iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

The Olympics > WBC take for baseball makes absolutely no sense and there is no need to pretend it does

100

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

this is insane, the only possible call here is an INT. I don't get it

010

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Wait people thought this wasn’t an INT?

000

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Arch with three spectacular passes on that drive 🙏

010

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

this is something that the computer in CFB 26 started doing and it makes so much sense

000

Reposted by Ben Howell

Ben Csiernik @bcsiernik.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Im a bit over a third into tracking this year’s OUA women’s hockey season and the expected goal model is doing pretty well. A really “fun” case of regression to the mean at this point.

141

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

29 in Philadelphia to 72 in Orlando 🔜 🙏

020

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

*Star Wars voice* somehow Taylor Swift returned to number 1 (I’m actually very surprised by this because I wasn’t sure she’d be top 5 at all)

130

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

(remember that the point is to win games)

110

Reposted by Ben Howell

FanGraphs Baseball @fangraphs.com · 01/12/2025

InstaGraphs: Job Posting: San Diego Padres – Intern, Sports Science blogs.fangraphs.com/instagraphs/...

blogs.fangraphs.com

Job Posting: San Diego Padres - Intern, Sports Science

The San Diego Padres are hiring.

021

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Padres are hiring Sport Science interns. Very important roles for us w/ boots on the ground data collection and application!

023

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

yeah you wouldn’t keep em out nor would you surely keep out a team who beat both huh

000

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

at the end of the day I want to care about three games: A&M, OU, Arkansas and not worry about how much a quality loss matters

000

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

I wish the 12-team playoff did not exist

100

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Revellie can’t come to DKR because A&M AIN’T GOT THAT DAWG IN EM

001

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

How soon can Dia Bell put in the burnt orange

000

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

it is funny how it’s only ever “this A&M player never got offered / recruited by Texas and wants to prove them wrong” and never the reverse…

000

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

sure, the account for a new league having 0 tweets on the day of their “draft” is uh not how I’d do things *personally*

030

Reposted by Ben Howell

jen ramos-eisen @jenramose.online · 20/11/2025

#WPBL NEWS — I asked the PR director for clarity over the use of past tense, indicating that the draft has already happened ahead of the draft this evening. "Correct, the players have already been selected for teams," the WPBL PR director told me. "They are not chosen in real time tonight."

74014

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

hmmmm I don’t like that I explicitly remember watching the new to the ballot players play, is this what getting old is

220

Reposted by Ben Howell

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 02/11/2025

Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...

In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class.

I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you.

It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents.

NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs
Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning.

In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work.

I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this:

(a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder)

At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map.

Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.”

That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!)

Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already.

It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it.

I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here.

I’m concerned that it’s not real data.

It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal.

None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.

417952

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

the ball does not tell a falsehood

000

Reposted by Ben Howell

James G @orth.ca · 01/11/2025

A picture of Guerrero Jr showing his back sporting a Poulin jersey.

312026

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

The words to describe how much of a loser move to call that a dead ball do not exist

130

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

something refreshing about unfollowing someone for writing a 20-grade article on a baseball topic you know a lot about rather than the usual reasons to unfollow someone these days

040

Reposted by Ben Howell

Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) @hcrichardson.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

People ask what they can do in this moment: here's a crucially important election. There are 52,000 elections taking place next month, many of which will be determined by turnout.

351092552

Reposted by Ben Howell

Joseph Zucker @josephzucker.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Taylor Swift is basically Marvel Studios now. You get a new album every year, which feels a little worse than the last, and it becomes harder and harder to ignore the commercial factors behind her decisions. defector.com/taylor-swift...

defector.com

No Good Art Comes From Greed | Defector

The packages arrived square and thin and carefully wrapped on Saturday afternoon. There were three of them, but only one was mine. If I could have rejected my package, sent it back from whence it came...

3123

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Save me $1 Rico Dowdle pickup from three weeks ago, save me 🙏

010

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Taylor Swift is not beating the allegations

220

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

my go-to sandwich just went from $8.95 to $9.95 in the last two weeks, this is terrible news

020

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Citi Field, I apologize…I was not familiar with your game. Great stadium.

000

Reposted by Ben Howell

amy brown 👻 @amybrown.xyz · 22/08/2025

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me?
Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

36191768727

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaa who woulda thought it

030

Reposted by Ben Howell

Chicken Puppet 🏳️‍⚧️ @chickenpuppet.online · 18/08/2025

I’m sure I’m going to be stuck beating this drum for three months but it’s a really important distinction that’s California is voting on a new map and Texas is just going to do it

1154

Reposted by Ben Howell

Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

the right spent the early COVID pandemic whining about how they weren’t allowed to do various things because of the virus, then, by scientific magic, our best minds quickly developed a medicine which allowed people to do those things ASAP. and the right decided they hated that too. Still weird

535954

Reposted by Ben Howell

Billy Fryer @billyfryer42.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

Using data from @acrossthetimeline.com, I analyzed trade patterns among WNBA Teams and historic franchises as well as the 2025 Trade Deadline moves billyfryer.com/wbb/historic-w…

Heat map table showing common trade partners among current WNBA Teams including Portland’s past trade history

175

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

The Savannah Bananas are not competitive baseball, it's a show and that's more than fine. But it is not a competitive product where winning matters

010

Reposted by Ben Howell

Mike Petriello @mikepetriello.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Bless you @williamfleitch.bsky.social williamfleitch.substack.com/p/volume-5-i...

19657157

Reposted by Ben Howell

southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

The missing piece of this viral post is that the Texas officials are lying and deflecting blame. The NWS, hobbled as it is, issued an accurate flood watch for Kerr County the evening before and accurate escalating warnings overnight as the flood was developing.

24456472305

Reposted by Ben Howell

Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

🚨🚨🚨 double overtime playoff hockey siren (soon to be triple overtime) 🚨🚨🚨

2466

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

rec softball team found out I work for an MLB team a couple weeks ago, which sometimes means I wake up to fun texts like "hey can you explain what attack angle is, I'm seeing it everywhere but it makes no sense"

470

Reposted by Ben Howell

Ian Petrie @icpetrie.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

He noted there was initial resistance to the river trail, with some residents believing it would provide a path for criminals. “People said this is going to ruin the neighborhood,” he said. “In reality, you know what happened? Homes increased in value.”

inquirer.com

New $48M pedestrian bridge connects Schuylkill Banks in Center City to Grays Ferry

Starting Saturday, trail users will be able to cross a new soaring cable-stayed bridge.

0273

Ben Howell @benhowell71.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

as an aside, so many coach partners know ball at a high level and are a big part of them being able to do their job. At Texas, we had a couple instances where a wife in the stands spotted someone tipping something before anyone else and we were able to communicate that to the dugout pretty quickly

000