iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 03/10/2025

I went to the new Book Hero store today. It's not huge or fancy but it makes me so happy that an actual physical real-life book store has opened near where I live bookhero.co.nz

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 01/10/2025

Am I missing something, or is Woolworths New Zealand really selling wrapped onions for about 2.5x the price of loose onions?

200

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 30/09/2025

These words that Nigel Latta wrote in 2015 have always stayed with me

What's the hardest thing about being a parent?

It isn't the sleepless nights, or the endless fights. It isn't the constant worrying about every last little thing, or the constant pestering about every last little thing. It isn't the impact on your work life, your love life, or your social life. It isn't the lack of money, the lack of time, or even the lack of anything approaching a life of your own.

It feels like it's all of those things, but it it's none of them.

In the end, the hardest thing about being a parent is truly understanding that everything comes with a number. You get a certain number of bedtime stories, and a certain number of bedtime kisses. Your get a certain number of roads they'll cross holding your hand, and a certain number of sports matches on a Saturday morning. You get a certain number of bike rides, and a certain number of bad jokes with no real punchline. Most of all... you get a certain number of hours.

One day you'll go to the bucket, and it will be empty.

So--and I'm saying this as much to myself as to anyone else--get as much as you can, of all that you can, for as long as you possibly can. It's the only score you'll get that will ever truly mean anything, and it's also the hardest one to keep track of.

Good luck.

39125

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 29/09/2025

A bit more context since I was just looking at the business demographics data .. Stats NZ reports 144 egg farming business in 2024, which seems like a reasonable number and is up a bit since 2022, but there could be a few large suppliers and many small ones.

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 25/09/2025

Gotta share this picture again because I love it

130

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 17/09/2025

Suspicious triangle too

160

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 17/09/2025

MBIE has released the external economic advice it received about banning credit card surcharges. I haven't read the full report but here are the key findings. Basically, it's a bad idea because it will reduce competition and benefit the credit card operators. www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/...

200

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 16/09/2025

Otoh, farm-gate beef prices are waaay up over the past year so probably there's more to the story than retail shenanigans beeflambnz.com/industry-dat...

010

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 16/09/2025

Good news; bad news www.stats.govt.nz/news/annual-...

Chart showing housing rent inflation in New Zealand, it's low and falling

Chart showing the average price of beef mince in New Zealand, it's rising fast

010

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 14/09/2025

The world is shit. I planted seeds.

040

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 09/09/2025

Today in data janitor land: This number in Excel appears to have leading spaces. But TRIM() won't remove them. Why? Because they're non-breaking spaces. But SUBSTITUTE() with CHAR(160) (non-breaking space) won't remove them either. Why?! Because they're actually CHAR(202). Why??! F*cked if I know.

150

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 03/09/2025

3 more months! And this is pretty funny from Auckland Council. I presume they mean the first opening day rather than being open in general. But still, not something that a properly functioning city should say. www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

010

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 02/09/2025

Speculators gonna speculate

Polymarket chart for "Will Trump resign in 2025". Probability has spiked in recent days but still just under 6%.

021

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 21/08/2025

We can have lower tariffs now please? www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

120

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 20/08/2025

I would really like to help Watercare improve their usage estimation algorithm

000

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 16/08/2025

Weekend gardening at our house

010

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 13/08/2025

After all these years, I am still discovering maddening things about Excel. Here the true and false values are text, but SUMIFS insists on treating "true" as a logical TRUE, so it fails.

110

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 12/08/2025

For context, here's the statistics that the BLS produces (from Wikipedia)

000

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 11/08/2025

Is it normal for dental treatment plans to swap left and right, and does this ever lead to mistakes?!

220

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 10/08/2025

Asked Chat 5 to design me a potting table for the garden, hmm, I don’t think it has a PhD in carpentry

050

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 06/08/2025

Another mildly useful application of ChatGPT Agent. I could have copied and pasted the tables myself, or written some web scraping code, but that would have taken longer than writing this prompt and doing spot checks on the results. But still have the nagging worry it may have made errors.

Asking ChatGPT agent to compile a table of public holiday dates from a website

110

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 04/08/2025

So interesting. I must've messed it up the first time because I re-checked and got Meridian about 2% more expensive for our last bill (not including the $10/month credit that Meridian is offering for the first 12 months). Here's my maths with the prices Meridian quoted for us

220

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 31/07/2025

So interesting! Here's Chatham Island. And I just learned about "infragravity" waves 🤓

130

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 29/07/2025

We ended up with 101mm in the backyard yesterday. Auckland’s average for all of July is 113mm. Stormwater infrastructure earning its keep this morning

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 29/07/2025

Closing in on 100mm for the day. That’s 9,000 litres of water on the roof of my house alone.

250

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 29/07/2025

Backyard weather station just ticked over 60mm of rain for the day and it’s still chucking down

230

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 28/07/2025

Thinking about getting solar installed so like a nerd I'm analysing our half-hourly electricity billing data and I spotted some half hours that seem to have two different values recorded 🤔

110

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 25/07/2025

In a follow up I asked it to make an interactive chart with a dropdown menu instead of individual charts for each industry and it succeeded

Updated chart with dropdown menu for selecting industry

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 25/07/2025

Ooookay the new ChatGPT Agent can actually do something non-trivially useful (ugly chart though)

Requesting ChatGPT to go on Aotearoa Data Explorer and get some productivity data and make charts of it in Excel

Productivity chart for the construction industry in Excel

230

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 22/07/2025

Things you don’t see every day

Photo of a small airplane on a pole above a large shed

110

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 21/07/2025

Updated my NZ inflation tracker with today's data We may have passed peak olive oil but fruit, meat, coffee and dairy are rising again Household utilities keep rising; stuff for your home is cheaper Cheaper education for toddlers but bad news for uni students More: schiff.nz/gallery/pric...

44522

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 17/07/2025

The NZ government says it wants to decouple the economy from the property market. I think that's great! Is it working yet? Maybe......? But I do think the politics of housing supply have changed. I wrote a blog post on it: schiff.nz/blog/propert...

120

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 16/07/2025

Oh joy (from here, paywalled: www.ft.com/content/82e3...)

021

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 14/07/2025

Continuing with the data visualisation project I shared last week, over the weekend I made individual “roofline” maps for all of Auckland’s 200+ suburbs (link to gallery in the comments). Four of my favourites are below, see if you can recognise them. Gallery: schiff.nz/gallery/auck...

1232

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 10/07/2025

Re current headlines of 30k/year NZers migrating to Australia, here is the long term trend of net migration between NZ and AU. 30k is relatively high but not a record, there was a net loss of around 40k/year in 2008 and 2011-2012. Also the net fell slightly towards the end of 2024.

121

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 09/07/2025

It’s been a while since I’ve done a data visualisation project just for fun. I’ve been experimenting maps of building outlines using their roof colours from aerial imagery. Here's Auckland's CBD. There's some more on my blog: schiff.nz/blog/rooflin...

150

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 09/07/2025

An interesting thing I noticed about ChatGPT's "thinking" is that it sometimes searches the web in other languages to try to get information

Screenshot of ChatGPT searching in other languages in response to a request in English

030

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 06/07/2025

My very first interaction with Microsoft 365 Copilot was underwhelming. It suggests that getting AI agents to do useful things is quite hard, if Microsoft can't even do it within its own ecosystem.

Chat transcript with Copilot. I asked it to turn off my email autoreplies in Outlook. It told me how but I had hoped it would just turn them off itself.

062

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 02/07/2025

ChatGPT absolutely cannot read sheet music properly and will completely confidently make up nonsense about it

351

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 29/06/2025

Interesting stat from Ikea's survey of New Zealand homes (also note this is partly enabled by free on-street parking and public transport) www.ikea.com/nz/en/newsro...

93% of garages aren’t for cars but are instead carpeted and repurposed as an extension of the home for storage, laundry, work, exercise, hobbies, children’s play and more

180

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 27/06/2025

It’s worse than flat earth. It’s saying that if you get any kind of illness it’s your fault and you are a failure

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 27/06/2025

Lol. Slop squared. This can't possibly end well.

Tweet by Elon Musk that reads:

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

000

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 11/06/2025

Always interesting to look at the NZ migration flows behind the net numbers. Net is low and outflow of citizens is high, but also 120k non-citizen migrants chose to come here, and 25k citizens came back.

020

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 04/06/2025

Lol, ChatGPT gave me a new euphemism for its hallucinations

Because the statement cannot be independently verified, please treat my earlier reference to it as an unsubstantiated recollection rather than a documented fact.

12010

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 22/05/2025

Yeah it's just a time-shift of some depreciation into the first year. Here's Treasury's example. Page 30: www.treasury.govt.nz/sites/defaul...

110

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 17/05/2025

I am also too busy to negotiate with my suppliers so I will just charge myself more to buy their stuff www.ft.com/content/1f5f...

000

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 15/05/2025

An unscientific survey of the cheapest butter prices I could find quickly NZ: NZD8.29 for 500g = NZD16.58/kg AU: AUD7.00 for 500g = NZD15.26/kg CA: CAD5.88 for 454g = NZD15.71/kg UK: GBP1.99 for 250g = NZD17.95/kg

200

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 14/05/2025

Always annoyed by the outrageous (in percentage terms) payment fee applied by the system my kid's school uses for paying for school trips etc (Hero / Linc-Ed)

000

Aaron Schiff @schiff.nz · 07/05/2025

ChatGPT (o3) is still useless for research. 4/7 of these DOIs don't work, 3/7 work but are for completely different papers to those cited.

Screenshot of ChatGPT chat with a table of papers and DOI references that it says were "verified" in April 2025

Screenshot of ChatGPT admitting that it fabricated references and lied about them being verified

020