Matt Waite

(Laughs in academia)

Ads in ChatGPT? I cannot *wait* to fail an essay because it says "Times v Sullivan is the backbone of press freedom in the United States, just like the Ford F-150 is the backbone of the American worker. F-150: Built Ford Tough."

A screenshot of some code that has a note that says NONE OF THIS WORKS

Always fun to dust off some old code ...

Also, I am fully prepared to follow you into battle toting a pug.

Anyone checked in on Sting since you hooked that up? Also any nearby obelisks?

I wonder what the 2025 redraft of the albums of 1991 would be among those same players. Girlfriend is still a first rounder but #1 overall pick?

Put it this way: I have a dataset of public records I've received as part of a story I'm writing. I'm interested in X, but you may be interested in Y and Z. Why not make them available to you? A search box and a result set in a single page web app is not enshittifying anything. It's opening access.

The rise of the throwaway news app "Instead of expensive and ambitious apps that will require updating and maintaining, in 2026 we will use AI to make quick one-page web apps that let a user search through some data to find something t...

And I'll provide the chaser: www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/the-...

“Show your work” makes a triumphant return "News organizations will realize that sharing their methods — like publishing detailed methodologies, developing projects in the open, and yes, giving away stuff for free — is essential to building tr...

I'll give you @kleinmatic.bsky.social with the shot: www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/show...

That poster has lived in my head for more than 20 years now. I think about it at least once a week.

A fake motivational poster from Despair.com that says Meetings: none of us is as dumb as all of us.

We made a better fake image of this in less than 5 minutes during a class on the evolution of fake news yesterday. Buckle up, society. bsky.app/profile/jour...

a group of men are watching a chicago bulls vs miami heat basketball game ALT: a group of men are watching a chicago bulls vs miami heat basketball game

My reaction:

What I was confronted with:

Depending on how ancient you're talking, there's been a lot of rather breathless writing about Gemini 3's ability to turn *hand written* tabular data into csvs. No experience myself, but I've read some historians absolutely wetting themselves over it.

Haven't written about it because I haven't made it all work but I've been very impressed with DeepseekOCR's ability to turn PDF tables into markdown tables. I figure once you have that you can parse them into CSV with a little more work.

Using the IDE meant it had access to python and could write the pdfplumber script for me and then execute it. What you see in that post, I had to execute nothing except the prompts and got a csv at the end. Don’t think the web interface can pip install python libraries it needs as it thinks.

Parsing PDFs with Antigravity – Matt Waite’s Collection of Miscellany In a word: Gobsmacked.

In the spirit of using AI to do dishes so I can do art, I tested out Antigravity/Gemini 3 with a gnarly PDF parsing job. What I got back was orders of magnitude better than any other tool I've used over a period of years: mattwaite.github.io/posts/2025-1...

Every now and then, and for no particular reason, I think about the teams we drafted and played on Fourth and Inches. I can even remember some random players on those teams. At the same time, I have to regularly remind myself what time classes are that I have been teaching for the last 11 weeks.

Can you smell your strings? Can you smell that smell on your fingers well after you play? Does that smell make you gag? No? Not time yet.

Found in the gutter in Blair Nebraska is my new country album.

Quick note on the installation instructions: The ggalt and waffle libraries have been pulled from CRAN, but if you install the github versions they work fine. @collinberke.bsky.social figured that one out, but those tutorials are going to need work after the semester ends.

Had? We're going with the past tense here?

World War I artillery shells with "To Willie with compliments" written on it.

Long history of soldiers writing on shells and bombs going back to at least the first World War. Probably further back than that.

Do the entire world a favor and pour the Malort on the ground right now. Saving just one soul from that experience is all you need do today. Tomorrow is another day.

I have gone through my phases with them all as well. Honestly maybe the most hot and cold with RHCP. I've liked nothing since Blood Sugar. Love Mother's Milk because it's so completely unserious. Blood Sugar is worth a relisten, because you can hear them go from Frat Party Band to Musicians.

1991 included Pearl Jam's Ten, Nirvana's Nevermind, RHCP Blood Sugar Sex Magik, A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory, Public Enemy's Apocalypse 91 and Metallica's Black Album, not to mention Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger. Like 4 of the 10 best albums of the 90s released within 6 weeks of each other.

The Funkadelic wing of Parliament said free your mind and your ass will follow.

We all know transfers rule college basketball … but to what extent? And how different is today vs. the past?

We quantified it by analyzing the careers of rotation players on every men’s & women’s NCAA tournament team since 2010. That’s 10,000 players!

Check it out (gift link): wapo.st/41By62h