iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 06/08/2026

I mean I agree that nominal numbers have a substantive psychological effect but the real price of many things and specifically eating out has gone up too hasn’t it?

Two-panel line chart showing U.S. restaurant prices, overall inflation, and wages from 2010 to 2026, with all series indexed to 100 in 2010

000 0

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 08/05/2026

Yeah especially since a lot of ppl basically mean “the contiguous US” by “the lower 48”, unless this phrase was made specifically for this carve out and I’ve just never thought about it!

130 3

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 05/02/2026

I am finding it somewhat hard to believe that in the 1990s fully 20%+ of Scottish and Russian households were millionaires? Going to have to check the SCF on that one

020 2

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 11/08/2025

The amendment would simply read: “all justices have an x year term limit, currently serving justices are subject to that term limit as abbreviated by their current tenure since appointment.” or something along those lines. There are specific carve outs throughout the constitution like this

120 2

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 28/03/2025

A looot of money in education being poured into LLM tools to help teachers modify curriculum to fit their classroom/needs, which sure, is helpful, but that seems like the emblematic case, it’s a helpful productivity boost that needs significant oversight

020 2

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 17/12/2024

Does using ‘by’ count as an “explicit” loop? by(df, df$g, function(sub) lines(sub$x, sub$y, col = as.factor(sub$g)) Feels less loopy than writing lapply for some reason

230 3

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 15/12/2024

I’ve watched Google AI/ChatGPT/Claude hallucinate the sources or be incorrect in terms of what the source actually says. I see companies trying to do this constantly with their chatbot gates to customer support as well, it creates a very poor user experience that prevents people from reaching out

030 3

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 15/12/2024

I see this everyday where I work so it’s by no means a student exclusive issue, but what the FAQ page has that LLM’s never will is a 0% error rate. Rearranging a UI, adding semantic search, and making better design choices (which ed-tech works on constantly!) seems a vastly superior solution to me

120 2

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 15/12/2024

What’s the benefit of a curated LLM tool over a curated FAQ page in this case?

110 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 28/11/2024

I think the key issue is the framing - people will give different answers if you present all the caveats we have discussed in this thread. Does media present negative bias? Yes. Does that mean surveys presenting forced misapprehension of data are meaningful? Not really imo

000 0

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 28/11/2024

Concerning that the trend has reversed in the last 5 though!

100 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 28/11/2024

This is infant mortality (dying before 1 year), not child (5-year and below) as was originally posted. That WDI data is quite difficult to dig into source material, but I would reference the latest NVSS reports, infant mortality in the US ⬆️: www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nv... www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nv...

cdc.gov

110 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 28/11/2024

I tried tracking down the source here and was unsuccessful, the CDC official data indicates that in the US it has gone up in the last 5 years which is consistent with other medical data I am aware of: wonder.cdc.gov/controller/s... Arguable that it is as a result of covid, but upwards trend.

250 5

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 13/11/2024

Key word “voters beliefs”, there is no political compass messaging slider that can fix already broken beliefs that aren’t even real, gotta change the topic at that point. Generic dems ran better with swing voters

010 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 13/11/2024

Genuinely curious about the source here, would love to read it. But I think this illustrates my exact point, she tried to campaign to the right/middle on all of these points and they didn’t believe her! It came off as inauthentic and was hopeless from the start of her candidacy.

110 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 13/11/2024

Independents who are famously indecisive, difficult to engage en masse, and hold nuanced views that go beyond the right-left distinction?

100 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 13/11/2024

It was a lot of wasted effort campaigning for republican voted as it stands. Which direction do you suggest she should have gone?

100 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 07/11/2024

I know it’s nitpicky but gained ground really implies that Trump won a greater following, while that simply isn’t true. The chart should be titled “How democrats lost ground”

010 1

Duncan Gates @duncangates.me · 07/10/2023

Any idea on the source there? Would love to read

100 1