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Ned Letcher

@ned.sh
3.6K followers 9.9K following 135 posts

Data science, AI/ML, analytics, visualisation. Naarm/Melbourne @thoughtworks, #dataBS, #Python, #NLP, #DuckDB, & assorted whimsical miscellania

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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 30/03/2026
Just a few hours left to submit to PyCon AU! If you have a #python and/or #Data and #AI idea you're keen to share with the community, why not consider a cheeky last minute submission? 🐍
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 13/02/2026
Hey #python, #data and AI peeps! #pyconau 2026 is in Brisbane this year and the CFP is open! Are you a (wrangler | engineer | curator | researcher) doing things with data or AI/ML? Consider sharing with the community--submit to the Data and AI specialist track! 2026.pycon.org.au/cfp/speciali...
2026.pycon.org.au
Specialist Tracks — PyCon AU 2026
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Sheridan Feucht @sfeucht.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
I'm headed to San Diego this afternoon to attend the mech interp workshop at #NeurIPS! Really excited to give a lightning talk and catch up with everyone. 🌴
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 04/12/2025
San Diego!
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 03/12/2025
I'm in town for NeurlPS all week. Wow this conference is biiiig. Anyone I know (or don't know!) up for a drink? #NeurIPS #NeurIPS2025 #mlsky
A selfie of me looking quizzically excited, in the poster hall of NeurIPS 2025, standing under the Deep Learning section sign hanging from the roof
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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
I like to think that this map of all the regional names for woodlice in the UK could also be a map illustrating the new tribes of humans to be found on the same landmass after The Great Digital Crash and ensuing breakdown of society.
A map of all the different names for woodlice in the United Kingdom
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Data Behind the Scenes Conference @databsconf.com · 06/10/2025
The videos from the #DataBS Conference have made it to YouTube! Over the coming days, we'll highlight sessisons from the event -- one post per talk. You can also sneak ahead by going straight to the YouTube playlist, here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
youtube.com
Data Behind the Scenes 2025 - YouTube
Data Behind the Scenes is a data conference by data practitioners, for data practitioners. We come together to share stories and experiences about the the me...
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Collin Berke @collinberke.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
I got introduced to @randyau.com's 'Data Cleaning IS Analysis, Not Grunt Work' post during the #dataBS Conf this week: www.counting-stuff.com/data-cleanin... . I just finished--it was a great read. Here are some quotes and thoughts I'm walking away with 👇 1/9 #RStats
counting-stuff.com
Data Cleaning IS Analysis, Not Grunt Work
Also, most data cleaning articles suck
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
“In humans, curiosity usually begins as a mental stirring, but in octopuses,… it’s a function of bodily design. In a sense, curiosity + intention are dispersed throughout an octopus’s tissues—right out to the tips of its tentacles. Inquisitiveness… ‘is built into the octopuses’ anatomy.’”
nybooks.com
‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’ | Verlyn Klinkenborg
Their striking intelligence makes octopuses tempting subjects for wishful anthropomorphism and uncanny reminders of nature’s mysteries.
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Erwan Rivault @erwanrivault.com · 12/09/2025
Launch day 🚀 We’ve just released @chartlecc.bsky.social - a daily chart game! Your job is to guess which country is represented by the red line in today's chart. You get 5 tries, no other clues! Play today, come back tomorrow for a different chart with new data and share with your chart friends 📈
chartle.cc
Chartle - A daily chart game
Guess the country in red by analysing today's chart
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Erwan Rivault @erwanrivault.com · 19/09/2025
It's been a week since we launched @chartle.cc with @adnaanj.bsky.social and we had an amazing start! - Average of 700 users/day - Record 1.2K users yesterday - From 78 countries - 66% win overall - 2m 18s average engagement Thank you to all who played + shared the game Any feedback, send our way!
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DuckDB @duckdb.org · 16/09/2025
📈 DuckDB 1.4.0 is out! This is our first LTS release which comes with *one year of community support*. It also supports database encryption, the MERGE SQL statement and Iceberg writes. For more details, read the announcement blog post at duckdb.org/2025/09/16/a...
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Alice Averlong 🏳️‍⚧️ @alice.averlong.com · 15/09/2025
Behold my latest keyboard, the JuggleKeyboard! Just click the letters as they're juggled, it's an easy* way to type. * it's not easy
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Dr Osnat Katz Moon 🌙🟣 @astrosnat.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
Does anyone want beautiful historical depictions of celestial phenomena? Anyone? Well, here you go publicdomainreview.org/collection/f...
publicdomainreview.org
Flowers of the Sky
Depictions spanning almost a whole millennium — in chronological order — of comets, meteors, meteorites and shooting stars.
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hrbrmstr 🇺🇦 🇬🇱 🇨🇦 🏳️‍🌈 @hrbrmstr.dev · 15/09/2025
"AI" is going great! blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/mac-app...
“AI chat" icon collage from the Mac App Store
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/09/2025
I'd recommend this course for anyone working on operational systems where LLM output may play a load-bearing role, even if you're not of the engineering persuasion, but are up for getting your hands dirty with some code. maven.com/parlance-lab...
maven.com
AI Evals For Engineers & PMs by Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar on Maven
Learn proven approaches for quickly improving AI applications. Build AI that works better than the competition, regardless of the use-case.
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/09/2025
The course validated my intuitions that these foundations apply just as much to generative AI applications and has given me a road-tested pragmatic framework for applying them to the weird world of LLMs and AI engineering.
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/09/2025
Their approach thoroughly resonates with my experience as a data scientist: look at your data, perform thorough error analysis, develop metrics that matter, and iterate via experimentation and user-feedback.
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/09/2025
I recently completed @hamel.bsky.social and @sh-reya.bsky.social's AI Evals For Engineers & PMs, which presented practical frameworks for identifying appropriate dimensions of quality, creating automatic validators to measure at scale, and effective feedback loops that enable continual improvement
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/09/2025
Assessing LLM output quality requires managing their vast input/output spaces and acute sensitivity to minor prompt changes, but many teams are still running on largely vibe-based evals, incurring considerable risk and preventing systematic product improvement. We can do better! #databs #mlsky
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Joshua Gans @joshgans.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
If AI and workers were strong complements, what would we see?, by @joshgans open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga... Does the latest data tell us AI is a substitute for human work? Nope. Is that comforting? Also nope. My comments on @erikbryn and co. (and @Noahpinion
open.substack.com
If AI and workers were strong complements, what would we see?
The answer is pretty much what the initial data is showing
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Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
debugging new pretrain like
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Jennifer Cobbe @jennifercobbe.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
There is a reason why the introduction and first three chapters are required reading in weeks two and three of my law and technology course Essential for understanding where we are
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Jorin @jorin.me · 26/08/2025
DuckDB is awesome and it’s a great tool to explore and transform data. But DuckDB doesn’t help you visualize and share data with others. That's why I built Shaper: taleshape.com/blog/turn-yo... #duckdb #databs #dataengineering
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Randy Au @randyau.com · 20/08/2025
Data Behind the Scenes Conference free registration is open! Wed Sept 24, ~10am-5pm EDT. Online-only, single track. Join data folks as they share experiences with how data work is done in production, thorns & disturbing hacks and all! (Pls help get the word out 📈) ti.to/databsconf/d... #dataBS
ti.to
DataBS Conf
"Data, Behind the Scenes" is a free-to-attend online-only, single track conference centered on the real stories of data work from the folks in the trenches. We’re not here for the latest AI hype, perf...
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Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
I got my #DataBS Conf ticket todayyy! Come hangout with us! ti.to/databsconf/d...
ti.to
DataBS Conf
"Data, Behind the Scenes" is a free-to-attend online-only, single track conference centered on the real stories of data work from the folks in the trenches. We’re not here for the latest AI hype, perf...
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Raghav Agrawal @impactology@mastodon.social @impactology.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Is there any book for working professionals that teaches them how to dissect, compress, and traverse a domain quickly to come up with first principles of any domain? To rapidly map any domain's knowledge structure in weeks, not years
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Justin Garrison @justingarrison.com · 10/08/2025
Mythical agent month
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Dominik Moritz @domoritz.de · 01/08/2025
🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.
Screenshot of embedding atlas showing the embedding view on the left, a table at the bottom and charts on the right.
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henry @hdevalence.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
I’ve been working on an experimental, multiplayer, open-world AI chat system called Numinex. 1. Uses branching comment trees 2. Multiplayer/multimodel 3. Explicit context curation 4. Built on ATProto 5. Open observation of model behaviors
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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 10/07/2025
LOL, @beyer.house.gov ftw
A nutty tweet from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (dated 10 July 2025) reading "Americans have questions about geoengineering and contrails. They expect honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers. For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. This ends today." --> to which Rep. Don Beyer's official account tweets this reply (also dated 10 July 2025): "Some people have 'questions' about whether birds are real — will that be your next project? How much taxpayer money will you be spending on this?"
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 14/06/2025
Anyone got a good alternative to Pocket as a read later / stash a copy of an article tool?
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
The AI Con book tour is headed abroad! @alexhanna.bsky.social and I aren't traveling together but check out thecon.ai/events for our upcoming events, starting with Edinburgh (Alex), Sydney (Emily) and Melbourne (Emily)
thecon.ai
Events - THE AI CON
Upcoming CTMF-GAIL Seminar (Edinburgh), June 20, 2025 Alex will do a fireside chat with Shannon Vallor, hosted by the University of Edinburgh’s Generative AI Laboratory. UTS (Sydney), June 25, 2025 Em...
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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
A great post from Dr Marco Motta on the pursuit of objectivity in data storytelling #dataviz #dataBS. Marco is both an expert in data viz and has a PhD in philosophy - so he has some unique perspectives that are worth engaging with www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-d...
linkedin.com
From Data to Dialogue: Why Pure Objectivity in Analytics is a Philosophical Dead End
Rethinking data visualization through the lens of phenomenology and hermeneutics In boardrooms around the world, a familiar refrain echoes: "Just show me the facts." "Let the data speak for itself.
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Jonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
I have an opportunity to hire a staff scientist for my lab. Looking for someone with outstanding skillset in ML/statistics, genomics applications; interest in mentoring, strong publication record, PD experience required. Email CV to me+cc my assistant (see 'contact' on my website). Ad to follow.
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Maike Osborne @maosbot.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
the peak moment of my career was co-inventing (with Roman Garnett) Bayesian optimisation, only to discover just before we submitted that someone had already invented it a few decades before
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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 25/05/2025
our priority is to invest in the systems that prevent your stuff from being covered in poop in the first place
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DuckDB @duckdb.org · 13/05/2025
DuckDB Labs is looking for software engineer interns: duckdblabs.com/jobs/Softwar... Apply until June 15 and join us in Amsterdam!
duckdblabs.com
Software Engineer Intern
DuckDB Labs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 05/04/2025
Extremely +1 to DuckDB!
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
After all the discourse over whether super-intelligent, ultra-powerful AI is coming, we now have a prime example of exactly how AI is massively disruptive, today: When it is used by lazy, reckless, and malicious people in power. Welcome to the age of AI-generated economic collapse, everyone
bloodinthemachine.com
Welcome to the age of AI-generated economic collapse
On AGI, AI-generated tariffs, and what really threatens the social order
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 03/04/2025
Textual Web app in Electron 🤣
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 03/04/2025
What about distributing things like Dash and streamlit apps as electron apps? I imagine that could be a viable strategy
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 03/04/2025
That's some bona fide data BS right there 👌
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rmoff 🏃‍♂️🫖🥓 @rmoff.net · 02/04/2025
Thoughtworks have published their latest #TWTechRadar. A few 'blips' (as they call them) of note in the data space: 🟢 Adopt: Data product thinking 🟢 Adopt: Trino 👍 Trial: Databricks Delta Live Tables 👍 Trial: @metabase.com ✋ Hold: Reverse ETL www.thoughtworks.com/radar #dataBS
thoughtworks.com
Technology Radar | Guide to technology landscape
The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to today's technology landscape. Read the latest here.
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 02/04/2025
This is a thing that seems to keep recurring for me too. Any #databs peeps have any ideas?
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Robin Linacre @robinlinacre.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
If you're using duckdb in a python script or jupyter notebook, you can run con.execute('CALL start_ui()') at any point, and the ui will pop right up in your web browser with the current database automatically available. (I knew about the UI, but I had missed this trick!)
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Arna Ghosh @arnaghosh.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
Are you training self-supervised/foundation models, and worried if they are learning good representations? We got you covered! 💪 🦖Introducing Reptrix, a #Python library to evaluate representation quality metrics for neural nets: github.com/BARL-SSL/rep... 🧵👇[1/6] #DeepLearning
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Ned Letcher @ned.sh · 31/03/2025
Haha well I'm sold then
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