iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 18h

Excellent essay from Giorgia Lupi on the steps of craft -- and how AI *can* be used to support it. AI can be a powerful tool to accelerate some kinds of work -- but only with careful attention to what we lose each step of the way.

000

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 21h

I combined my love of #datavis with a different passion -- the rich text of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. The Torahmap places every verse of the Tanakh in a fixed spatial position, then plots overlays over it. You can play with it at torahmap.org

3115

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The secret to immortality found: a ten percent increase in tree canopy cover.

010

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Don't we all sometimes wish our lives could be summarized as "loved to scuba dive and take acid." (I recognize her accomplishments were actually quite substantial, both in acting and in diving technology.) www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/a...

nytimes.com

Zale Parry, Aquatic Hollywood Star and Early Acid Tripper, Dies at 93

A diving feat landed her on the cover of Sports Illustrated and led to a film and TV career. She also took part in one of the first LSD studies.

000

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

At last, the Rob Reiner / Chris Nolan connection we’ve all been searching for.

A Venn diagram overlapping “the princess bride” and “inception” with a dream within a dream

000

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

- Folkloristics - Story structure - microeconomics - statistics - social media technologies as information systems (in 2000!) Fascinating exercise to look back at those!

020

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Proving that Poes Law predates the internet, I genuinely have no idea whether this letter is a ribbing or tongue in cheek pride.

021

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

I want to talk a little more about discoverability. I often find that the creators of AI-driven services have a very specific set of scenarios in their minds -- but then advertise extremely broadly. Unlike a button on a UI, there's no way to know what the creators have in mind!

130

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I'm interested in Anthropic's Qualitative AI study, with lots of questions about both what they learn and how to use the results. www.anthropic.com/features/81k... But from a visualization point of view, there's something I noticed that's bothering me. Those dots are impressive.

A map of the united states, purporting to show locations of survey respondents. The outlines of the states of Washington, California, and Florida are densely filled.

The caption: "Each dot represents 4 respondents"

130

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Dumb heart. Barely spins a yarn, much less telling a tale.

010

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Um … we don’t have children practice handwriting because there’s a shortage of the letter ‘a’ in the world. We don’t have them learn times tables because the economy needs a piece of notebook paper that says “4x3=12.”

020

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

I’m less enchanted with the question “what does a lefty with the power of Trump” look like, because the best possible outcome is a world where every few years we lurch between lefty utopia and corrupt dictatorship.

130

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 28/09/2025

more and more frequently, trump makes comments that make it seem like he is vaguely aware of the fact that his entire inner circle and cabinet are all scheming viziers, he's just sort of indifferent about it

Trump referenced a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland is different from what's being portrayed to him.

"I spoke to the governor, she was very nice," Trump said. "But I said, 'Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening? My people tell me different.' They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible."

291073161

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

I carried out the same exercise in metric, too: the number of hours during which the temperature (in C) is the latitude. Cooler equatorial oceans -- and a long span of northern Africa and south America. danyelf.github.io/degree-degree/

A screenshot from the Degree-degree visualization. The interface allows the user to pick between different temperature modes; the main visualization shows a globe, with colorful bands running through central South America and northern Africa and across the oceans

140

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

A friend posted a photo, sunbathing from Scandanavia a little bit ago, captioned "60 degrees at 60 degrees!" That made me wonder how often that really happens -- where on earth is the temperature the same as the latitude, and how often? I answered that at danyel.github.io/degree-degree

A screenshot of a visualization showing a globe; a purple streak runs across the northern Atlantic ocean and diffuses into a darker purple across Asia. A control panel on the left would allow the user to explore the map further.

161

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

The other day, I watched a (small local) LLM melt itself down. I was testing out Ollama with the 8b Deepseek model. I gave it a moderately-challenging technical question -- how to make a Javascript and Python package talk to each other -- and hit "go". Three hours later...

An Ollama UI:
"I’m interested in using Python to drive Deck.gl. Do you know anything about that?"
Thought for 1800.6 seconds

140

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

ceej @ceej.online · 16/07/2025

Strunk & White stole all their ideas from that spider

1235829

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

This is hilarious - ChatGPT hallucinates repeatedly about a nonexistent feature on another website (confusing people), eventually leading the site's owners to implement the feature. www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

holovaty.com

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists | Holovaty.com

12010

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

Rabbi Mike Rothbaum @ravmike.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Given that these grotesque abuses are being conducted for our supposed benefit, what do you imagine they'll do when Jews are not sufficiently grateful? What will be the punishment? And which Jews and Jewish orgs will cooperate? May God give us soft hearts and strong spines.

0146

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

Curt Gebers @curtgebers.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Oh, my God, it's the HUD sucker proxy.

0121

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

The White House is pretty much issuing revised official photographs that no longer show out of favor politburo members.

000

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

If something reduces death by 30%, then removing that thing increases death by 50%. There are about 40,000 deaths by flu annually, placing it just behind liver disease and self-harm as a leading cause of death. With no vaccine, I bet we could make it up to 60k and hop 3 steps in the rankings!

030

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

I suspect that the person at OpenAI who saves 5% on a power cost gets a much smaller promotion than the person who shows how to get a 5% increase on a loss function. Cost isn’t the issue, so cost isn’t an issue.

030

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I seem to have two different blog entries -- or, perhaps, rants -- half-written. Help pull me off the fence before I go away for vacation! Which would you rather see? Option 1: Visualization Is About Comparison (and anyone who disagrees is trying to sell you a gauge)

460

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Finally got a chance to read these comments on box plots. I think it’s really important to realize that the visualization forms of the mid 20th century were doing really different work than 2”we do today.

110

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 25/04/2024

For #30DayChartChallenge - day 26 - ai I wanted to make a chart that showed generative AI generates expected seeming results consistent with the kind of corpus associated with the prompt, with no understanding of truth, facts, logic, or causality. So I had chatGPT supply the data for the graph.

Do not go to Generative AI for any outcome that expects truth.

37523

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

It’s surreal. Vaccination is one of the easiest-to-quantify, mind-boggling successful health discoveries ever. A solid “w” ticked on the human column.

240

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

We tried. It’s weirdly unavailable to stream right now.

020

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

Alper Sarikaya @alper.datav.is · 30/10/2024

Hi new website! I'm Alper and I work on the Power BI Core Visuals team as an software engineer at Microsoft. I try to bridge the gap between research and practice in driving effective visualization authoring and consumption experiences for people of varying data and visual fluency.

1165

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

I've been thinking a lot about how to interview for UX well recently. Smarter people than me have written books on this, but I've run into a few recurrent issues. Here's a few big ones: danyelfisher.info/blog/2024/2/...

danyelfisher.info

How to Ask the Right Question — Danyel Fisher

100

Reposted by Danyel Fisher

Bethany Black @bethanyblack.bsky.social · 20/02/2024

I never understood survivorship bias and I turned out okay.

6756183

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 22/01/2024

I feel like new frontiers in data visualization can be explored with this approach. (Or did Tamara Munzner already cover this? graphics.stanford.edu/papers/webvi... )

000

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

It's time for the IEEE Vis conference. I'm not in Oz this year, but the paper listing is online ieeevis.org/year/2023/in.... Authors are pretty good about putting their papers on arxiv ; I've been downloading and following along.

161

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

I got to use this data-first philosophy was my work at Honeycomb on BubbleUp. We figured out the visualization first, and the way it would fit into the interface much later. danyelfisher.info/blog/2023/7/...

danyelfisher.info

A Honeycomb Story: Five Different Kinds of Bar Charts — Danyel Fisher

110

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 10/10/2023

When I first learned about interface prototyping, we distinguished between high- and low-fidelity prototypes: cardboard and wireframes vs elegant, near-functional images. I've been chewing on how (I think) data visualization breaks that model. danyelfisher.info/blog/2023/7/...

221