iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Was great to meet a bunch of folks at Posit conf! Here's me pictured with all the new lightbulb ideas I'm having from people's talks + convos (Not AI, it's a super cool exhibit at Houston's Museum of Fine Art called Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity)

A man wearing a black shirt + shorts in the center of a dark mirrored room reflecting many golden lights

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I might substitute this one for "large boulder size of small boulder"

Tweet saying "We're a modest company with modest goals: 1. sell a quality product at a fair price 2. drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god"

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Not perfect, but I do like this chart from Artificial Analysis with cost per agentic task vs their overall performance metric artificialanalysis.ai/models#intel...

A scatter dot with cost per agentic task on the X axis and overall model performance on the Y axis. There is a strong, positive relationship between cost per agentic task and performance score, with no models really in the denoted "most attractive quadrant" with low cost per agentic task and high performance

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

A lot of models have very different people with the same name in their weights, but here I am in Opus 4.8 I'm not sure how to feel about this!

A description of me, Michael Mullarkey, that's eeriely accurate from Opus 4.8

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

If Weakened Friends plays a show in your city, do yourself a favor and go see them

A photo of Weakened Friends on a lit stage in an otherwise dark concert venue

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Had a fantastic time at NBA Summer League, Flagg v Harper yesterday absolutely lived up to the hype

An NBA court during a summer league game. Dylan Harper is going up for a dunk and in the process of being fouled by a Mavericks defender

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

The free throws immediately following boos raining down after Jakucionis (accidentally?) committed a foul with the game out of hand

A basketball court with a player shooting a free throw

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I love building data projects. And it's worth taking some time at the beginning to figure out if they're impossible If you're not subscribed yet you can check out my latest Data Dash newsletter on how to do that here buttondown.com/datadash/arc...

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

World is wild so went and found big rock

A landscape shot of a snowy mountain landscape with a frozen lake in the foreground

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

My new Data Dash newsletter post is on its way to inboxes! If you aren't subscribed yet you can learn how to have more fun writing a README here buttondown.com/datadash/arc...

Make your README a brag sheet from Data Dash (says January 7, 2025 which isn't today!)

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

I got laid off suddenly and I'm looking for a new gig — remote or Denver based data scientist/ML engineer roles I'm good enough at coding to not break prod and good enough at humans that I used to be a therapist Reach out via the email on the resume I've linked below or DM with leads, thank you!!

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Labeling data by hand continues to pay dividends The first two principal components for embeddings of podcast episode descriptions line up really well with episode type labels

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

In my last newsletter post, I told people labeling data by hand was a good idea I try to walk what I talk, so I labeled all the episodes over the past year+ for one of my favorite podcasts I used a Shiny for Python app I built, and that made the process go much faster vs. a spreadsheet

A horizontal bar chart of episode types of Dunc'd On basketball podcast episode type by whether or not I thought the episode was a banger

A majority of all episode types were bangers, but while the Big Picture episodes were the most common type, they were least often bangers. An overwhelming majority of Gamers and Hollinger + Duncan episodes were bangers, though those were both substantially less common

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

I used ModernBERT to create embeddings of the official descriptions for every Dunc'd On podcast episode in their RSS feed (Hi @nateduncannba.bsky.social, @sethpartnow.bsky.social and @dannyleroux.bsky.social!) I reduced those embeddings to two dimensions + created this interactive plot

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

I'm playing with RSS feeds, and my favorite basketball podcast has even wilder episode release times than I expected

Bar graph of podcast episode release times for Dunc'd On by hour of the day. The most common release times are very late in the evening or very early in the morning

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

This book is perfect for sickos like me. Page 39 dives into how far we can extend copper wires to make functioning circuits, then page 40 starts with "What is truth?"

The cover of the book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software Second Edition by Charles Petzold

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Hey @mikecaulfield.bsky.social unfortunately seems to be an account impersonating you on here. I reported for impersonation and blocked, but wanted to give a heads up + DMs don't have media

An impersonation Bluesky account of Mike Caulfield with the handle @santospacker.bsky.social

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

While everyone else was regular and took a post-Thanksgiving meal nap, I followed these instructions and got Ollama working on my nearly 5 year old Android I used Qwen2.5:0.5b and got ~8 tokens per second dev.to/koolkamalkis...

A terminal window on an Android phone with the following text:
Python has become one of the most popular languages among programmers because: 1. It is easy to learn due to its simplicity and readability. 2. It supports a wide variety of libraries and frameworks for various programming tasks, making it ideal for developing applications in different domains. 3. It is widely used across multiple industries, including web development, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, scientific computing, etc. Python's versatility allows developers to build custom software solutions quickly and effectively. With its active community of users, libraries, and tools, Python can be a valuable tool for many developers who prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Some key points about Python: - It has built-in support for several programming paradigms (e.g., object-oriented, procedural, functional). - It is cross-platform compatible. - It supports various data structures like lists, dictionaries, tuples, sets, and so on. - It is open source with a growing community of developers contributing to its development and improvement. In summary, Python is an excellent language for beginners as it allows them to write code quickly and learn the basics of programm…

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Small data teams have two realistic choices: 1. Take the (helpful!) approach @randyau.com describes in this screenshot 2. Spend an inordinate amount of time engaging in polite fictions Engaging in some polite fictions is required in any job, but ideally doesn't constitute the team's entire role

Since I'm not good at doing any of that, the way I tend to approach "big projects" is to break them down into useful self-contained chunks that have these properties:

The chunk of work is small enough to deliver sorta/kinda quickly so that people don't get annoyed that I've run off for a year
The chunk is valuable on its own merits, even if it subsequent chunks don't ever get built
The chunk is potentially useful for other projects, it's not solely tied within the big project

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

Didn't know anyone was living inside all my old code repos

A picture of a push notification that reads: Editors Picks. A young couple's dream home was infested with thousands of bats and their skeletons

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 05/10/2024

This phenomenon is so real. I've been thinking about this piece by a couple of AI ethics researchers a lot www.aisnakeoil.com/p/faq-about-...

An article excerpt from AI ethics researchers that reads: There’s a humorous definition of AI that says “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. When an AI application starts working reliably, it disappears into the background of our digital or physical world. We take it for granted. And we stop calling it AI. When a technology is new, doesn’t work reliably, and has double-edged societal implications, we’re more likely to call it AI. So it’s easy to miss that AI already plays a huge positive role in our lives.

There’s a long list of applications that would have been called AI at one point but probably wouldn’t be today: Robot vacuum cleaners, web search, autopilot in planes, autocomplete, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, spam filtering, and even spell check. These are the kinds of AI we want more of — reliable tools that quietly make our lives better.

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

Just finished listening to Character Limit by @kateconger.bsky.social and @rmac.bsky.social Even if you think you know what happened to Twitter this book is a wild ride worth taking! For example, Elon appeared to make multiple critical decisions based on the advice of his biographer(??)

Cover of the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 17/09/2024

I think this is the only site where I'd qualify as an early adopter?

BlueSky imagine celebrating 100k users, and I was user 64,302

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 05/04/2024

Next level pettiness from the Rockets broadcast #nba

Andrew Wiggins about to shoot a free throw with a graphic showing he was drafted first in 2014 while Jokic, the defending Finals MVP, was drafted 41

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 10/10/2023

I know @molly.wiki is joking, and one of many barriers to catching academic fraud is that even when code for papers exists it's often indecipherable (This very much includes code I wrote while in academia. When we have too many jobs it's hard to do any of them as well as we'd like)

Highlighted text from Substack post: "Note to self: if you’re going to write code to do fraud, make it messy and unreadable to reduce the chances it’s later put in front of a jury as evidence"

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

I got the Llama 2 LLM working locally on my ~4 year old Intel Chip MacBook + you can too I followed this blog post by @simonwillison.net up until downloading the model simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/1/l... Downloaded the model using the instructions in this Github issue github.com/simonw/llm-l...

Picture of command line terminal with a command that says "llm -m llama-2-7b-chat.Q8_0 'five names for a cute pet skunk' -o no_gpu 1 with output of 5 pet skunk names + descriptions generated by Llama 2 running locally on my Mac

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 21/09/2023

I found myself disagreeing with this excellent, touching, and thorough piece by @economeager.bsky.social until the last paragraph. Understanding why I wasn't finishing my academic projects led me to pursue a path where I'm much happier! rachaelmeager.substack.com/p/finish-you...

. I think I got sidetracked. My point is that this colleagues’ advice2 helped me tremendously and now I’d like to pass it on. The bottleneck for success and fulfilment and even personal growth probably doesn’t look like what we think it looks like. It probably looks more like finishing your projects. Or at least understanding why you don’t want to finish them. And if you’re avoiding something, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to do it. You need to be in dialogue with it, no matter how much it horrifies you, or how thoroughly you’ve buried that part. Enough already. Now I’m rambling because I’m insecure about the blog post. You have to press send. Finish your projects

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 01/09/2023

Fascinating research suggesting YouTube can filter out conspiracy content even when people try to search for it And also lol

A screenshot of the research article saying "We deviated from this term set in only two ways. First, on YouTube we eliminated the “signs” term, as the phrase “fire signs” was returning many astrology videos. To deal with a similar issue on X, we used these exclusion terms:

-“fire signs” -leo -aries -sagittarius.
"

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Michael Mullarkey @mcmullarkey.bsky.social · 08/07/2023

Gm bsky I regret to inform you escaping to an island solves most problems

A landscape picture of an ocean with a picturesque island town in the background

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