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markposts.bsky.social
mark thompson
@markposts.bsky.social
4.3K followers 600 following 2.9K posts
data software engineer @ Twenty3 Sports || sport for all || (he/him) || ⚽🎾💻📰🏎️🤖
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markposts.bsky.social
Forest are the 'midfield vibes' meme but in this case the 'ball goes through midfield somehow' is 'Elliot Anderson'
Bar chart of Nottingham Forest's line-breaking passes completed; Anderson accounts for 30.6% (per the linked article) and leads the chart on 101, with the next nearest player on 33, followed by five players in the low-to-mid 20s
November 9, 2025 at 10:53 AM
markposts.bsky.social
Interesting. And quote further down too - "If you set rules and boundaries on people and they break those rules and boundaries, you create conflict in your group [...] It might be different at a different club with a different culture, but that’s what works here."

www.nytimes.com/athletic/674...
Following a seventh-place finish and a qualification spot for the Conference League with the youngest team in Europe’s top five leagues, many are curious about Rosenior’s approach to the game. Outside of a daily 10.30am meeting, scheduling is loose. Coaching staff opt against setting specific times for training, instead waiting for the playing squad to feel at their most relaxed and ready following pre-activation and warm-up routines. Strasbourg players are not given curfew times, nor fines for arriving late. “I don’t think there’s been one player late in my 15 months here, because they respect the fact that I’ve given them the trust in other areas,” adds the head coach.
October 26, 2025 at 6:58 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Why is The Athletic's search so bad?
A search for 'specialist coaches' on The Athletic, returning articles on Tottenham specialists (a good result), Chauncey Billups arrest, Thomas Frank discussing Cristian Romero injury, and NBA coverage on Amazon Prime (three bad search results)
October 26, 2025 at 12:35 PM
markposts.bsky.social
A moment later, the (short) interview concludes as follows:
SIMON: I mean, if a writer wants to play around with AI as the writer and see if it helps him, I mean, I regard it as no different than him having a thesaurus or a dictionary on his desk or a book of quotable quotes. Play around with it. If it starts to lead the way in the sense that a studio exec comes to you and says, AI gave us this story that we want, that's not why I got into storytelling. And it's not where I'll stay if that's what storytelling is. SHAPIRO: You've been through past writer's strikes. Were there lessons those experiences taught you that you think are relevant today? SIMON: Oh, yeah. The one that is fundamental today is they are now telling us, we don't know what AI is. We don't know how good it's going to be. Let's not litigate what AI can do, what it can't do. SHAPIRO: You think they're hiding their cards. SIMON: Of course. They did the same thing in 2007 when it was streaming. And so yeah, this is - we're having the same exact fight as in 2007. Technology is different, but the fight has to be the same. It's going to be a long fight. I think this is going to go on a while. This is the fight. This is now. This has to happen now. SHAPIRO: David Simon is a TV writer and showrunner known for "The Wire," "Homicide," "Treme" and more. He's also a member of the Writers Guild of America's Negotiating Committee. Thank you so much for coming into the studio.
October 9, 2025 at 9:33 PM
markposts.bsky.social
🎶having fun
isn't hard
when you've got matplotlib and claude code 🎶
October 4, 2025 at 9:49 AM
markposts.bsky.social
Feel like any discussion of promoted teams that doesn't talk about this vs league position is missing something. Early numbers are early numbers, but 1) do we think Sunderland will finish closer to 12th or 5th 2) this spread doesn't feel totally unusual for promoted teams, historically
Premier League table sorted by xG difference; promoted teams Sunderland, Leeds, and Burnley are 12th, 15th, and 20th respectively
October 2, 2025 at 6:40 PM
markposts.bsky.social
This is a more Sinner-y orange, I think
October 2, 2025 at 7:48 AM
markposts.bsky.social
This doesn't really capture this point but it is kind of wild to see the distance Sinner covered in four shots - www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3UF...

(I should've persisted trying to find a better orange for Sinner)
October 1, 2025 at 9:15 PM
markposts.bsky.social
sup
September 30, 2025 at 10:08 PM
markposts.bsky.social
This is too much fun
Data visualisation from a 'TV camera' viewpoint of tennis data, visualising Borg vs McEnroe serve-plus-one shot locations from their 1980 Wimbledon epic tie-break. Their names are plotted in dynamic large type on the image, as if painted on-court Data visualisation from a 'player view' viewpoint of tennis data, visualising Borg vs McEnroe serve-plus-one shot locations from their 1980 Wimbledon epic tie-break. Compared to the TV view, the viewpoint is lower, with datapoints, net, and player names all still in proportion as if in real 3D space
September 30, 2025 at 7:28 PM
markposts.bsky.social
motion pictures
September 26, 2025 at 8:23 PM
markposts.bsky.social
It's not quite gas that we're cooking with but it's increasing in flammability
Tennis court visualisation from a "player view" perspective (although more like someone stood 20 feet behind a player), showing serve-plus-one locations from Borg vs McEnroe's 1980 Wimbledon tie-break. Shots on the far side of the court are rendered behind a partially transparent net
September 23, 2025 at 9:40 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Need to work the regular text plotting args work in various orientations, but it's neat to be able to switch the view up relatively easily (calling this 'umpire view')
Side-on view of the tennis court plot of McEnroe vs Borg serve-plus-one shots
September 21, 2025 at 11:09 AM
markposts.bsky.social
Toying with 3d matplotlib - plotted all of the serve-plus-one shot locations in the 1980 Wimbledon McEnroe vs Borg tie-break.

Borg's baseline plus-ones were all second serves iirc. McEnroe's shot closest to the net is absurd (on a second serve too): youtu.be/UnwYdF8a5ws?...
Plot of locations on a tennis court. Serve-volleying is clearly evident, although Borg has some shots near the baseline. McEnroe's locations are more spread, suggesting better returning from Borg.
September 21, 2025 at 8:47 AM
markposts.bsky.social
tempted
Screenshot of a bluesky feed creator service with an unpublished feed titled 'ref-chat'
August 30, 2025 at 12:45 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Thought I'd dip into today's News Agents episode, which has an interview with Anthropic's co-founders. Feel like the tendencies to 'miss the wood for the trees in the day-to-day' are also at play in saying we 'may be about to invent a tech which at a stroke denudes the one advantage humans have'
Screenshot reading six paragraphs: "Sometimes in journalism, the act of day-in day-out reporting of events, it is so easy to get distracted, to miss the wood for the trees; to get lost in the latest tweet, the latest here-today, gone-tomorrow fiasco, the most recent bit of noise. We can be very bad, by contrast, at seeing, at talking about, at reporting on the trends which historians will one day say were the defining elements of our age. AI, the coming wave of artificial intelligence married with robotics is our printing press, our steam engine our atomic bomb, our generation's singular contribution to humanity s development. In fact, it could be if you believe some theorists, the last thing humanity ever does. A couple of weeks ago I attended AI4, the world's biggest AI conference in Las Vegas. One of the godfathers of AI tech, Sir Geoffrey Hinton, was the keynote speaker. Hear what he had to say about the precipice our race might now stand upon: "We've somehow got to be stronger than them. We've got to be dominant and they've got to be submissive. That's not gonna work: they're going to be much smarter than us " Think about that. We may be about to invent technology - AGI, artificial general intelligence - which is cleverer than us; which at a stroke denudes the one advantage our race has had from the beginning: that we can outwit everything else around us in this world, even when they're stronger than us. It's why the gorillas are in the zoo, and you're listening to this."
August 29, 2025 at 5:53 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Feed is perfect #epl-live
One post on live football chat feed saying that every pundit will say "he's like a new signing" about Chiesa over the next few days. The post below, posted 20 seconds earlier, reads: "HE'S LIKE A NEW SIGNING"
August 15, 2025 at 8:51 PM
markposts.bsky.social
If 67% of men cannot score a penalty with no goalkeeper the UK we may as well disband all our national teams now. You are 36 feet away from a target that is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
Reaction to the Yougov poll about the percentage of men who think they are fairly or very likely to score a penalty against Jordan Pickford or Hannah Hampton, saying "yikes... I reckon 33% of men is maybe about right for scoring a penalty with no goalkeeper at all"
August 1, 2025 at 9:25 PM
markposts.bsky.social
maybe matplotlib is ok

(i am not saying it is, but one must be open to the possibilities)
July 3, 2025 at 9:21 PM
markposts.bsky.social
testing uploading this gif via the video button on bsky rather than the image button, even though the gif appears in both interfaces
July 3, 2025 at 9:18 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Need everyone to see this score from the final round of Wimbledon qualifying
Holmgren beat Watanuki 6-4, 6-7, 3-6, 7-6, 7-6. The final two tie-breaks had scores of 13-11 and 10-7
June 26, 2025 at 3:57 PM
markposts.bsky.social
No regrets on the experiment away from Ghost but I do like how great the default themes look now I'm back (although the logo and featured image are a me 🤝 Canva collab)
Mobile screenshot of get goalside analytics dot com. A clean but approachable and simple style of homepage with a tagline, subscribe call to action, featured post, and recent posts list
June 20, 2025 at 4:59 PM
markposts.bsky.social
Really interesting chart (for nerds) in this Athletic piece on 'how Liverpool afford Wirtz'. Liverpool are obviously the focus of it, but the other Merseyside team is a fun outlier too

www.nytimes.com/athletic/642...
Chart of Premier League team yearly player amortisation change from 2018-2019 to 2023-2024. Many clubs have increases in the range of 20 to 60 million pounds, but Liverpool only a 2.7million increase. And the real outlier on the chart is Everton, with a decrease of 30.5million
June 14, 2025 at 10:56 AM
markposts.bsky.social
Sort of convinced that many web pages (on mobile, anyway) aren't really designed to be read, just consumed as ad impressions

(I know what the media economy is like, but still)
Screenshot of the standard with half the page devoted to an ad, an ad overlay over another quarter, and a navigation overlay on one side A screenshot of an article where three lines are visible to read over a two scrollable ads Screenshot of the standard with half the page devoted to a Read More section, an ad overlay over another fifth, and a navigation overlay on one side Screenshot of the standard with half the page devoted to a Recommended section, two ad overlays over another third, and a navigation overlay on one side
May 29, 2025 at 12:13 PM
markposts.bsky.social
'Watch live' is just the BBC News channel. Am I out of touch for just wanting a regular online news article?
Landing page of the BBC 'live' post for the UK-EU trade deal. At the top is a header image of Kier Starmer, above a 'Watch live' link. The bottom half of the screen is a summary linking to other stories.
May 19, 2025 at 4:49 PM