@mattwaite
Professor of Journalism, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I teach people who can't spell code to find stories and visuals in data with #rstats. Publish all my course books and tutorials at https://github.com/mattwaite
Over on LinkedIn, there was some hand-wringing about the Tampa Bay Times using AI to write some boilerplate real estate stories and I had enough feelings to start a blog post about it and then throw it away. No one gives a shit about things from 2009.
Whooo boy thread number 3 has me feeling some kind of way.
All three notebooks in one giant blog post: mattwaite.github.io/nicar/2026-i...
A screenshot of an Ebay auction for a vintage mimeograph machine for $111.
Just doing a little shopping. Hell, might even make a TikTok account restoring these things.
If Canvas doesn't view this as an existential threat, they have no idea how ready I am to replicate college in the 1980s. companion.ai/einstein
Flew from Frankfurt to Chicago on Lufthansa on a 747. It was so huge it felt like flying in slow motion. Could not believe we were airborne at what felt like 35 mph.
(Laughs in academia)
Ads in ChatGPT? I cannot *wait* to fail an essay because it says "Times v Sullivan is the backbone of press freedom in the United States, just like the Ford F-150 is the backbone of the American worker. F-150: Built Ford Tough."
A screenshot of some code that has a note that says NONE OF THIS WORKS
Always fun to dust off some old code ...
Also, I am fully prepared to follow you into battle toting a pug.
Anyone checked in on Sting since you hooked that up? Also any nearby obelisks?
I wonder what the 2025 redraft of the albums of 1991 would be among those same players. Girlfriend is still a first rounder but #1 overall pick?
Put it this way: I have a dataset of public records I've received as part of a story I'm writing. I'm interested in X, but you may be interested in Y and Z. Why not make them available to you? A search box and a result set in a single page web app is not enshittifying anything. It's opening access.
I'll give you @kleinmatic.bsky.social with the shot: www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/show...
That poster has lived in my head for more than 20 years now. I think about it at least once a week.
A fake motivational poster from Despair.com that says Meetings: none of us is as dumb as all of us.
We made a better fake image of this in less than 5 minutes during a class on the evolution of fake news yesterday. Buckle up, society. bsky.app/profile/jour...
What I was confronted with:
Depending on how ancient you're talking, there's been a lot of rather breathless writing about Gemini 3's ability to turn *hand written* tabular data into csvs. No experience myself, but I've read some historians absolutely wetting themselves over it.
Haven't written about it because I haven't made it all work but I've been very impressed with DeepseekOCR's ability to turn PDF tables into markdown tables. I figure once you have that you can parse them into CSV with a little more work.
Using the IDE meant it had access to python and could write the pdfplumber script for me and then execute it. What you see in that post, I had to execute nothing except the prompts and got a csv at the end. Don’t think the web interface can pip install python libraries it needs as it thinks.
In the spirit of using AI to do dishes so I can do art, I tested out Antigravity/Gemini 3 with a gnarly PDF parsing job. What I got back was orders of magnitude better than any other tool I've used over a period of years: mattwaite.github.io/posts/2025-1...
Every now and then, and for no particular reason, I think about the teams we drafted and played on Fourth and Inches. I can even remember some random players on those teams. At the same time, I have to regularly remind myself what time classes are that I have been teaching for the last 11 weeks.
Can you smell your strings? Can you smell that smell on your fingers well after you play? Does that smell make you gag? No? Not time yet.
Found in the gutter in Blair Nebraska is my new country album.
Quick note on the installation instructions: The ggalt and waffle libraries have been pulled from CRAN, but if you install the github versions they work fine. @collinberke.bsky.social figured that one out, but those tutorials are going to need work after the semester ends.
Had? We're going with the past tense here?
World War I artillery shells with "To Willie with compliments" written on it.
Long history of soldiers writing on shells and bombs going back to at least the first World War. Probably further back than that.
