David Smith

That does it. I am officially switching back to “Statistician”.

Working on this is part of my new job! Even more to come blogs.windows.com/windows-inside…

Hot take from looking at @github Copilot telemetry: benchmarks make coding models look wildly different. Production workflows make them look much more similar. 👀 We looked at 23M+ Copilot requests and examined one simple metric: code survivability.

Okay this is no longer a work in progress, very happy with the result. andymasley.com/visuals/water/

i guess the idea just didn’t have legs

A few people asked me to make an image of how much irrigated farmland would use the same water required for ALL ChatGPT usage, including every part of the process. I did a botec and my best guess right now is that inference uses about as much water as training, and power generation uses ~5x as much water as the data centers themselves, so it looks something like this. The water cost of manufacturing chips is marginal compared to how much water they use over their lifetimes.

"AI" is not a stochastic parrot.🦜 I wrote this piece a couple weeks ago, but it was hard for me to finish up given AI's role in society and war over the past few weeks. I should share it at some point though. Not perfect, but here it is. @margarmitchell/no-ai-is-not-a-stochastic-parrot-a99e57766bed" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@margarmitchel…

We made a blind taste test to see whether NYT readers prefer human writing or AI writing. 86,000 people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, 54% of quiz-takers prefer AI. A real moment! nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Radar graphs are among the worst ideas in data visualization. The whole point of them is to show the area and you can usually reorder the labels freely in order to create a desired dramatic effect. Two versions of the same graph: - left one tells the story that AI is rapidly replacing whole industries - right one shows the "jaggedness" and reinforces the idea that humans will always have something that AI won't be able to replicate

@chrisalbon Same here. Haven’t had this much fun coding (well, building with code) in decades.

I know some people hate the ai agentic changes in software engineering, but man, I feel I found a second wind in my life.

yall 5.4 reasoning is like talking w a ranty colleague i fucking love it

Got scammed by Google Search. Booked a hotel room on the road trip last night. Searched for hotel name, clicked on the first link — got a shady travel agent site instead. Got a room, but with costs listed in USD instead of AUD plus fees, paid 1.5x rack rate. Thanks Google!

`tabular-nums` should be the default for any number that updates ( timers, counters, prices, percentages, scores, live data etc ). you can enable this tnum OpenType feature using the CSS property `font-variant-numeric`. .tabular-nums { font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; }

The most impressive change that AI caused is that now engineers are writing detailed specs

Do you run a popular open source project? If so you might qualify for complimentary GitHub Copilot Pro. No need to apply. Learn more here: docs.github.com/en/copilot/how…

Dear developers at work, GitHub Copilot CLI is generally available with /plan, /plugin, /resume, /review, /yolo, /models, multi-model in single request autopilot, custom agents, experimental features, and much more. Love, GitHub🌹 github.blog/changelog/2026…

@burkeholland Why not both? CLI in Codespace is awesome *and* accessible from anywhere.

I'm a little new to the CLI game - admittedly - but I do not understand how you people survive with just a terminal. Madness. Don't you wanna see the git timeline? Don't you ever look at the files in the project? DO YOU NOT USE DEV CONTAINERS?!?!

This vintage 1938 world map is centered around Sydney, Australia. Since it was published by Qantas, it also shows travel distance to all parts of the world. Great piece. Zoomable high-res version here: buff.ly/MwTbsDf

The New York Times' new AI assistant

My new keyboard has arrived.

Never staying at an @Airbnb again. Arrived in Sydney to find our booked property was dirty, unsafe, and had one few bedrooms than advertised. Totally unlivable. We left immediately. AirBnB’s response (paraphrased): sucks to be you!