Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

New in Public Notice: My expectations for the debate were low, but holy crap
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/gop-debate-fox-business-simi-valley-yikes

"If all you have is an MC Hammer, everything looks like you can't touch it"

- ancient proverb

I wrote about the surprising pragmatism of Lina Khan’s Amazon antitrust lawsuit — and how it gives up on a lot of the more radical ideas in her famous law review paper. Maybe Amazon isn’t an antitrust paradox after all… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/27/lina-khan-amazon-antitrust-paradox/

Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.

Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.

Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".

The old version got torn in my office move so I redid my 2015-20 US All-Cause Mortality Poster and had it reprinted in a nice large size for the wall. I like this simple way of looking at the data because it does not even try to do any direct estimation of Covid mortality per se. It just shows (a) something happened to overall mortality rates in 2020, what could it be; (b) There's a lot of variation but still it happened everywhere; and (c) The size of this effect is visible from f***ing space.

Case studies are always fun. The most impressive #PositConf2023 one was the city of #Chicago showing how they took 50k+ lines of rules-based SPSS code and reduced it to about 20 lines of tidymodels ML code to fix a scandalously broken property tax regime. And the whole thing is public!

Wild flamingos flock to #Wisconsin. https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/outdoors/2023/09/22/flamingo-mania-draws-crowd-to-port-washington-beach/70932653007/

Flamingoes arrive at Lake Michigan in #Wisconsin - a totally normal and not at all weird thing.

#climate

https://milwaukeerecord.com/city-life/flamingos-in-wisconsin/

Random story: In grad school for a while I shared an office with Eszter Hargittai who at the time was doing pioneering early work on the Internet and Society. One week she was having some persistent trouble with the browser she was using and nerd me says I could take a look at it if you want and she says no it’s OK I have a friend dropping by at lunch to help troubleshoot. I come back from lunch to our shared office and sure enough her friend is v. helpfully investigating. It’s Brian Kernighan.

If you're interested in newer workflows for #rstats 📦 development, the 2nd edition of the R Packages book - free to read online! - includes a new chapter "The Whole Game" by @jennybryan that goes over a complete process when developing "a small toy package."
https://r-pkgs.org/whole-game.html
#PositConf2023 @rstats

This is awesome! Full text search has come to Mastodon, and it's being rolled out in a responsible way.

I know full text search is a hot-button issue. For journalists, researchers and many others, FTS is essential. Plenty of others have good reason to keep their content unsearchable.

If you're in the latter category, you don't need to take any action. Your toots will remain unsearchable just as they were before.

For the rest, please manually change the default so your toots will be searchable. This will address a major shortcoming that has kept a huge number of fedi holdouts from joining.

To do that, go to Preferences > Public Profile and select the Privacy and Reach tab. Then check the Include profile page in search engines box.

Fediverse: My first account on Mastodon was made shortly after the service was launched. I didn't heavily use it, but I loved the idea of the fediverse and what it could offer. I loved Twitter in the 2014-2020 times. I learned so much and discovered so many new things, and it helped me make connections I wouldn't have otherwise. I'm starting to feel that energy again with the growing instances and people I can follow.