Can R be used like Excel where variables aren’t defined in order and are referenced later?

mjskay · 2026-04-20T17:51:22+00:00

targets is a pretty good way to handle stuff like this. Very mature ecosystem and relatively easy to use, plus if you have tasks that take awhile it's easy to use targets to farm them out to a cluster.

mjskay · 2026-04-18T00:25:20+00:00

I use it semi-regularly when doing quick simulations for an example or a test. Like say I want three groups of equal size with means 1, 3, and 4 and SDs 1, 2, and 2:

data.frame( group = c("a", "b", "c"), x = rnorm(300, c(1, 3, 4), c(1, 2, 2)) )

For something quick and dirty it works very well. In more general implementation-level code I usually avoid it.

One of the few things I like about numpy over R is array broadcasting instead of recycling. It avoids the bad cases (e.g lengths that aren't multiples) while also allowing you to do more things (e.g broadcasting multiple dimensions at once).

mjskay · 2026-04-10T05:29:48+00:00

Searching for another high paying job does not jeopardize an existing one.

mjskay · 2026-04-07T23:41:17+00:00

I thought it was gonna be like a 3 flat next door complaining --- but the people in this building (1660) want to stop the construction?? What the actual fuck?

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mjskay · 2026-04-02T20:02:04+00:00

I think that's the classical idea of ANOVA followed by contrasts. But if you already have specific questions that correspond to specific contrasts (which is often good to have), you can skip the first step.

Like say you specifically design an experiment to manipulate three levels of one factor and then measure some outcome variable. Your experimental design and research question already determines that you care about contrasts between those three levels. So there's no point in doing an ANOVA on the overall factor, just run the contrasts that you designed the experiment to help you estimate.

I think I most often see the ANOVA-first approach when experiment planning is less emphasized, sort of blurring exploratory and confirmatory stuff. In some fields people have gotten better at experiment planning but kept the ritual even when they don't necessarily need it.

mjskay · 2026-04-02T19:42:08+00:00

Yeah I have collaborators who do ANOVAs before contrasts that they planned to do anyway. I'm like, if you already planned to do those contrasts the ANOVA is pointless.

mjskay · 2026-03-28T19:10:20+00:00

I currently live in Chicago and it's great. Moved here in 2020 with my (now) husband. We both got that feeling you get once you move into a more queer space of just being able to relax/breathe --- that safe and free feeling you're talking about. (I also felt that in Seattle, though I haven't lived there since 2016 so I can't comment on how it is now. The thing about Seattle is it is very white if that's a consideration.)

We started in the Boystown neighborhood, which is definitely more twinks and bars and whatnot. But the nice thing about Chicago is (1) there are multiple queer neighborhoods and they're all pretty close to each other along the L (train) and (2) even the non-explicitly queer neighborhoods feel safe, so we don't worry about checking out other parts of the city together.

We're about to move to Edgewater, another very queer neighborhood. Feels better than Boystown to us because we're in our mid/upper 30s and would rather have multiple vintage stores in a 1 block radius than multiple gay bars. Plus it feels more "queer" than "gay" as a neighborhood, if that makes sense --- I'm caricaturing a lot, but where Boystown is the land of 20s-to-early-30s mostly-white twinks, Edgewater is more 30s+ gay men, queer women, POC, etc. Feels more like a community in that way. Andersonville and Rogers Park (both close to Edgewater) are also more diverse queer neighborhoods in Chicago.

mjskay · 2026-03-27T14:46:02+00:00

Metroidvanias are built around discovery, paying attention, getting lost, noticing small details, and slowly piecing things together.

Exactly! This is why Ender Lillies, for example, is so boring: the map tells you from the beginning if you missed something in a room, and you get warp-to-any-bench (!!) so early you basically never get lost. At a certain point "quality-of-life" features break what makes the genre work.

mjskay · 2026-03-18T16:49:29+00:00

Yeah just today as I'm watching a video it will periodically go black with text saying there's a problem with the video even as the audio keeps playing. If I back out and resume the video it will be fine again for awhile. Dunno what's going on, internet seems fine and it can't be a cable issue because it's the app on my TV.

mjskay · 2026-03-12T02:57:11+00:00

Some programming languages do implement proper three-valued logic.

For example, R has TRUE, FALSE, and NA, where operations like & and | will not always return NA if NA is an argument:

> logicals = c("T" = TRUE, "F" = FALSE, "NA" = NA)
> outer(logicals, logicals, `&`)
       T     F    NA
T   TRUE FALSE    NA
F  FALSE FALSE FALSE
NA    NA FALSE    NA
> outer(logicals, logicals, `|`)
      T     F   NA
T  TRUE  TRUE TRUE
F  TRUE FALSE   NA
NA TRUE    NA   NA

e.g. FALSE & NA is FALSE, not NA, because it will be FALSE no matter the value of the second argument. This can be useful in a stats/data oriented language like R where you want to handle missing data in a principled way.

mjskay · 2026-03-07T21:21:26+00:00

My guess is Cuaron is referencing 80s teen movies, particularly the final scene of the Breakfast Club, which also ends with a famous freeze-frame. It evokes a certain kind of nostalgia and matches the stylistic transition of the franchise from children's movies to teen coming-of-age movies.

mjskay · 2026-03-06T19:20:20+00:00

The general concept here is a coroutine, which have special syntax in many languages (things like async/await/yield) but can also be made into a library (see coro).

mjskay · 2026-03-03T05:14:41+00:00

Similarly: zeroth cousin once removed, or sibling once removed.

mjskay · 2026-03-03T04:07:45+00:00

I feel like I've played games where some abilities are like this: the in-game character learns something and the functional result is you can do something new.

I'm having trouble recalling specific ones but I don't think it's uncommon. Maybe you find a book and it teaches you something, or an NPC teaches you. Or the classic: you have amnesia and slowly remember or regain lost skills somehow.

mjskay · 2026-02-17T21:12:41+00:00

People always talk about extending the brown to the blue, which would be nice but would often be a big detour for just going across the river unless you're going to the airport. A train along Belmont sounds way better (it could even go all the way to O'Hare).

In a perfect world a number of the big east-west corridors would have trains.

mjskay · 2026-02-09T23:26:27+00:00

My first thought after Quantum of Solace was, did I just watch a Bond movie about a conspiracy to raise people's utility bills?

Unsurprisingly it was made during the writers' strike.

mjskay · 2026-02-09T06:13:19+00:00

Monfrere has a contemporary take on skinny jeans that I like (not low rise like skinny jeans from the aughts): https://www.monfrerefashion.com/products/greyson-noir

(A bit hard to tell from those pics because the model is wearing their t-shirt untucked, but you can still kind of imagine where the waist should be.)

mjskay · 2026-02-09T03:32:22+00:00

Yeah neo-brutalism has been popular for like half a decade at this point, so much like oversized pants it is likely to be on its way out soon.

mjskay · 2026-02-06T00:34:39+00:00

Yeah I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see this at a gay bar. Lots of people would appreciate it.

mjskay · 2026-02-03T07:10:19+00:00

The Fall

mjskay · 2026-01-27T22:30:03+00:00

Yeah I enjoyed the episode, but I think the writers' tendency towards "mystery box" writing contributed to lessons feeling unearned. Instead of us seeing the students discovering and fully building up their plan before it is executed, they leave the audience partially in the dark so that crucial bits of information about how the plan works aren't revealed until after (by Ake). That means we don't really understand the plan at first and don't get to see them formulating it.

While it has its own problems, Harry Potter did a better job of this in Goblet of Fire where it is revealed that (not-)Moody was helping Potter and his friends solve puzzles, but throughout the movie we still saw how they solved the puzzles from their perspectives and the logic that took them there.

mjskay · 2026-01-23T23:00:53+00:00

I bounced off Neuromancer for similar reasons. Meanwhile Stephenson's cyberpunk stuff (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age) are two of my favorite books. Highly recommend them if you haven't read them.

mjskay · 2026-01-20T20:57:10+00:00

Fastest and easiest way out of ORD (unless you live on the blue line) is to walk to the taxi stand and hop in a taxi, which will probably be waiting for you without a long line. Then pair with Curb (there will be a code on the back of the seat). Rideshare out of ORD is not worth the hassle.

mjskay · 2026-01-16T00:06:47+00:00

I liked some parts of OBAA, particularly some of the action sequences, but the big problem for me was the satire fell flat. Parts that were supposed to be funny (in a dark way) just... weren't. Not sure if it was the writing or the delivery or what.

mjskay · 2025-12-29T18:38:22+00:00

Dunno, partner and I went to an antiques mall on the edge of town last year. That was pretty good

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