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Andy Timm

@andytimm

Data scientist @ Grow Progress, testing Dem ads. Usually thinking about methods for survey weighting, efficient causal inference, or scalable Bayes. https://andytimm.github.io/

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29.10.2023
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Latest posts by Andy Timm @andytimm

Ooh interesting, thanks for these.

06.03.2026 12:56 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This is also the face I make when doing bayes, very cool mr. coypu!

Looks like a cool, short bayes intro book!

05.03.2026 23:33 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

gsood.com/research/pap...

This may be helpful on both fronts! + refs in the lit review

05.03.2026 19:19 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

This is very strong work, and I want to say I especially appreciate the PRs given incentives in academia.

Thank you!

04.03.2026 13:15 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This gave me an idea: I wonder how well a Claude code skill implementing the β€œnewbies checks” would do. Many of them are fussy, but squinting at them, many are things that I trust a strong LLM to check.

I have a new package I’m about to finish pushing to CRAN, will try this out/share if it works.

02.03.2026 13:28 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Obvious would be run the check as cran, take advantage of win builders.

Less obvious: assume you’ll need to iterate on your first submission(s). For more complex packages, assume that the process will involve some requirements you don’t personally find valuable or particularly well considered.

01.03.2026 15:18 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
81st Annual AAPOR Conference

AAPOR program’s up. So much cool work this year- really stoked to hear about all of it!

I’ll be sharing some of GP’s work on bot/LLM detection, and also our work on survey experiment designs that manipulate attention in-survey to understand how noisier environments modify ad effects.

15.02.2026 16:25 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

If polarization is interesting, Lily Mason’s uncivil disagreement or Neil O’brian’s The roots of polarization are both solid.

If you want a more hopeful account (who doesn’t right now…), Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America I found helpful, though it’s been a few years since I read it.

03.02.2026 13:40 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

A few different directions-

1. For a comparative approach on democratic backsliding, β€œHow Democracies Die” is great. The authors + Laura Gamboa both have good next reads .

2. For more β€œhow we got here” party institutions wise, American Carnage and/or The Hollow Parties are great.

1/2

03.02.2026 13:34 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Might be better than my current strategy of attempting to nerd snipe an econometrician friend who also runs with random questions.

β€œHow likely to replicate do you think the studies about rotating shoe pairs between runs are?” <β€” basically a box trap for my people

26.01.2026 18:05 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I realize you’re a cyclist, but do you or @stephenjwild.bsky.social have anyone you follow & trust to summarize the medical literature on distance running/training well?

There’s so much low quality research around running, I end up having to go down a rabbit hole myself for all my little questions.

26.01.2026 13:34 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I do think these spaces do help loneliness though- the (often cruel tbh) memes about the guys in a game shop or smash tournament who’re clearly learning to be in public are evidence not everyone in these spaces is already well adjusted.

25.01.2026 13:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Alas, the gap between folks doing and talking about a hobby strikes again. I see this a bunch in my own community- there’s a big difference between folks who follow the FGC online and who actually come to local tournaments.

Some folks really do make first friendships- just fewer than you’d hope :/

25.01.2026 13:36 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

For some research questions, this sounds

VERY

OMINOUS

23.01.2026 12:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Popping a mini disc into Claude matrix style, and being like β€œyou do not, in fact, need the whole 75 page PDF in your context window” is a lot of my life right now.

22.01.2026 22:50 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Are you feeling the AGI yet? It sure feels spiky…

But yeah more seriously I feel like half of the tools I give to CC right now are trying to bring up the floor on its actions, not give it any galaxy brained tricks to raise the ceiling.

22.01.2026 18:36 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Enduring, visceral hatred of his enemies’ political projects keeps him warm from the inside :)

22.01.2026 13:26 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

something like* this

15.01.2026 02:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

If I recall correctly, I ran into something this and updating waldo resolved my issue.

15.01.2026 02:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
CS336: Language Models From Scratch – Andy Timm Review + Practical Notes for Auditors

I go through a bit more detail on what you should expect to learn, what pre reqs you probably want, workarounds where materials are Stanford only, and things like GPU costs (I spent ~$350 w/ side experiments), and time needed (it took me ~200h).

andytimm.github.io/posts/cs336/...

11.01.2026 15:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I finished CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) from @stanfordnlp.bsky.social It was a fantastic way to get back into the weeds with recent LLM training/arch advances and strengthen my systems engineering skills.

I wrote up a short review + some practical tips for other auditors-

11.01.2026 15:18 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Hrm I don’t think saying ~linear is quite precise enough, I’d take that wording back. I’d need to poke the details a bit more to describe the form more precisely.

08.01.2026 14:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I think it’s not quite accurate to call this an intentional design choice. It’s more a quirk/limitation of MT19937, though not a particularly load bearing one.

You can do some magic tricks to scare coworkers with this, like β€œpredicting” uniform draws 🀠

08.01.2026 14:00 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
mt19937ar: Mersenne Twister with improved initialization

I believe I understand where this is coming from; not by my laptop so can’t fully step through a demo for you.

R uses MT19937 (by default) as another poster already mentioned. Creation of the internal state is ~linear in seeds, hence shifted sequences: www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/MT2...

08.01.2026 14:00 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Big foil wants you to believe it doesn’t matter for most foils, but the true answer is shiny side out, obviously.

27.12.2025 15:17 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Just here to thank you for the public service of posting this.

Was wondering about some of these checks!

13.12.2025 15:56 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Mitigating the risk of prompt injections in browser use Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Don’t think these are new methods?

I’m pretty pessimistic about these directions both because:
1. These are really unoptimized bot prompts/setups!
2. The labs (rightly) understand addressing various injection-like attacks as key to making browser use more valuable: www.anthropic.com/research/pro...

08.12.2025 13:32 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Congratulations!

05.12.2025 13:45 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Risk of astronomical suffering - Wikipedia

I thought it was the probability of astronomical suffering (this joke is really for like 2 people so will just link this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_of...

25.11.2025 20:46 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Ah yeah that’s def preferable if you don’t have a reason to build yourself.

19.11.2025 21:56 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0