Recent content on Publishable Stuff
It’s a special kind of happiness when one can one-shot an app/script. That is, write a single prompt that a capable LLM can use to deliver the whole thing in a single attempt. For me, the feelings follow this trajectory: smugness that my single prompt actually worked, then a light dusting of shame, because in ye olden days this code would have been artisanally handcrafted by me, and finally…
I hacked together a simple and friendly retro-styled chatbot UI over the weekend. I wanted to give my kids some experience with LLM chatbots and also some practice typing on a keyboard. But I felt they needed something more engaging than the ChatGPT app. So, after an intense evening hacka promptathon, I ended up with Bötty: Bötty is a fun, friendly, and simple ChatGPT UI with the following…
In Sweden, there’s a long tradition of TV and radio advent calendars: shows, often Christmas-themed, that are exactly 24 episodes long. Each of the 24 days in December leading up to Christmas, a new episode drops. Whether this year’s advent calendar shows are better or worse than last year’s is always a hotly debated topic. But, obviously, the best calendar shows were the ones…
Last week I made the small card sorting game called The Climate Impact Sorting Challenge where the challenge is to sort cards with different foods in the order of their climate impact. But then the thought hit me: Any time you find yourself with a dataset with labels (say, types of foods) mapped to numbers (say, climate impact in CO2e) you could turn that into a card sorting game! So, I created a…
Try out The Climate Impact Sorting Challenge ! A quick game I just made that teaches you about the climate impact of different kinds of food. This game can be played in two different ways. You can play it by yourself and try to beat your own high score (mine is 9). If you’re in a group, you can play “last man standing” style, where you take turns placing the cards. When someone…
Sometimes it feels a bit silly when a simple statistical model has a fancy-sounding name. But it also feels good to drop the following in casual conversation: “Ah, then I recommend a Plackett-Luce model, a straightforward generalization of the Bradley–Terry model, you know”, when a friend wonders how they could model their, say, pinball championship dataset. Incidentally, in this post we’re going…
This is just a post to brag about that the CopenhagenR useR group is alive and kicking, again. After COVID-19, the group (like so many other meetups) was on hiatus for a couple of years and without an organizer. In 2023, I thought I would try starting it again and, while it took a little while, I’m happy that I got together five great meetups for the spring 2024 season! Here’s a little…
There are tons of well-known global indicators. We’ve all heard of gross domestic product, life expectancy, rate of literacy, etc. But, ever since I discovered pinballmap.com , possibly the world’s most comprehensive database of public pinball locations, I’ve been thinking about a potential new global indicator: Public Pinball Machines per Capita. Thanks to Pinball Map’s well-documented public API…
Upon discovering that the tiny town I live in has a pinball arcade with over 40 tables (!), I got a bout of pinball fever. I fancy myself a fairly accomplished video game player, but was disappointed to discover that my ability to keep Mario alive didn’t translate to preventing the pinball from draining. Assuming I just needed a bit of practice, I downloaded a virtual version of Fish Tales — a…
Five years ago I started a new role and I suddenly found myself, a staunch R fan, having to code in Python on a daily basis. Working with data, most of my Python work involved using pandas , the Python data frame library, and initially I found it quite hard and clunky to use, being used to the silky smooth API of R’s tidyverse . And you know what? It still feels hard and clunky, even now, 5 years…