Please.

The person in the photo is weak not because he cries on TV, but because he entirely argues in bad faith, has little idea what he actually believes, and is fully engaged in a culture war, with little focus except fearmongering and resisting anything that might make the world somewhat lively in a crazed aspiration to “rebuild” western civilization.

This meme is sexist itself; I don’t care that the person in the photo is a hypocrite. It is petty to the point it essentially platforms the person depicted.

Please be part of a cultural movement. The news used to bring on people from outrageous movements to mock them and instead it simply promoted those groups to a wider audience. The news has somewhat learned and you can see how delicately the NYT tries to dismantle Yarvinism.

Please please don’t platform hateful people. I’m here to escape them.

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Behold: PRQL. I only know it exists not if the errors are good, my SQL needs are simple, but perhaps for some complex data wrangling it could be nicer idk

Perhaps the textbook example is the Simpson’s Paradox.

This article goes through a couple cases where naively and statically conclusions are supported, but when you correctly separate the data, those conclusions reverse themselves.

Another relevant issue is Aggregation Bias. This article has an example where conclusions about a population hold inversely with individuals of that population.

And the last one I can think of is MAUP, which deals with the fact that statistics are very sensitive in whatever process is used to divvy up a space. This is commonly referenced in spatial statistics but has more broad implications I believe.

This is not to say that you can never generalize, and indeed, often a big goal of statistics is to answer questions about populations using only information from a subset of individuals in that population.

All Models Are Wrong, Some are Useful

• George Box

The argument I was making is that the NYT will authoritatively make conclusions without taking into account the individual, looking only at the population level, and not only is that oftentimes dubious, sometimes it’s actively detrimental. They don’t seem to me to prove their due diligence in mitigating the risk that comes with such dubious assumptions, hence the cynic in me left that Hozier quote.

“Wet sidewalks cause rain”

Pretty much. I never really thought about the causal link being entirely reversed, moreso that the chain of reasoning being broken or mediated by some factor they missed, which yes definitely happens, but now I can definitely think of instances where it’s totally flipped.

Very interesting read, thanks for sharing!

I feel this hard with the New York Times.

99% of the time, I feel like it covers subjects adequately. It might be a bit further right than me, but for a general US source, I feel it’s rather representative.

Then they write a story about something happening to low income US people, and it’s just social and logical salad. They report, it appears as though they analytically look at data, instead of talking to people. Statisticians will tell you, and this is subtle: conclusions made at one level of detail cannot be generalized to another level of detail. Looking at data without talking with people is fallacious for social issues. The NYT needs to understand this, but meanwhile they are horrifically insensitive bordering on destructive at times.

“The jackboot only jumps down on people standing up”

• Hozier, “Jackboot Jump”

Then I read the next story and I take it as credible without much critical thought or evidence. Bias is strange.

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Do you know of any Nix projects which are basically nix-but-as-if-was-brew?

I get that this violates the Nix philosophy, but it’s hard convincing collabs to install a root package manager, which has install commands like:

nix profile install nixpkgs/nixos-24.11#hello

I get that it’s flexible, but I would like something more like:

nix install hello

I want three things:

1. rootless
2. can manage “casks”
3. global cli with support for per-project flakes

Do you know if this exists / is being developed?

You probably already know this, but for those who don’t, git can globally ignore patterns. It’s the first thing I set up after logging in. Honestly wish git just shipped this way out of the box (maybe match .DS_Store by name and some magic bytes?) with a way to disable it. Just for the sake of easier onboarding

My way is simple and stupid. I hit F12, then search for “rss” in the html and copy the link

If you’re on iOS, feeeed is kinda slick :)