issues unsigned orders when they aren't in session right? Right? Because I surely would know if they've ever done this while in session, which sounds preposterous..."

Do not let this incredible day for American sports go by without listening to this beautiful story about Rony Seikaly—DJ Rony Seikaly—stepping up for Magic Johnson when he needed it the most.

More people need to watch Orb

My pitch of "subtitled anime in 15th century Poland, citizens trying to prove heliocentrism while being chased by church inquisitors" always leads to glazed over eyes before I get to how phenomenal it is

Maybe training AI on decades of text from bros faking it til they making it was an error

Goose chasing meme Top frame: push alert from NBA app announcing today's Golden State vs Minnesota game has been postponed to Sunday. Goose asks "WHY WAS THIS GAME IN MINNESOTA POSTPONED?" Bottom frame: goose chasing human running away "WHY IS IT POSTPONED?!"

Forrest was always, inexplicably involved or in the background of every major event or moment. So kind of a non-malicious omnipresence

Easy peasy, cancel Hilton honors in 3min and they even have a box for you to leave comments why

Jeffrey Tyner (L), Ph.D., and Melissa Stewart (R), Ph.D., led a team at OHSU that discovered a new drug combination that may help people with acute myeloid leukemia. (OHSU/Christine Torres Hicks); Both are pictured inside of a research laboratory

OHSU researchers have discovered a promising new drug combination that may help people with #AML overcome resistance to one of the most common frontline therapies.

“Of the 25 drug combinations tested, venetoclax plus palbociclib was the most effective.”

- Dr. Melissa Stewart, lead author

Part 2 really requires you to believe the cure was a sure-fire guarantee if only they could harvest all the marrow. If you say the cure was a 15% chance then so much of the logic falls apart

Alternative to Get Out of Jail Free Card: the phantom foul. Once a series the winning team can assign 1 personal foul to an opposing player at any point in the game. No FT, clock stop or change of possession.

Tired: Blue Owl doesn't like Oracle

Wired: Blazers ownership group needs more capital than a hockey team will sell for

Larry Ellison’s big dumb gift to his large adult son Is funding his son’s dreams of media moguldom enough?

lately I have been thinking about the Paramount bid for Warner Bros. mostly I have been thinking about how it doesn't make any goddamn sense www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

Screenshot of Kalshi market for "which party will win the US House next year?" Over the past week, slight separation in prices with Dems going from 73% to 77% now

Only minor movement after TN-07 so far

Dedicate a notepad for it, or an album of your phone camera

One of the only movies growing up that terrified me for non-obvious reasons. I think it was just the furnace and vacuum created this sense of lurking malice.

@epmcool.bsky.social gotta send in a better track

Those look incredible, I'm jealous of the facial detail on the center one. I always end up punting on faces

Donut Land in Tualatin is also helping out!
www.instagram.com/p/DQdJsnYj7q8/

Wilsonville, OR #NoKings

Probably too late, but very comfortable with wrangling, analysis and viz using #Rstats, happy to help with this or other questions

Though my background is cancer biology, so quite distinct from this dataset

It's so bad, my three year old walks 30ft ahead of me on the sidewalk before I say "slow down a bit bud"

And as a "study Biology to disprove it" traveler, what stuck was listening to religious professors

"That progress didn’t come from outsiders or even nonpracticing Muslims like me; it came from scholars, thinkers and activists who argued for the compatibility of Islam and evolution."

Opinion | I’m a former creationist. Here’s why ‘follow the science’ failed. The moment I finally admitted that Darwin was right didn’t feel liberating. It felt like grief.

Found this articulating a fear I've never been able to put my finger on:

"if we allow science to become just another tribe, we will be asking people to choose between their loved ones and abstract principles"
"asking them to pay an almost unimaginable price."

wapo.st/4nqIhQE (gift link)

Same energy tbh

People focusing on the 65%, but how many *total* people would you "trust" in that definition?

I'd say the 8% is a bigger outlier, you know TWO Kevins you trust with your money? Pft, we're good