Martyn Plummer

If I wanted to do this, I would add NA tags as a separate attribute of the data frame, not try to augment the numeric vector class.

I think that tagged NAs are useful for data management but not necessarily for computation. You could extend the data frame class to allow tagged NAs, preserve them during data manipulation operations, and allow selection and transformation based on the tag.

To some extent, yes. Critics of big tech have identified a pervasive set of cultish beliefs driving the AI industry that they call the #TESCREAL bundle.

www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/

Even if you have hardware and compiler support for NaN payload propagation, you still have to implement the semantics of NA vs NaN vs finite value propagation in all low-level arithmetic operations. Extending these semantics to include tagged NAs is too much complexity, and not guaranteed to work.

NA_real_ in #rstats is implemented on top of IEEE754 arithmetic as NaN with a particular payload (1954). This seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that NaN payloads are propagated. It happens to work - mostly - on the platforms R is mainly used on.

This is a joke from A Fish Called Wanda used to illustrate the stupidity of Otto (Kevin Kline):

"When he learned that your daughter's name is Portia, he said 'Why did they name her after a car?'"

They’re going to switch it on and ask it if there is a God aren’t they?

I’m only half joking. A lot of tech bro behaviour can be explained by my theory that they desperately want to live in the SF world they read about as kids and are just pretending that they are bringing it into being.

Warwick Statistics is hosting the first Winter School in Probabilistic AI, 5-8 Jan 2026, targeted at PhD students, academics, and professionals; and features world-leading researchers speaking about recent advances in AI. www.probai.ac.uk/eve...

YouTube video by Calvin & Habs German tries American Coke

youtube.com/shorts/ycYbM...

Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine: Vol 0, No 0 Background: Aluminum is used as an adjuvant in nonlive vaccines administered in early childhood. Concerns persist about potential associations between vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and i...

Let's say it louder for those at the back: Routine childhood vaccines do not cause autism, a major study in Denmark confirmed Wednesday, countering a myth that has been trumpeted for decades.
www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

GPT increasingly feels like the next evolution of Gladwellian non-fic. Gladwell’s great trick was that you could flatter the reader’s ego by dressing up banalities and oversimplifications in a way that made them feel clever, like they were accessing special wisdom. This is the interactive version.

Your Al Can Think. Let's Make It DO. Applied Generative Al for Business TURING

No it can't

Lyon has done a good job of promoting itself as a tourist destination. There’s a summer music festival “Les nuits de fourvière” which will push up demand. Personally, if I were there on 13 July I would get tickets to see Jeanne Added singing Joni Mitchell.

Visit the basilica up on the hill. You can’t miss it. There’s also a Roman amphitheatre up there which is used for a summer music festival. There is a museum attached. You should also visit La musée des Confluences where the two rivers meet.

Lyon is the gastronomic capital of France, so your dining out experience is limited only by your budget. Try
* Dinner at Brasserie Georges. A unique experience
* Tea at Café des Négociants
* Take away lunch from Pignol on Place Bellecour.
* Try a “bouchon” restaurant, e.g. Café des Féderations.

I used to live in Lyon. My former work books all guests into Hotel La Residence on rue Victor Hugo just off Place Bellecour, the main square in the heart of Lyon. It's where I stay when I visit.

I would recommend using the excellent metro + tram system especially as it gets hot in summer.

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

AUC is a very clever way to avoid some hard problems comparing classifiers. You don’t need to choose cut points or define relative losses for false positive and false negative results. But the problem it solves (Can you correctly label a discordant pair of observations?) is artificial.

It’s fair to say that Starmer is operating within an Overton window that has massively shifted to the right in 9 years, and has no interest in pushing it back.

Hannan is no innocent bystander here. He is complicit in this shift despite his rhetoric from the Brexit campaign.

We are recruiting! A three-year postdoctoral position at Warwick as part of the “Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence” hub on the mathematical foundations of AI. Further details at the link: warwick-careers.tal....

@danmcquillan.bsky.social has shared the text of his talk in which he applies Illich's ideas to the question of the role of the university in a world with now ubiquitous 'AI'. Here's a juicy bit.

YouTube video by Google UK Google Pixel 9 with Gemini Live | 30s

By far the worst AI advert is the one where Google Gemini says “I love talking sports”. No you don’t! Chat bots should not use first person pronouns and should never ever claim to have an internal emotional state. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of how they work.

youtu.be/_gkkSH0T4V0?...

YouTube video by Apple Apple Intelligence | Custom memory movies | iPhone 16 Pro

In this ad, Bella Ramsey creates an AI eulogy for a little girl’s pet goldfish because her dad can’t even remember its name, despite being reminded twice. “Sure, you have no emotional connection with your daughter”, the ad says, “but we can fake that for you.”

youtu.be/EcHUOKPDMFU?...

The really strange thing about this ad is that it supposes a world in which Warren the slob can fake his way through work because his colleagues remain blissfully unaware that AI tools exist.

6.6K views · 127 reactions | 🌍✌️ The Power of the People – A Call for Unity and Peace Hello, brothers and sisters, I once said, "Working-class people around the world have no... | By Information War... 🌍✌️ The Power of the People – A Call for Unity and Peace Hello, brothers and sisters, I once said, "Working-class people around the world have no...

I think you are right. It’s a fake quote. I traced it back to a deepfake video on Facebook from an account called “Information War”. Otherwise there is no record of him either saying this on video or writing it.

www.facebook.com/InformationW...

This is not necessarily prevention. It’s prediction. And prediction only leads to prevention if certain screening criteria are fulfilled including how good the prediction is & how effective the action is once you have the info. Otherwise there may be harms.
IMO this hasn’t been well thought through.

Gresham's law in action.

YouTube video by Prefab Sprout - Topic The Old Magician

A flawless album. Hard to believe it was 40 years ago.

Check out 2013's Crimson/Red, if you haven't already.

youtu.be/QuIAh_f6NWY?...

Philip K Dick correctly predicted how annoying the future would be, and I think it’s because he was a Bay Area guy

No, that was Cyril M Kornbluth. The story is called The Marching Morons.