John Paul Helveston

From the Julia community on Reddit: I ported Karpathy's microgpt to Julia in 99 lines - no dependencies, manual backprop, ~1600× faster than CPython and ~4x faster than Rust. Explore this post and more from the Julia community

Someone ported Karpathy's microGPT to pure #julialang in 99 lines with 0 dependencies, it's 1600x faster than CPython... hard to emphasize enough how impressive this is
www.reddit.com/r/Julia/s/Vg...

#opensource always wins 😎

There's just as much thinking going on in how I use agents, they just write code for me. I still architect, execute, and test, which is where all the serious thinking lies in coding. Agents just write the tedious bits with fewer human errors (typos).

More likely that we'll need to clarify the opposite, as in "I wrote this code by hand"

Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns I’ve started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns—coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development …

@simonwillison.net is the first I've heard use the term "agentic engineering", which feels like a much better description of how I use tools like Claude Code (as opposed to "vibe coding", which implies no human architecting the result). Great stuff in this post:

simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/23/...

Create Interactive Graphs with Echarts JavaScript Version 6 Easily create interactive charts by leveraging the Echarts Javascript library which includes 36 chart types, themes, Shiny proxies and animations.

echarts4r
echarts4r.john-coene.com

Sharing a new #opensource project we've been building: vehicletrends.us — an interactive dashboard tracking U.S. automotive market trends from millions of listings. Data is available via the {vehicletrends} #rstats package. Site made with #Quarto, code at github.com/vehicletrends 🚗 📊

YouTube video by GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future At the EV Crossroads: China Surges, the U.S. Stalls - The Greenhouse

Check out this wide-ranging discussion I had with Frank Sesno, director of the Alliance for a Sustainable Future at GWU. Topics include EV competition, US-based EV production, facing the challenge of Chinese EV leadership, and national security (among other things).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUMz...

I wanted a totally static site with no server, would that framework be able to handle that? I never used plumber but heard lots about it.

Yup. For a long time I relied on shiny because it was easy to build, and I just lived with production bottle necks. No more. I think we're going to see an explosion of custom builds using tools and frameworks that we only barely understand but can get working

Note that the main data file, the PMTiles files, is hosted on cloudflare to make it accessible for the actual map, but I also exported the data file as a release on that GitHub repo

GitHub - vehicletrends/hhi-map: US Vehicle Market Concentration (HHI) Map - Interactive census tract map viewer US Vehicle Market Concentration (HHI) Map - Interactive census tract map viewer - vehicletrends/hhi-map

github.com/vehicletrend...

Actually I have made the HHI metric I calculated publicly available. It's just the underlying raw data that can't be made available. I'm putting it all into a R package, so look out for that soon.

Yes, JS for sure. The whole file is linked below, and yeah I could never have written it myself. I tinkered with other frameworks like shinylive, but it was just too slow. Once I started over from scratch, plain html was the solution github.com/vehicletrend...

Underlying data is licensed from marketcheck.com, which collects detailed listings data from dealerships across the country. This is part of a larger analysis I've been doing with some data from them. HHI is a measure of market concentration: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfind...

Still works for me, not sure why it isn't for you

That's just plain HTML, which Claude code wrote for me. It's a new age now where all you need is the idea and CC will build the code.

We live in a magical time for #dataviz. This map is just a static html page served on GitHub pages 🤯

It uses the incredible {pmtiles} #rstats package by @kylewalker.bsky.social to quickly filter through ~21M rows of data hosted on Cloudflare

vehicletrends.github.io/hhi-map/

Ousted Korean President Yoon Sentenced to Life Over Martial Law Former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol faces life in prison after being found guilty of leading an insurrection with his 2024 martial law declaration, a move that shocked the nation and triggered...

So jealous of S. Korea
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

There I fixed it

image.png

I teach my students to always start the y-axis at 0 when making a bar chart for a reason

x.com/WhiteHouse/s...

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Incredible self own for the US. The damage being done to the US scientific enterprise is generational. We will look back on this as a tipping point where the US chose all on its own to stop leading the world in science.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Now channel your inner Mitch McConnell and stick to it
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

Defund ICE or shut the government down. This is the moderate position.

Jim Jones got over 900 people to kill themselves with him. Cults are like that.

People are holding on to hope with "but the Generals wouldn't obey that order right?" and 1) that says a LOT about where we are right now and 2) you better believe they 100% would follow that order, and if not there are hundreds in line who would I mean look at who they put in charge of DoD ffs

For the record, as an American, I think threatening tariffs on our closest European allies and fellow NATO members because they are standing up to US threats to forcibly annex Greenland is bad.

Most Americans have no idea how immensely pissed Canadians are at the US. I'm not Canadian, but have family there, and the damage from the US's betrayal will last a generation or more. There's no returning to the prior relationship regardless who takes power in the US.

It begins. Canadians will soon experience the vast superiority of Chinese EVs, and the US will lose its largest vehicle export market. The transition will happen much faster than people think.

Updated my LLM / AI policy for my intro to #Rstats programming course this semester:
p4a.seas.gwu.edu/2026-Spring/...

Largely inspired by @andrew.heiss.phd post: lnkd.in/e_Sr2D-5