Michael Mullarkey

Kansas revokes driver's licenses of hundreds of trans people, prompted by new law Prompted by a new law, Kansas began sending letters to some trans people saying their drivers licenses were being invalidated until they change their gender information.

🚨hey so this is absolutely HORRIBLE for so many reasons I can’t even fully list out. But a few:

- licenses are immediately invalid, making it difficult to even get around to change license or god forbid APPEAL THIS DECISION

Do You Agree? Do You Strongly Agree? The Effect of the Number of Response Categories on Response Processes and Verification of Substantive Hypotheses Abstract. This study investigates how the number and labeling of response categories in survey scales affect respondent behavior, psychometric properties,

This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...

In my experience I'm much better off starting a new session + re-providing context myself if I reach compaction

Had a good convo recently about this exact phenomenon! Writing in the "teaching" style can force us to confront what we don't know.

I feel this lesson in my bones. I'm someone prone to "thinking out loud" in writing. Micro-blogging helps me refine those thoughts

I whipped up another learning related Skill! Smaller than Learning Opportunities, but very complementary: interactive guidance through a quick research-backed psychological intervention that helps improve learning plans, motivation and commitment



github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

Congratulations!

A basic chat interface on mobile with messages about to do items, notes, and searching those notes. Most of the chats are slash commands

Might be up to something

This is my "desert island," most distilled, most succinct piece of advice right now for all the technical people I am talking to who are worried about their learning.

Data Consultants

I have continued to update my Data Consultants table. It currently includes 96 businesses. So if you are looking for help with data wrangling, visualization, analysis, reporting, dashboarding, training, and more, consider checking out these consultants!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I'm sure summiting Mount Everest feels great, but have you ever had a delicate series of stacked PRs all merge smoothly?

Just made computer do hard thing 5x faster, I will never tire of this feeling

I have plenty of reservations about the reliability of funnel-plots and z-curves and such, as well as their interpretation.....

But holy shit look at that.

A photo of Weakened Friends on a lit stage in an otherwise dark concert venue

If Weakened Friends plays a show in your city, do yourself a favor and go see them

Somewhere inside me is a YouTube video essay about data grifting

I'm not sure if that's great, terrible, or both

That's not a small investment! And it might not pay off! But someone is going to try something like this approach and have a bonkers level of success

Anyway, you can't answer OP's super important questions without better measurement, there is no free lunch

Think creating + validating custom evals for your codebase. Then tracking if improvements in those evals track at all with fewer 3 AM pages, more on-time delivery, etc

People can get captured by whatever's trending on Hacker News because measuring software quality is *wicked hard*

And for a data-intensive profession, software's approach to measurement ranges from evidence-light to evidence-free. Often, the actual metric is Highest Paid Person's Opinion

"If a dataset is confusing to a human analyst, it will be opaque to a language model. If the logic behind a metric lives only in someone’s head, an AI agent has no way to recover it. In that sense, AI does not lower the bar for data quality—it raises it."

You're correct so far!

I further regret to inform some of y'all this song already exists

I am one Github Actions-specific error away from finishing this project. Set the over/under at 34.5 years until I'm done

Consider this a commitment to sharing how I made it after the fact!

I got introduced to automerge through your posts and thank you! Already super useful, and planning to use it to let people solve a puzzle together at a party later this year

The best time to shut down a tool that can't meet basic standards is before it ships. The second best time is right now

I'm working on a small version of this right now in my spare time, and it's blowing my mind

The whole thread is fascinating, and this realization started because of qualitative interviews

A bitter irony: most screeners for problematic video gaming pick up on problematic *gambling*

I love this idea: duckdb.org/community_ex.... It translates dplyr syntax _inside_ of duckdb so you can mix it with regular SQL

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

There are lots of ways to help, and if you're as lucky as me a lot of organizations could use your $$

Here's a list of vetted resources in Minnesota passed along by a friend