Russell Pierce
@russellpierce.bsky.social
Cognitive Psychology PhD turned Data Scientist turned Data Engineering turned Engineering Leader... Everyday We Stray Further From Science's Light... but also closer somehow.
It is f'ing awesome to realize that something you'd been shooting intuitively around for years but couldn't get a handle on has a fully realized version. It is a little bittersweet too. Moreso when you see that the realized version has been around for decades.
October 16, 2025 at 8:10 PM
It is f'ing awesome to realize that something you'd been shooting intuitively around for years but couldn't get a handle on has a fully realized version. It is a little bittersweet too. Moreso when you see that the realized version has been around for decades.
You can't make this stuff up. Gnome was dying on a new linux machine because... *checks notes* the screensaver wouldn't start because a bluetooth library wasn't available.
October 10, 2025 at 5:54 PM
You can't make this stuff up. Gnome was dying on a new linux machine because... *checks notes* the screensaver wouldn't start because a bluetooth library wasn't available.
I've spent some of today using local models to squish down verbose webpages to the things I actually care about for doing additional work. Then I notice Qwen code does "Fetching content from {url} and processing with prompt: {prompt}"... makes me feel seen and validated.
October 3, 2025 at 3:23 AM
I've spent some of today using local models to squish down verbose webpages to the things I actually care about for doing additional work. Then I notice Qwen code does "Fetching content from {url} and processing with prompt: {prompt}"... makes me feel seen and validated.
It's funny how Anthropic silently boosted usage available on Pro plans this week in the middle of the week AND changed the weekly reset to Wednesday from Monday. I presume it is because they released a new feature that chews through tokens like mad and they want people to fall in love with it.
October 2, 2025 at 2:21 PM
It's funny how Anthropic silently boosted usage available on Pro plans this week in the middle of the week AND changed the weekly reset to Wednesday from Monday. I presume it is because they released a new feature that chews through tokens like mad and they want people to fall in love with it.
Developers Log Supplemental. #AI (so you can ignore it if you like). Background food for thought... if you're billed by token... what motivation does an LLM provider have to reduce your token usage? To serve more with their current fixed capacity. Will that last?
October 1, 2025 at 9:17 PM
Developers Log Supplemental. #AI (so you can ignore it if you like). Background food for thought... if you're billed by token... what motivation does an LLM provider have to reduce your token usage? To serve more with their current fixed capacity. Will that last?
Unstructured or poorly structured data? LLMs can be helpful for this! The cleaning code can be audited to help validate correctness (don't trust re-authored datasets). 13 minutes and $3.75 list price to clean that dataset. $0.43 per 1k rows. Not bad! Thanks for sharing @jeremy-data.bsky.social
I like Claude Code for this kind of thing. I doubt I would have found and fixed 151 data cleaning issues in 13 minutes.
![⏺ Task(Analyze case name patterns)
⎿ Done (15 tool uses · 48.9k tokens · 12m 58s)
⏺ I've completed a comprehensive analysis of case names across all three CSV files (8,707 total cases). Here's what I found:
Key Findings
151 unique issues identified across these categories:
Major Issues:
1. United States typos (22 cases): "United State", "United Staes", "United Sates", "United Statse", etc.
2. State name typos (55 cases): Virgina, Tennesse, Georiga, Conneticut, Illnois, Minneosta, Pennsylvannia, etc.
3. Concatenated "of[State]" (16 cases): "ofMassachusetts", "ofVirginia", "ofPennsylvania"
4. "American" instead of "America" (4 cases): "United States of American"
5. "vs" instead of "v." (13 cases): Mostly Oregon and North Carolina
6. Whitespace issues (23 cases): Leading/trailing spaces
7. Multiple consecutive spaces (4 cases)
8. Placeholder values (13 cases): "Unknown", "Data not available", "W"
Your Current Code Coverage:
✅ Already handles: Some "United States" typos, "Ofmassachusetts", Tennessee variations❌ Missing: Most state typos,
whitespace issues, "vs" patterns, "United States of American", placeholders
I've provided a complete updated cleaning code block that fixes all 151 issues. The code is ordered properly (whitespace →
concatenation → spelling → separators → standardization) and includes all the fixes your current code has plus the new ones
needed for the two additional datasets.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yktvw5fpe6j4rqy4vio7l3w3/bafkreidct4memo7q2ntv3bjifokuzyyhkuawna4nv7ockcmn7mfmykeuzu@jpeg)
October 1, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Unstructured or poorly structured data? LLMs can be helpful for this! The cleaning code can be audited to help validate correctness (don't trust re-authored datasets). 13 minutes and $3.75 list price to clean that dataset. $0.43 per 1k rows. Not bad! Thanks for sharing @jeremy-data.bsky.social
I'm sorry, how the heck do they release The Mandalorian & Grogu movie on May 22nd instead of May 4th?
October 1, 2025 at 11:43 AM
I'm sorry, how the heck do they release The Mandalorian & Grogu movie on May 22nd instead of May 4th?
TL;DR the Zellij - terminal multiplexer is great (@zellij-dev.bsky.social). ZOMG... I had played around with screen and tmux way back in the day... but like my desire to play with emacs it was limited by my mental bandwidth/priority to pick up the key combinations.
September 24, 2025 at 1:35 PM
TL;DR the Zellij - terminal multiplexer is great (@zellij-dev.bsky.social). ZOMG... I had played around with screen and tmux way back in the day... but like my desire to play with emacs it was limited by my mental bandwidth/priority to pick up the key combinations.
I'm sorry, the ultimate complaint against Kimmel is *checks notes* he went on FCC regulated broadcasting and told lies? Um, look it's an evolving environment such that what's actually going on may not be very clear... and even if it was don't look at the AM dial y'all.
September 18, 2025 at 11:37 AM
I'm sorry, the ultimate complaint against Kimmel is *checks notes* he went on FCC regulated broadcasting and told lies? Um, look it's an evolving environment such that what's actually going on may not be very clear... and even if it was don't look at the AM dial y'all.
@anthropic.com you know what would be pretty nice? The ability for the user to set a cap on Claude code usage so that they have usage left over for other tasks. Of course, for driving upgrades that's probably wrong. But as a public benefit corporation I hope you might consider it.
September 5, 2025 at 1:50 PM
@anthropic.com you know what would be pretty nice? The ability for the user to set a cap on Claude code usage so that they have usage left over for other tasks. Of course, for driving upgrades that's probably wrong. But as a public benefit corporation I hope you might consider it.
Has anybody been able to make Gemini Flash 2.5 make two tool calls in a single response? I found it took me extra prompt development to get the calendar tool response to include much beyond the calendar entries themselves.
Control your Android mobile device & apps with Utilities - Gemini Apps Help
When you use Gemini as your mobile assistant on your Android device, you can ask it to do certain actions for you with the Utilities app. For example, you can ask it to manage your alarms and ti
share.google
August 14, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Has anybody been able to make Gemini Flash 2.5 make two tool calls in a single response? I found it took me extra prompt development to get the calendar tool response to include much beyond the calendar entries themselves.
If you're interested in the AI space, but aren't familiar with the history and discourse on AI prior to 2010, the "AI winter", and/or don't always understand the perspective of @yann-lecun.bsky.social, then the rest of this post might be for you.
July 15, 2025 at 11:01 AM
If you're interested in the AI space, but aren't familiar with the history and discourse on AI prior to 2010, the "AI winter", and/or don't always understand the perspective of @yann-lecun.bsky.social, then the rest of this post might be for you.
It's mildly interesting to consider that LLMs are perhaps a system for which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is most true (i.e., language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality). What to know: the 'voice' you ask these models to respond in will tend to also affect the content itself.
July 5, 2025 at 4:35 PM
It's mildly interesting to consider that LLMs are perhaps a system for which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is most true (i.e., language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality). What to know: the 'voice' you ask these models to respond in will tend to also affect the content itself.
Reposted by Russell Pierce
Arc is gone but Zen is nicer anyway: https://lifehacker.com/tech/zen-is-a-firefox-based-browser-with-arcs-best-features
The Arc Browser Is Dead, but the Firefox-Based Zen Is a Great Alternative
The beloved Arc browser isn't getting any new features. Here's what to use instead.
lifehacker.com
May 30, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Arc is gone but Zen is nicer anyway: https://lifehacker.com/tech/zen-is-a-firefox-based-browser-with-arcs-best-features
Server Sent Events (SSE) for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) seems to me to be a pretty big over complication for the purposes of providing a streaming response. The need to maintain an open pingable host seems to bedevil a simple serverless context holder. Why is it this way?
May 22, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Server Sent Events (SSE) for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) seems to me to be a pretty big over complication for the purposes of providing a streaming response. The need to maintain an open pingable host seems to bedevil a simple serverless context holder. Why is it this way?
The R folks didn't really give the Python folks enough grief about poor threading support in Python. The era is almost over though... labs.quansight.org/blog/free-th... Python leaves behind the GIL and @posit.co enters to offer paths with a consistent approach? It'll be fun to see what happens next.
The first year of free-threaded Python
A recap of the first year of work on enabling support for the free-threaded build of CPython in community packages.
labs.quansight.org
May 16, 2025 at 12:41 PM
The R folks didn't really give the Python folks enough grief about poor threading support in Python. The era is almost over though... labs.quansight.org/blog/free-th... Python leaves behind the GIL and @posit.co enters to offer paths with a consistent approach? It'll be fun to see what happens next.
One person's syntactic sugar is another's strychnine... and sometimes both at the same time for the same person.
May 3, 2025 at 1:04 PM
One person's syntactic sugar is another's strychnine... and sometimes both at the same time for the same person.
Come on... it is kind of hilarious that LaTeX has this progression for text sizes...
\normalsize
\large
\Large
\LARGE
\huge
\Huge
\normalsize
\large
\Large
\LARGE
\huge
\Huge
April 30, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Come on... it is kind of hilarious that LaTeX has this progression for text sizes...
\normalsize
\large
\Large
\LARGE
\huge
\Huge
\normalsize
\large
\Large
\LARGE
\huge
\Huge
I find that for the first time in my life I'm less than enthusiastic about open sourcing/publishing something. LLMs will scrape it and make my having shared it less valuable (to anybody other than LLM companies and their customers). Anybody else addressed similar feelings of reservation?
April 9, 2025 at 8:58 AM
I find that for the first time in my life I'm less than enthusiastic about open sourcing/publishing something. LLMs will scrape it and make my having shared it less valuable (to anybody other than LLM companies and their customers). Anybody else addressed similar feelings of reservation?
Does the loss of almanacs and encyclopedias mean that we can't remake the classic Carmen San Diego games? Are they teaching a skill that isn't as relevant anymore?
March 8, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Does the loss of almanacs and encyclopedias mean that we can't remake the classic Carmen San Diego games? Are they teaching a skill that isn't as relevant anymore?
#dallas how degraded do we think tornado detection and warning are right now? Are things going to flow forward on autopilot right now, or do we need to exercise extra care?
March 3, 2025 at 11:31 PM
#dallas how degraded do we think tornado detection and warning are right now? Are things going to flow forward on autopilot right now, or do we need to exercise extra care?
Reposted by Russell Pierce
When you see a headline you want to click, stop. Breathe. Ask yourself: why do I want to click this? What does that say about me? Do I like what it says about me? And, most importantly, am I likely to learn anything?
Reject anxiety bait – Justin Pot
Reject anxiety bait
justinpot.com
February 21, 2025 at 4:21 PM
When you see a headline you want to click, stop. Breathe. Ask yourself: why do I want to click this? What does that say about me? Do I like what it says about me? And, most importantly, am I likely to learn anything?
Reposted by Russell Pierce
When the Nazis took power and gutted the Weimar era civil service in government, they also claimed the need to increase efficiency and to ensure loyalty to the nazi party. They did it through the law for the restoration of the professional civil service.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_for...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_for...
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
February 16, 2025 at 6:40 AM
When the Nazis took power and gutted the Weimar era civil service in government, they also claimed the need to increase efficiency and to ensure loyalty to the nazi party. They did it through the law for the restoration of the professional civil service.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_for...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_for...
I kind of miss the small blast radius of live journal. I feel like targeting on this and similar platforms is just so... insufficient. I want to follow public people... but I want to be able to share with curated subsets. This was something Google + or whatever it was called got right.
February 15, 2025 at 5:07 PM
I kind of miss the small blast radius of live journal. I feel like targeting on this and similar platforms is just so... insufficient. I want to follow public people... but I want to be able to share with curated subsets. This was something Google + or whatever it was called got right.
My whole life I heard "mechs down at nav gamma" as "mechs down as Nasgana"... which I just took to be a fantasy place name. #mechwarrior
January 15, 2025 at 1:31 PM
My whole life I heard "mechs down at nav gamma" as "mechs down as Nasgana"... which I just took to be a fantasy place name. #mechwarrior