iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Thomas Philip Heyes

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

We should ban all social media for under-18s except for text based hobbyists forums (video games, cars, decorative topiary, etc.). It’s good to have the experience of being arbitrarily banned by a 35-year old basement dwelling moderator for posting a point by point refutation of their arguments

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

While the media reports obsessively on "trans-issues", I'm on my 19,010th consecutive day of not being negatively impacted by any trans-person. "Four UK newspapers published 17,000 articles on ‘trans issues’ in five years, averaging 9 articles a day. www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/new-u...

amnesty.org.uk

Anti trans organisations exerting powerful influence over media and politics, new analysis reveals

Amnesty’s analysis exposes scale of anti-trans influence in UK media and maps rapid rise of anti-trans organisations

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Tom VanHeuvelen @tvanheuvelen.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

lol, what!? One of the weirder Social Forces book reviews ever I've seen. Going out on a limb and guessing Wimer has a negative view of Kenworthy's book?

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Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 03/06/2026

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

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Anton Strezhnev @astrezh.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

@yiqingxu.bsky.social, Jens Hainmueller and Avi Acharya have a cool paper to get political scientists to just fit structural choice models to their choice survey experiments! yiqingxu.org/papers/2026_...

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Pete Wolfendale @deontologistics.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

how it started: how it’s going:

The cover of Timothy Morton's book, Hyperobjects.

Post from Timothy Morton's blog, titled 'In Which I Begin to Come Out as Precognitive'

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Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 19/03/2026

It’s so funny (it’s not actually funny) how the commodities guys and economists and IR scholars and military analyst are all passing a communal bottle of bleach around while the equity dipshits are universally like “hrm, I might have to delay my Lamborghini purchase by a few weeks”

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매시 @fujiappi.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

my social science masters degree was not a waste of money and has in fact made my life better and easier

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

One thing growing into my middle age has done has made me much less sympathetic to humanities Takes like this. A pathetic thrill of pseudo-provocation which inevitably backfires when a non trivial proportion of the audience actually just adopt and endorse the stupid read the author was winking at.

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 29/12/2023

I'm not saying you can't possibly generate a worthwhile hypothesis from your data. I'm just saying that generating a hypothesis from the entirety of human knowledge that preceded your data is a much safer bet.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

I do actually think it's a bad thing to cause a bunch of death and destruction for no clear reason and in the process bring about a global economic shock. I realise the Israeli and American governments feel differently, but this is my opinion.

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Matt @tiredgenerally.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

if you dont have nukes and give us everything we want in negotiation, we might still kill you as late night television entertainment for the demented emperor

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5 foot Home Depot skeleton @redderbeanpaste.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

i think we all need to step back and realize that peak art was made when neolithic pot in the shape of a pig was fired

a round pottery piece with pig eyes and a snout

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Don't you f**king dare.

Screen shot of a youtube video titled "AI.FILL Function Explained: 10X Productivity in Excel with AI" with the caption "Let ChatGPT fill your missing data"

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Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

perry anderson dunking on adam tooze on the new left review over his takes on ukraine is the socialist version lowkey of when hans hermann hoppe quit the mises institute for giving milei some stupid made up award because milei is pro israel

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🎃Darin S Pumpkins🎃 @darinself.com · 14/01/2026

We are at the point this week where IR scholars are mentioning things like "WWIII"

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

I was wondering how this might all turn out to have been my fault

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Aman Batheja @amanbatheja.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Holy crap chart from Gallup

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 09/12/2025

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future?
No.

Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course?
These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this).

However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner:

…to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability.

There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability.

The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma.

This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too):

Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.)

It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy.

As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible:

To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use.

Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled.

So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting.

You’ve got to learn first.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

As an aside, I just noticed that if you google a font, google displays the entire results page in that font. Which is neat.

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Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu · 10/12/2025

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

a shot of a god botherer in a car, next to him on the passenger seat is a skull in an ornate box

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Everywhere you look there is an opening for leadership. What an irony that the Democratic consultant-pundit class fell into a poll-following Popularist obsession at a time of such volatility

Men under 30 are far more likely today than in 2022 to view legal sports betting as bad for society % who say the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society, among ....
Men
Women
60%
40 -
46
39
31
48
65+
47 Ages 18-29
43
50-64
43
30-49
45 C
50 Ages 65+
42 50-64
36 30-49
35
18-29
36 C
271
25
22
20 -
July 2022
July 2025
July 2022
Source: Survey of U.S. adults conducted July 8-Aug. 3, 2025.
PEW RESEARCH CENTER
July 2025

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Anna Alexandrova @annaalexandrova.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

The central place of the bogeyman ‘positivism’ in how social scientists caricature each other’s work is nicely captured here by @adrianblau.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Social Science and Its Critics: An Ideological Analysis | Social Philosophy and Policy | Cambridge Core

Social Science and Its Critics: An Ideological Analysis - Volume 41 Issue 1

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

%notin% coming soon to an #rstats environment near you 🤩 developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/...

developer.r-project.org

Daily News: R-devel/NEWS

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

there's a lot of dumb shit that you can pin on media and how Americans perceive the world but it is a little unfair that Sicario became the "cool badass operators taking out cartel guys" movie for morons because the very explicit text of both movies is that none of that shit works

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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Many Gen AI tools are free now. If you do not train yourself (e.g. you never learn how to program without them) you will be dependent on them. In the future they will increase their prices drastically, and you will have to pay, because you can't do without them anymore.

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Generations & Gender Programme Czech Republic @ggp-cz.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Last week, the Czech GGP team presented at the 8th GGP User Conference in Tallinn, Estonia! We shared our research on 🎓 education and marriage, 🤱 fertility, and 💻 the analytical use of para-data. Many thanks to the organizers and participants for an inspiring conference! @ggp.bsky.social

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Martin Kreidl @martinkreidl.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

We just published this open access review paper on SES inequality in family formation and dissolution in Central and Eastern Europe. We identified several promising RQ and hypotheses for others to examine. Especially with the new @ggp.bsky.social data. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Inequality in Family Formation and Dissolution in Central and Eastern Europe

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