1356. A visual history of chessmen ↪ The history of chess set designs from ancient history to today.

1357. Unparalleled Misalignments ↪ A fun collection of pairs of non-synonymous phrases. Some of them are not suitable for work but they can easily be hidden if that is a concern. See also this post.

1358. The Pour-igin of Species ↪ Another great dataviz feature from The Pudding. This time using Vivino and ChatGPT to explore the price and quality of wines with animal labels on the bottle. For another recent great analysis by The Pudding, check out Bears Will Be Boys (on animal gender in children’s books). Or this article on the mathematically optimal way to dice an onion.

1359. Large Language Muddle ↪ I share many of the same feelings about AI expressed here. This piece contains one of the best metaphors for how web data is being used (for free) as input data to the training of LLMs: “As someone who has spent their entire career and most of their life participating and creating online, this sucks. It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it.” Maybe I am just getting more nostalgic about the old web, and the combination of AI and social media especially seems wrong (I deactivated my Facebook account the other day as they started showing content in my feed from other accounts despite the fact that it has been empty for years).

1360. Advice for time management as a manager ↪ Some good advice on time management. As I have taken on more managerial responsibilities this year I have read quite a bit on the workflow as a manager, including time management. This post captures a lot of important issues (and here is another good post on becoming a manager). The primary difficulty of time management as a manager is that you are not only managing your own time (and how the immediate management of your time might block the work of your colleagues), but that you are effectively managing the time of your team.

1361. Notes on Tunisia ↪ Yet another good country deep dive by Matt Lakeman.

1362. Overlooked films ↪ A good list with movie recommendations from different directors that are either underrated or not rated at all.

1363. When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History ↪ The views of 19 researchers working in the field of NLP and their take on LLMs and ChatGPT. It is easy to understand the early opposition towards LLMs, in particular the “API science” and nested commercial interests. I remember how the focus in academia was geared towards BERT and RoBERTa (i.e., encoder-only transformer architecture) rather than GPT and GPT-2, and I guess it is because of focus on understanding (e.g., classification) of the former instead of the generative element of the latter. You will most likely find career(-existential) crises in most academic fields now due to ChatGPT and LLMs, and a lot of the interesting work these years is taking place in industry. Why focus on writing papers in academia when ChatGPT can do it better, and nobody (but an LLM) is going to read all these papers (that are, in some cases, also written with LLM assistance)?

1364. A masterclass in information visualization: the tube map ↪ A great post on the visualisation of information. I could have shared a lot of different posts from this blog, so I decided to go with one of the most popular posts on the blog that will most likely be of interest to most people. However, if you feel like reading a lot of data related posts, I can recommend to go through the archives. See, for example, also The bad boy of bar charts: William Playfair.

1365. Star Wars Galaxy Map ↪ I have never been a huge fan of Star Wars, but I found this galaxy map of the Star Wars universe impressive (it even shows major trade routes). There is even a 59-page document with a list of the star systems of the galaxy. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I never really got into Star Wars. There is simply too much going on.

1366. The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century ↪ The 100 best movies of the past 25 years? This would of course not be my list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century but there would be a non-trivial overlap. There are too many Western movies on this list, but it is still a good place to start to identify good movies you might have missed. There are seven movies on the list I have not yet seen (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, Carol, Under the Skin, Tár, Best in Show, Bridesmaids, Y tu mamá también), but I have had a few of them on my watchlist for a long time, so this list is a good reminder to watch them soon.

1367. Python F-String Quiz ↪ I use f-strings in Python all the time for interpreted string literals (if you only work in R, it is basically what you get when you use the {glue} package). However, this is a good and humbling quiz on Python f-strings. It goes without saying that I was nowhere near getting 26 out of 26 questions correct. See also this f-string cheat sheet.

1368. How to Firefox ↪ Firefox is not perfect, but… use Firefox.

1369. The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time ↪ I tend not to recommend specific podcasts (see this post for my general recommendations on podcasts), and this list of the 100 best podcasts of all time is a good example of why. While most of these podcasts will not be of interest to most people, you will most likely find one or two podcasts on this list that are worth checking out. There are a lot of (historically) good podcasts on the list, e.g., 99% Invisible, The Daily, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Heavyweight, Serial, and Slow Burn, but even the completionist in me would never even consider checking out most of the podcasts on the list.

1370. I Drank Every Cocktail ↪ I love these kinds of personal projects. I was not familiar with the IBA official cocktail list, but it looks like the authoritative list to complete if you want to … drink a lot of different cocktails. I am keeping my alcohol consumption to a minimum at the moment, and while I would not consider working my way through any cocktail list, I like this individual approach to consuming alcohol much more than the social component that defines most alcohol consumption. Also, respect for having achieved this at the age of 24.

1371. Explore all works by Hans Christian Andersen ↪ The complete works of Hans Christian Andersen, both in English and Danish (original and modern). And here is a good article on the 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen.

1372. The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made ↪ I love Disco Elysium and I am not sure I would like to play a sequel to this game. This FT Magazine piece gives an overview of what has happened over the past few years and what is most likely (not) going to happen. The article also mentions the interesting documentary by People Make Games on what happened with the people involved in making the game.

1373. The History of Windows XP ↪ I remember buying my first computer with Windows XP and it is difficult not to be a bit nostalgic about that time. This article tells the history of how Windows XP came to be.

1374. Everything I know about good system design ↪ If you have any experience working with MySQL and PostgreSQL in production (or aspirations of doing this in the future), this is worth reading in full.