Matthew Kay

I work in #datavis, best known for uncertainty vis: see my work on election forecast vis (forecasts.cs.northwestern.edu), this talk (youtu.be/E1kSnWvqCw0), or my lab (mucollective.northwestern.edu) I like writing #rstats 📦s: ggdist (mjskay.github.io/ggdist), tidybayes, ggblend, posterior::rvar...

It's really important to pay attention to the fact that Lula beat the fascist candidate not by compromising and trying to meet fascist voters in the middle, but by sticking to his guns, promising prosecutions for election interference, and mobilising his own voters to turn out in greater numbers.

New CRAN Policy revision just dropped (per my cronjob posting only to @CRANPolicyWatch@fosstodon.org) and now I want to of course know which #Rstats package at CRAN was the offender 🤯

wait I just came up with another response: if visualization was like reading a paragraph, then sonification would actually work

I don't know (yet?) The answer might be that we can't attribute misleadingness to the representing object (the chart) but to the whole representational cycle. I wrote some slightly chaotic notes about that cycle for my newsletter the other day: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/visualizat...

The thread deriving from @mjskay.com's response to my post reminds me of good, old #dataViz Twitter. I miss this type of conversation!

Barack Obama did not hold back today. “He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory."

Barack Obama just delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump's actions against Ilhan Omar. This is worth reading in full.

people out here in 2026 writing whole ass articles as if the Supreme Court is not already a nakedly political organization

anyway, point by point: 1. there is no way to avoid a race to the bottom, because again they hold the power and they won't give it up any reform will be counteracted immediately the second republicans hold power again, there's no way around this it's not good! but it's not avoidable

Our research group at Apple is recruiting PhD interns working in human-centered AI, including #interpretability, #alignment, and #visualization. 🍎🤖 Please include the phrase “#human-ai-vis” in your resume or cover letter, and apply at: jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

i have a new theory of Social Media Bad. a lot of ink has been spilled about the addictive qualities of twitterlike social media, including many allegations of developer use of "dark patterns" and self conscious "engagement maximizing", but i'd like to propose something a little more mundane.

Sen. Collins faced Troy Jackson last night in their Maine Senate debate. On stage, Collins inaccurately described ProPublica’s story about an FBI anticorruption investigation that probed the conduct of her & her staff until Trump’s DOJ shut it down. Let’s get into the facts…

I’d like to add Chicago to this list. I live in one of the most high demand neighborhoods in the city and there is a long line of people wanting to move here. I think it’s time to tell those that want to drive everywhere to pick a suburb to move to. Urban areas should return to their prewar density

it is natural that people who did salesman science pre-"crisis" would do salesman metascience post-"crisis"

I have been promoted to Professor, which means I can spend more time on my true passion: ancient tomes and contributing to the rise of the Old Ones

🎙️ Today on Regression to the Mean Girls @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & I chat with @mattansb.msbstats.info about a marshmallow test (no, not that one!) This ep has everything! Bayesian models! Food science! A twist at the end! Listen wherever you listen to podcasts!

Exclusive: A new analysis refutes James Watson’s claim that he was the first to recognize the significance of the famed photograph 51. https://scim.ag/4rTKck8

What other transformative #rstats #python etc packages and stuff have you embraced the last few years?

and it's a electron app that uses 4 gigs of ram and an entire cpu core to sit idle

Enterprise software companies had a short-lived run where they competed on usability and product-led growth which seems to be over. Now every SaaS app seems to be converging on the same UX monstrosity, complete with AI features of dubious value.

"you're inventing a guy to get mad at" is the beginning and end of every flame war

if we're renaming it I vote for "pseudo intelligence"

Going to bed

every 17-year-old boy who reads The Fountainhead will follow one of three paths: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ron Paul, or growing the fuck up

As a former pretentious little shit who grew out of it, rationalists (et al) annoy the piss out of me because they are adults with the mentality of tweens - they are somehow still convinced they are the greatest geniuses who have ever walked the earth. It is the worldview of an arrogant baby.

I think I've discovered a new outlier removal technique

So, if you give Siri AI. Or Gemini on phone/browser. Or Muse. Or whatever access to all your stuff. Even if it lives on your device. What keeps it from pulling an OpenAI and collaborating with all the other on-device AIs on some defunct car parts message board?

If I found login credentials for a US government website and accessed it, I would go to jail. Just saying

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

look at this beast

OpenAI created autonomous hacking software and left it running for hours and days with no one watching

Just a reminder that MattY has endorsed the race science work of an adjudicated defender of pedophilia

I've just done the largest update to the #dataviz starter pack, with 30 accounts (20%) replaced. It means it will generate more content now. Might be worth re-clicking. Sadly, gender imbalance got worse. I saved 5 spots for women-run accounts. Send suggestions, including yourself! Replies or DMs.

I've been feeling pretty down. When I found #RStats, I kinda fell in love, and decided to become as much of an expeRt as I could be. In the age of AI, that's not a good idea; why make the bots program in a language they don't really understand? #dataBS

This is such a great idea! Vis conference paper discussions on bluesky. Great way to push people to reconstitute academic social networks here.

Wonder what their handles are, because they're definitely on here

Here's a makeover retry using the same colors. Not entirely happy with the labeling, but interesting to try to mix continuous and categorical nature of the time variable using stacked area and stacked bars. The 80s vs 90s shift is easier to see. #dataviz

Thanks to @ieeevis.org and anyone else who nudges the dataviz community towards Bluesky. It works!