iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

This is a great post. "Not making a decision is still a form of making a decision"

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Achim Zeileis @zeileis.org · 15/07/2026

⚽ Probabilistic forecasts for today's match at #FIFA2026 In Semifinal: #ENGARG #ENG #ARG Probability to advance: 58.2% vs. 41.8% 🥅 In normal time: Mean goals: 1.4-1.1 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 43.9% Draw 26.7% 🇦🇷 29.4% Heatmap with probabilistic forecasts for the possible outcomes of the match in normal time:

Heatmap with probabilistic forecasts for the possible outcomes of the match. The most likely outcome is 1-1 with a probability of 12.7%.

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

The benefit of making things in #RStats and Quarto is that it only takes about 10 minutes to update an entire article when the next year of data is available. You can now explore this personal project about which baby names were popular in 2025 here: nrennie.rbind.io/data-stories... #DataViz

Screenshot of article showing most popular baby names in England & Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland for boys and girls in 2025. They are Olivia, Grace, and Freya for girls, and Muhammad, Noah, and Noah for boys.

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Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net · 07/07/2026

Belgium annihilating the United States in front of their public is the best way to end this scandal. Corruption can only get you so far, especially when it angers your talented opponents. Well done, Belgium 🇧🇪

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Fable is doing useful stuff for me. I know I prompted in this direction, but Fable agrees with me - it's very frustrating that NHSE continue to scatter their public data products across different websites, with different UI, naming conventions, and no metadata. Still no APIs on this stuff in 2026!

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 03/07/2026

Wrote an update to last year's blog post about how I'm using AI during my cancer journey. markallen.io/standard-ope...

markallen.io

Standard Operating Procedure

Not the type of follow-up post you ever want to write.

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Bob Wachter @bobwachter.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Of the many interviews I've done on AI and healthcare, this one (at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley) may be my favorite. The interviewer is the wonderful journalist and author Katie Hafner, who happens to be my wife. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sZ5...

youtube.com

CHM Live | A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare

YouTube video by Computer History Museum

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Now that we have Fable back, I've posed it my most devilishly difficult question to think about while I sleep. It's complicated, interconnected, in places not very well scoped or described (in truth because I don't have a good approach for solving it). Looking forward to seeing progress!

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Claude wrote a UK population growth comparison tool for me using office for national statistics data. It uses webR under the hood so you can run the calcs locally to confirm them. thomuk.github.io/claude-scrat... You can investigate by region(s), sub-ICB(s), or Local Authority(s) #rstats

Population pyramids comparing 2026 to 2036 population projections for the Nottinghamshire NHS Sub-ICB

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I've not watched much of the World Cup, but you can't beat this! youtube.com/watch?v=PjV9...

youtube.com

Monty Python's World Cup Team of Philosophers

YouTube video by Lonnie Goldman

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Dirk Eddelbuettel @eddelbuettel.com · 21/06/2026

BBC article about Brian Ripley of the #RStats Core team given this week's excellent news concerning 2026 Rousseeuw Price for Statistics recognition for him and the core team. www.bbc.com/news/article...

bbc.com

Prof Brian Ripley on developing R to manage the world's data

Prof Brian Ripley has spent the past three decades working on a computer software that analyses data.

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Hiro Ohta @xlix.me · 05/06/2026

This artwork by Karl Jilg, commissioned by the Swedish government, reveals how city streets have excluded human beings. Sometimes, imagination conveys our world closer to reality than reality itself.

Artwork by Karl Jilg. A surreal urban scene shows pedestrians calmly walking along a narrow sidewalk suspended above a vast, deep chasm. A man balances precariously on a wooden plank connecting two sides, as though unaware of the danger below. The surrounding environment appears normal, with traffic lights and storefronts, yet the impossible drop emphasizes a disjointed reality. Everyday life continues despite the looming void.

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Frank Harrell @f2harrell.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Today we celebrate the awarding of the prestigious Rousseeuw prize to the R Core team in recognition of their 30 years of dedicated work on R and in recognition of the massive impact of R on the scientific community rousseeuwprize.org/2026 #RStats

rousseeuwprize.org

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics is a biennial prize to celebrate outstanding contributions to statistics research.

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Jeremy Allen @jeremy-data.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I still log AI's transformation of work at www.thetreeline.pub/p/ais-transf.... I defined the collection, processing, and writing workflow for Claude. I lightly edit final text. It's a semi-automated curation service for me, so I can keep up. You are welcome to it if you want. #AI #work

thetreeline.pub

AI's transformation of work

A running log

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Deploying R shiny apps to your own cloud server should be simple, so I created Lightbulb.is. Free 30 day trial. #databs #datasky

lightbulb.is

Lightbulb.is

Deploy R Shiny apps to your own cloud server.

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Deploying R shiny apps to your own cloud server should be simple, so I created Lightbulb.is. Free 30 day trial. #databs #datasky

lightbulb.is

Lightbulb.is

Deploy R Shiny apps to your own cloud server.

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Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Not having any EU competitive labs (plural intended) is about to get very painful.

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Achim Zeileis @zeileis.org · 04/06/2026

⚽ Our probabilistic forecasts for the #FIFA2026 #WorldCup are out. 📈 Based on a machine learning algorithm combining data, expert insights, and advanced statistical models. 🤝 Joint work w/ Andy Groll & team, @rmichels.bsky.social, Lars Hvattum, Gunther Schauberger. www.zeileis.org/news/fifa2026/

zeileis.org

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Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Did you know you can search for R packages by what they do, as opposed to just their names? Look! 👉🏼 rwarehouse.netlify.app @kylieainslie.bsky.social made The Warehouse for just this purpose. Send it to a new R programmer today ❤️ because it's the resource we all wish we'd had at some point #rstats

Screenshot of a website with "The Warehouse" at the top. The user has typed "add interactivity to a ggplot" into the search bar at the top of the website and results below include plotly and ggiraph

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The King's Fund @thekingsfund.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Bringing down waiting lists is important – but how people experience the wait matters too. New findings suggest that uncertainty and poor communication remain a reality for many patients waiting for NHS care. Our new blog explores what needs to change. 👉 bit.ly/3QaSYLS

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Lander Analytics @landeranalytics.com · 09/06/2026

Do you need enterprise AI infrastructure for a 120M-parameter model? Maybe not-but the answer is more interesting than you'd think. We break down why Chronos-2, DGX Spark, and a simple FastAPI deployment turned out to be the right combination. bit.ly/4eh0FbC #AI #TimeSeries #Forecasting #DGXSpark

bit.ly

DGX Spark Series (Part 3): When the Wrong-Sized GPU Is the Right Call

What we learned serving Chronos-2 from an R-friendly forecasting pipeline

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Sooo #rstats, I built a thing... Deploying R shiny to your own cloud server is still too hard in 2026. Lightbulb.is is my answer - connect to your digital ocean account, click to create a server, and point it at a shiny GitHub repo. That's it - spend the time you save making your customers happy!

lightbulb.is

Lightbulb.is

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

lightbulb.is

Lightbulb.is

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Big paper on AI coding agents using Github data. The early auto-complete tools (like Copilot) led to 2.2x as much code, local agents like original Claude Code led to 7.4x, & current remote coding agents 17.3x(!) But human bottlenecks in the coding process means actual releases "only" went up 30%.

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Freek Van der Herten @freek.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

A customer replies "thanks!" to a support ticket you just closed... and the ticket reopens. Now someone has to open it, read it, and close it again. A thousand tiny paper cuts across a day. So we taught There There to recognize a thank-you and leave the ticket closed. 🧵 here's how! ⬇️

An infographic details a process for ticket management, featuring icons representing messages, checks, questions, and connections.

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Reposted by Tom Smith

JD Long @jdlong.cerebralmastication.com · 28/05/2026

A lot of folks aren’t distinguishing clearly between “AI figured X out” and “AI helped write code that enabled us to figure X out”. They are very very different.

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

A gif from my first locally-deployed diffusion model (Quen-image). The frames of the gif are each of the sequential de-noising steps, ultimately producing the final image. The prompt was kindly supplied by my 6 year old son!

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Reposted by Tom Smith

Seeed Studio @seeedstudio.com · 15/05/2026

🏢 Meeting room signs, updated from SharePoint. Carlos Orts used our XIAO ESP32-S3 as a REST API wrapper, turning SharePoint booking data into JSON for SenseCraft HMI on our reTerminal E1002 full-color ePaper screen. Check it out 👉 tinyurl.com/bp83s4h4

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Soph Warnes @thatsoph.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

I was annoyed that I couldn't find a database of David Attenborough documentaries where I could search for a specific episode by topic. So I made it. attenborough-100.vercel.app

attenborough-100.vercel.app

Attenborough at 100 — A Nature Documentary Archive

Explore nearly 5,000 episodes across 90 series — from Zoo Quest in 1954 to Secret Garden in 2026. Search by animal, habitat, location, or theme.

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I agree! Finding ways to avoid vendor lock-in is always a savvy move. Partnering can be fruitful, but it's good to prioritise creating flexible architecture that can serve your needs in the bad times as well as the good. If it's not built during the good times, it's not there when you need it.

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KM @kautumn06.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I don't think I've ever felt more seen 🫡

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Open-source in action. I wonder if NHSEngland are watching?!

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Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org · 07/05/2026

Wind and solar have now beaten fossil fuels in Great Britain for a record 15 months in a row Just a decade ago, fossil fuels were generating four times more than wind + solar Now that's flipped: Since the Iran war, wind and solar generated twice as much as fossil fuels

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Rami Krispin @ramikrispin.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Opening a role on my data science team, and honestly, the definition of “Data Scientist” feels outdated. Our workflow has shifted heavily toward Claude Code and agents, and I’m rethinking what skills actually matter now. What would you prioritize in this new setup? Any good JD examples?

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I wrote a mobile-based image detection app during the first half of my daughter's swimming lesson. It's not perfect, but it was fun!

A vibe-coded image detector misclassifying a white pair of trainers as a toilet.

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I occasionally fall into a rut and worry that hospital problems are unsolvable, and thankfully posts like this snap me out of it quickly. Here's a team that is successfully deciphering the language that whales speak! Specifically, what their vowels sound like! Boom!

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Good laziness and why LLMs with no time constraint produce haystacks of code. I've been experimenting with prompts along the lines of "Implement this feature by removing code if you can. If you must add code, add it sparingly". Still experimenting but it does show promise

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

The content at the Modern Software Engineering channel is excellent, just in case anyone is yet to discover it... youtube.com/shorts/mLinl...

youtube.com

The Silent Killer of Your Software 🤫

YouTube video by Modern Software Engineering

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Hey #rstats world. Before I write something, is there anything out there to discover database table relationships from a large body of production sql (1000+ queries)? I have a largeish undocumented data warehouse (700 tables, 28k cols).

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Swapna Krishna @swapnakrishna.com · 07/04/2026

Earthset from Artemis II. I am overcome.

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 03/04/2026

Warning to open source maintainers: the Axios supply chain attack started with some very sophisticated social engineering targeted at one of their developers simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/3/s...

simonwillison.net

The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering

The Axios team have published a full postmortem on the supply chain attack which resulted in a malware dependency going out in a release the other day, and it involved …

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RJ Andrews @infowetrust.com · 02/04/2026

I went looking for one Japanese chart book and ended up with 19 prewar volumes, a new collecting method, and a stronger conviction that graphic history is far from fully known. www.chartography.net/p/ascending-...

chartography.net

Ascending into the Realm of Japanese Charts

A prewar collection crosses the Pacific.

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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊 🎂 Mar 30, 1840 Charles Booth born in Liverpool, England 🇬🇧 1889: Booth constructed street maps of London, showing poverty and wealth by color coding, transforming existing methods of social survey and poverty mapping 👀Interactive map: booth.lse.ac.uk/map

One of Booth's large scale map showing levels of poverty in London by color shading. See the legend image for color assignment

Zoomed in detail of one of Booth's poverty maps

Legend showing color coding in Booth's map, ranging from yellow (wealthy) through red (well-to-do), down to dark blue & black (very poor & criminal)

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Jeremy Allen @jeremy-data.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

I am still logging AI's transformation of work. The log is a quiet place, absent the noise of social media. I don't editorialize much, just collect the sources and make them available with a short summary. open.substack.com/pub/thetreel...

open.substack.com

AI's transformation of work

A running log

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Here's a video of me live-coding a hospital flow dashboard to use as a conversation starter. It's written in R shiny. youtu.be/aLm2WPfNmGM It's deployed here: smithdata.co.uk/apps/hospita... The code is here: github.com/ThomUK/hospi... #databs #datasky #nhs #nhs-os

youtu.be

AI-assisted live-coding a hospital flow analytics app with Claude Code and R Shiny

YouTube video by code-to-info

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Tom Smith @analyst42.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Today I gave a presentation to senior colleagues titled "Mystic Meg and the Triad Plot". I went for "memorable" rather than "technical rigour". People seemed to enjoy it. I might do this more often - big serious healthcare operations questions reframed as adventure book titles.

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