Ned Letcher

Screenshot of embedding atlas showing the embedding view on the left, a table at the bottom and charts on the right.

🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.

I’ve been working on an experimental, multiplayer, open-world AI chat system called Numinex.

1. Uses branching comment trees
2. Multiplayer/multimodel
3. Explicit context curation
4. Built on ATProto
5. Open observation of model behaviors

A nutty tweet from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (dated 10 July 2025) reading "Americans have questions about geoengineering and contrails. They expect honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers. For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. This ends today." --> to which Rep. Don Beyer's official account tweets this reply (also dated 10 July 2025): "Some people have 'questions' about whether birds are real — will that be your next project? How much taxpayer money will you be spending on this?"

LOL, @beyer.house.gov ftw

Anyone got a good alternative to Pocket as a read later / stash a copy of an article tool?

Events - THE AI CON Upcoming CTMF-GAIL Seminar (Edinburgh), June 20, 2025 Alex will do a fireside chat with Shannon Vallor, hosted by the University of Edinburgh’s Generative AI Laboratory. UTS (Sydney), June 25, 2025 Em...

The AI Con book tour is headed abroad! @alexhanna.bsky.social and I aren't traveling together but check out thecon.ai/events for our upcoming events, starting with Edinburgh (Alex), Sydney (Emily) and Melbourne (Emily)

From Data to Dialogue: Why Pure Objectivity in Analytics is a Philosophical Dead End Rethinking data visualization through the lens of phenomenology and hermeneutics In boardrooms around the world, a familiar refrain echoes: "Just show me the facts." "Let the data speak for itself.

A great post from Dr Marco Motta on the pursuit of objectivity in data storytelling #dataviz #dataBS. Marco is both an expert in data viz and has a PhD in philosophy - so he has some unique perspectives that are worth engaging with www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-d...

I have an opportunity to hire a staff scientist for my lab. Looking for someone with outstanding skillset in ML/statistics, genomics applications; interest in mentoring, strong publication record, PD experience required.

Email CV to me+cc my assistant (see 'contact' on my website). Ad to follow.

the peak moment of my career was co-inventing (with Roman Garnett) Bayesian optimisation, only to discover just before we submitted that someone had already invented it a few decades before

our priority is to invest in the systems that prevent your stuff from being covered in poop in the first place

Software Engineer Intern DuckDB Labs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.

DuckDB Labs is looking for software engineer interns:
duckdblabs.com/jobs/Softwar...

Apply until June 15 and join us in Amsterdam!

Extremely +1 to DuckDB!

Welcome to the age of AI-generated economic collapse On AGI, AI-generated tariffs, and what really threatens the social order

After all the discourse over whether super-intelligent, ultra-powerful AI is coming, we now have a prime example of exactly how AI is massively disruptive, today: When it is used by lazy, reckless, and malicious people in power.

Welcome to the age of AI-generated economic collapse, everyone

Textual Web app in Electron 🤣

What about distributing things like Dash and streamlit apps as electron apps? I imagine that could be a viable strategy

That's some bona fide data BS right there 👌

Technology Radar | Guide to technology landscape The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to today's technology landscape. Read the latest here.

Thoughtworks have published their latest #TWTechRadar.

A few 'blips' (as they call them) of note in the data space:

🟢 Adopt: Data product thinking
🟢 Adopt: Trino
👍 Trial: Databricks Delta Live Tables
👍 Trial: @metabase.com
✋ Hold: Reverse ETL

www.thoughtworks.com/radar

#dataBS

This is a thing that seems to keep recurring for me too. Any #databs peeps have any ideas?

If you're using duckdb in a python script or jupyter notebook, you can run con.execute('CALL start_ui()') at any point, and the ui will pop right up in your web browser with the current database automatically available.

(I knew about the UI, but I had missed this trick!)

Are you training self-supervised/foundation models, and worried if they are learning good representations? We got you covered! 💪
🦖Introducing Reptrix, a #Python library to evaluate representation quality metrics for neural nets: github.com/BARL-SSL/rep...
🧵👇[1/6]
#DeepLearning

Haha well I'm sold then

Vector Technologies for AI: Extending Your Existing Data Stack - MotherDuck Blog Understand when to use a vector database and how it differs from vector search engines. | Reading time: 17 min read

My latest article explores vector databases, their differences from vector engines, and how to integrate them into your existing Data Engineering Landscape.

+1 to the suggestions of trying DuckDB to do the indexing and then querying. Will be one of the faster ways I would expect and it has great dplyr integration

Analysing Russian news via Telegram, processing them with open LLMs – tadadit.xyz Testing alternatives for investigating public discourse.

New post, in which I indulge in exploring categorisation of text with open LLMs, and along the way incidentally develop an R package to facilitate relevant workflows.

Analysing Russian news via Telegram, processing them with open LLMs - tadadit.xyz/posts/2025-0...

I feel like you're gonna get a lot of head nodding up until the Rust part. What would you say to dyed-in-the-wool Pythonistas like myself to sell them on Rust over Python for data stacks?

Exporting Notebooks from DuckDB UI

🌟 The new @duckdb.org UI is awesome! But what about the all the SQL you write in it?

I cobbled together a script that dumps the SQL out of notebooks to files, from where I can then easily upload them to gist :

🔗 rmoff.net/2025/03/19/e...

#databs

Book Club is tomorrow at 7pm ET

We’re discussing Data & Reality Chapter 5: Attributes

Join us for fun philosophical discussions about data modeling!

jennajordan.me/book-club/

#datasky #databs

Programs: Byte Into IT – 19 March 2025, Byte Into IT — Triple R 102.7FM, Melbourne Independent Radio An episode of Byte Into IT on 19 March 2025

I was interviewed by @attacus.net for last night's broadcast of Byte into IT on RRR Melbourne Independent Radio. This is such a great conversation about my new book! Honestly one of my favorites so far. Huge thanks to @attacus.net. Listen to the episode here. www.rrr.org.au/explore/prog...

The data domain is about to get so fooked by “AI” But not the way you would think

Sometimes some #DataBS thoughts just have to come out:

open.substack.com/pub/agiledat...

I've been thinking a lot about the rich and wonderful challenges and risks of integrating AI into organisational ecosystems... aaand now I'm adding exploding integrations to the pile. It feels kind of obvious in hindsight, but I definitely haven't thought about it as explicitly as you presented it.