Sharon Machlis

They wrecked people's lives and a generation of US science and research advancements. Without any legal authority. FOR NOTHING.

Oh cool!!

Argh. For law to matter - even Constitutional law - there needs to be an enforcement mechanism that actually works. We seem to be still waiting here (despite all those people who took oaths about this.)

Google Street View in Sarajevo!! ❤️❤️❤️
youtu.be/M8G44b0mljw?...

They are. It's utterly bizarre. It looks like he was just too impatient to even try to make a case for this. Let alone actually follow the Constitution, which CLEARLY says that only Congress has the power to declare war. And they have not.

But we can't have affordable healthcare for Americans. Instead we're doing . . . this. Which is clearly illegal under US law: The Constitution is VERY CLEAR that only Congress has the power to declare war. They have not.

There may be "intense propaganda bombardment" *in general,* but there was NO serious effort to make a case for this. Every hour seems to bring a different reason, and even that happened after the fact.

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How I Keep Up With Everything in AI (2026-03-08) I might be a little crazy

SO much going on in generative AI - how to keep up? "Staying current on AI is the same challenge as any data problem. You need good inputs before you can produce good outputs," says Christopher Penn at Almost Timely News. He outlines his info sources:
almosttimely.substack.com/p/almost-tim...
#GenAI

Introduction to libfec! (NICAR26 re-record) YouTube video by Alex Garcia

Big thanks to everyone who came to my #NICAR26 session for libfec last week, it was a lot of fun! NICAR is the only place where you can chat about federal campaign finance data and actually enjoy it...

It wasn't recorded, but I made a video version of it here!

youtu.be/UdkQ5HEiF20

67 degrees F today and the snow is melting! Finally the softest of assurances that Spring will in fact come again.

So wrong. Such vile bigotry. Who doesn’t belong? People who don’t understand the Constitution and its First Amendment - they definitely don’t belong in Congress.

#Rstats #RSpatial #Duckdb ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Lots of tips and ideas in here on how to put together an autonomous Claude Code setup that can do some of your grunt work *in an organizational setting*.
(With some thought given to system security.)

It's remarkable how low this number can get and still keep going down

Beijing to Shanghai by train in under 4 hours - just like the 3:58 Amtrak between New York and Boston! Except the China bullet train travels 750+ miles in the same time that the Amtrak train goes 230 miles

bsky.app/profile/dber...

Should be a festive day in global financial markets . . . .

👀

Dug up my notes and handout files from NICAR 2007, including how to scrape a website with Perl. 😅
#NICAR

Positron AI Session (George Stagg, Winston Chang, Tomasz Kalinowski , Carson Sievert) | posit::conf YouTube video by Posit PBC

For an actual R- and Python-specific coding agent, Positron Assistant has an Agent mode. You can choose from a couple of different model providers, but alas it's all pay-per-use API -- you can't use a $20 Claude or ChatGPT subscription.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZW2...
FYI #NICAR26

Understand the concern, but I don't consider this 'automated'. It gives suggestions which you can take or not. Then it writes code. You can ask it to explain the code and the choices it made. IMO that's not worse and probably better than looking up 'What test should I use?' on a static table. YMMV.

Introducing Databot: An AI assistant for exploratory data analysis - Posit Optimize your data analysis workflow with Databot, an AI assistant designed to accelerate exploratory data analysis for Python and R users by acting as an interactive pair-programming partner.

Hey R and Python folks at #NICAR26 looking at coding agents for data analysis: Databot from Posit (formerly RStudio) is another option. It's an assistant for the Positron IDE specifically designed for data work.
See a demo from September's Posit conference:
youtu.be/Ve7cNChzq5Q?...
#RStats #Python

i probably need to move to that. Too used to my work graphs when I wanted to track down spikes and dips.

GitHub - NewsAppsUMD/nicar2026: Repository for LLM and archives session Repository for LLM and archives session. Contribute to NewsAppsUMD/nicar2026 development by creating an account on GitHub.

Here's the repository from our #NICAR26 session on using LLMs to improve your archives. You can follow along to see how @merrillcollege.bsky.social students created "beat books" from local news archives.

github.com/NewsAppsUMD/...

GitHub - freedmand/semantra: Multi-tool for semantic search Multi-tool for semantic search. Contribute to freedmand/semantra development by creating an account on GitHub.

Semantra is an open-source tool for searching documents by meaning, not keywords. It aims "to make running a specialized semantic search engine easy, friendly, configurable, and private/secure." Developed by @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com
github.com/freedmand/se...
(Needs #Python installed)
#NICAR26

I'll probably cave and do a trend line for this year at the end of Q1.

It was so interesting to hear at #NICAR26 how different newsrooms are - and aren't - using AI. The NY Times looks to have a very well thought out approach, always making sure human experts start and review any AI work.
(And they have some amazing internal tools)
#GenAI

oh wow thank you!! pro tip: my favs are the pdf-playground plugin and the one-way door skill/hook.

thank you for sharing!! <3

Thank you for the great repo!

Notes and code from my #NICAR26 talk: Analyzing Images and Video with AI!

jsoma.github.io/workshop-ai-...