Nick Radcliffe
njr0.bsky.social
Nick Radcliffe
@njr0.bsky.social
Sceptic
I spent an an intensive month pair-programming with Claude Code, fully expecting to hate it and for it to be a waste of time.

I did hate it, but it was not a waste of time. It worked and I changed my mind.

checkeagle.com/checklists/n...
November 14, 2025 at 12:35 PM
A review of Blue Machine, by @helenczerski.bsky.social.

njr.prose.sh/blue-machine

One of the best books I have ever read.™

#oceans #physics #ecology #biodiversity #sustainability
April 26, 2025 at 6:04 PM
This is an interesting perspective. It's not important, but I tripped over variantstens in the copy on your site. (I presume it should be "variants—tens" or "variants, tens".)
March 16, 2025 at 9:19 AM
I’ve been trying Kagi on and off. It’s a paid web search engine, available at ‪kagi.com‬ and as a default search option in the Orion web browser. It’s good and has found a few things for me I couldn’t find with Mojeek or DDG. (Google hasn’t found anything for me for years.)

Well worth trying out.
February 1, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Good overview of current state of LLMs from @simonwillison.net:

simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

He's more positive than I am, but balanced.

As to his boxed observation: I'm prepared to be persuaded, and I don't think they are valueless. I think they're misunderstood, dangerous, and misapplied.
January 3, 2025 at 9:36 AM
You will have heard by now that 2025 is a square year. So I thought I’d plot atmospheric carbon dioxide from 1BCE to now as a square heatmap. It’s not looking great.

Scalable version & PDF at stochasticsolutions.com/gallery/heat....

#climate-change #CO2 #sustainability #climate-crisis
January 1, 2025 at 9:17 PM
@theguardian.com You might want to fix the name of the Italian PM here:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

(I believe she is Giorgia Meloni, not Giulia.)
December 30, 2024 at 7:37 AM
Our long international nightmare is over!

Someone fixed CSS while I wasn't paying attention.

stochasticsolutions.com/they-fixed-c...

#css #centre #center #vertical #html
December 28, 2024 at 8:56 AM
I was looking for a map of the world scaled by population.

Of course, the brilliant @ourworldindata.org's brilliant @maxroser.bsky.social as one (from 2018). Would love to see this kept up to date and time-lapse.

assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018...
December 25, 2024 at 8:53 AM
I'm known (slightly) for criticising Jupyter and other computational notebooks. So here's something more positive: Suggested best practices for safe notebook use.

Clickable version at: www.tdda.info/best-practic...

Printable PDF at: www.stochasticsolutions.com/pdf/nbp.pdf

#jupyter #notebook #tdda
December 18, 2024 at 7:37 PM
Thinking about Dijkstra's quote (image), maybe rather than coding or hacking we should talk about bugging.

I bug
You bug
He bugs
She bugs
We bug
They bug
Copilot BUGS LIKE CRAZY.
December 16, 2024 at 2:18 PM
Spot the unfortunate typo:

#observationswindows
December 13, 2024 at 6:22 PM
I wrote up some slightly more refined thoughts about that @ourworldindata.org graph I was commenting on the other day:

Post: Log Graphs and Grokkability.
www.tdda.info/log-graphs-a...

#data #visualization #TDDA
December 11, 2024 at 10:35 PM
As the book on TDDA comes together, I am constantly surprised at the books and authors that end up in the bibliography. When I got up this morning, I did not expect to cite Robert Heinlein; yet this was the day it happened.
December 9, 2024 at 5:10 PM
This is really interesting and important data, and an interesting visualization—subtler than it first appears.I've redrawn it using linear scales, but resorted to two graphs.

The use of a log scale is clever and enables them to show both the multiplier and the relative size together. But... 1/n
December 7, 2024 at 4:11 PM
ffs (Fix filename spaces etc.) prototype.
November 23, 2024 at 7:34 PM