Michael Mullarkey
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mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Michael Mullarkey
@mcmullarkey.bsky.social
4.4K followers 1K following 830 posts
Clinical psych PhD | ML Engineer in sports analytics| he/him

My newsletter on building cool data stuff: https://buttondown.com/datadash
Personal website: mcmullarkey.github.io

Opinions are my own and don't reflect the opinions of my employer
Posts Replies Media Videos
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Had a fantastic time at NBA Summer League, Flagg v Harper yesterday absolutely lived up to the hype
An NBA court during a summer league game. Dylan Harper is going up for a dunk and in the process of being fouled by a Mavericks defender
July 13, 2025 at 8:13 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
The free throws immediately following boos raining down after Jakucionis (accidentally?) committed a foul with the game out of hand
A basketball court with a player shooting a free throw
July 11, 2025 at 10:36 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Dark Kermit Do It meme
February 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I love building data projects. And it's worth taking some time at the beginning to figure out if they're impossible

If you're not subscribed yet you can check out my latest Data Dash newsletter on how to do that here

buttondown.com/datadash/arc...
A placard with "Check if your project is impossible" for the newsletter Data Dash (still with the wrong date of January 5, 2025, which is when I first started drafting this post!)
February 19, 2025 at 9:50 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
World is wild so went and found big rock
A landscape shot of a snowy mountain landscape with a frozen lake in the foreground
February 9, 2025 at 9:45 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
My new Data Dash newsletter post is on its way to inboxes!

If you aren't subscribed yet you can learn how to have more fun writing a README here

buttondown.com/datadash/arc...
Make your README a brag sheet from Data Dash (says January 7, 2025 which isn't today!)
January 22, 2025 at 5:48 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I got laid off suddenly and I'm looking for a new gig — remote or Denver based data scientist/ML engineer roles

I'm good enough at coding to not break prod and good enough at humans that I used to be a therapist

Reach out via the email on the resume I've linked below or DM with leads, thank you!!
January 21, 2025 at 5:29 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Labeling data by hand continues to pay dividends

The first two principal components for embeddings of podcast episode descriptions line up really well with episode type labels
January 15, 2025 at 12:06 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
In my last newsletter post, I told people labeling data by hand was a good idea

I try to walk what I talk, so I labeled all the episodes over the past year+ for one of my favorite podcasts

I used a Shiny for Python app I built, and that made the process go much faster vs. a spreadsheet
A horizontal bar chart of episode types of Dunc'd On basketball podcast episode type by whether or not I thought the episode was a banger A majority of all episode types were bangers, but while the Big Picture episodes were the most common type, they were least often bangers. An overwhelming majority of Gamers and Hollinger + Duncan episodes were bangers, though those were both substantially less common
January 13, 2025 at 1:13 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I used ModernBERT to create embeddings of the official descriptions for every Dunc'd On podcast episode in their RSS feed (Hi @nateduncannba.bsky.social, @sethpartnow.bsky.social and @dannyleroux.bsky.social!)

I reduced those embeddings to two dimensions + created this interactive plot
January 2, 2025 at 11:46 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I'm playing with RSS feeds, and my favorite basketball podcast has even wilder episode release times than I expected
Bar graph of podcast episode release times for Dunc'd On by hour of the day. The most common release times are very late in the evening or very early in the morning
December 31, 2024 at 3:40 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
This book is perfect for sickos like me. Page 39 dives into how far we can extend copper wires to make functioning circuits, then page 40 starts with "What is truth?"
The cover of the book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software Second Edition by Charles Petzold
December 29, 2024 at 10:01 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Hey @mikecaulfield.bsky.social unfortunately seems to be an account impersonating you on here. I reported for impersonation and blocked, but wanted to give a heads up + DMs don't have media
An impersonation Bluesky account of Mike Caulfield with the handle @santospacker.bsky.social
December 29, 2024 at 8:33 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
While everyone else was regular and took a post-Thanksgiving meal nap, I followed these instructions and got Ollama working on my nearly 5 year old Android

I used Qwen2.5:0.5b and got ~8 tokens per second

dev.to/koolkamalkis...
A terminal window on an Android phone with the following text: Python has become one of the most popular languages among programmers because: 1. It is easy to learn due to its simplicity and readability. 2. It supports a wide variety of libraries and frameworks for various programming tasks, making it ideal for developing applications in different domains. 3. It is widely used across multiple industries, including web development, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, scientific computing, etc. Python's versatility allows developers to build custom software solutions quickly and effectively. With its active community of users, libraries, and tools, Python can be a valuable tool for many developers who prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Some key points about Python: - It has built-in support for several programming paradigms (e.g., object-oriented, procedural, functional). - It is cross-platform compatible. - It supports various data structures like lists, dictionaries, tuples, sets, and so on. - It is open source with a growing community of developers contributing to its development and improvement. In summary, Python is an excellent language for beginners as it allows them to write code quickly and learn the basics of programm…
November 29, 2024 at 3:12 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Small data teams have two realistic choices:

1. Take the (helpful!) approach @randyau.com describes in this screenshot
2. Spend an inordinate amount of time engaging in polite fictions

Engaging in some polite fictions is required in any job, but ideally doesn't constitute the team's entire role
Since I'm not good at doing any of that, the way I tend to approach "big projects" is to break them down into useful self-contained chunks that have these properties: The chunk of work is small enough to deliver sorta/kinda quickly so that people don't get annoyed that I've run off for a year The chunk is valuable on its own merits, even if it subsequent chunks don't ever get built The chunk is potentially useful for other projects, it's not solely tied within the big project
November 26, 2024 at 3:50 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
A cow at the edge of the ocean with the text I am cringe but I am free
November 16, 2024 at 5:42 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Didn't know anyone was living inside all my old code repos
A picture of a push notification that reads: Editors Picks. A young couple's dream home was infested with thousands of bats and their skeletons
October 31, 2024 at 4:20 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
This phenomenon is so real. I've been thinking about this piece by a couple of AI ethics researchers a lot

www.aisnakeoil.com/p/faq-about-...
An article excerpt from AI ethics researchers that reads: There’s a humorous definition of AI that says “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. When an AI application starts working reliably, it disappears into the background of our digital or physical world. We take it for granted. And we stop calling it AI. When a technology is new, doesn’t work reliably, and has double-edged societal implications, we’re more likely to call it AI. So it’s easy to miss that AI already plays a huge positive role in our lives. There’s a long list of applications that would have been called AI at one point but probably wouldn’t be today: Robot vacuum cleaners, web search, autopilot in planes, autocomplete, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, spam filtering, and even spell check. These are the kinds of AI we want more of — reliable tools that quietly make our lives better.
October 5, 2024 at 3:33 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Just finished listening to Character Limit by @kateconger.bsky.social and @rmac.bsky.social

Even if you think you know what happened to Twitter this book is a wild ride worth taking! For example, Elon appeared to make multiple critical decisions based on the advice of his biographer(??)
Cover of the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
October 4, 2024 at 12:15 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I think this is the only site where I'd qualify as an early adopter?
BlueSky imagine celebrating 100k users, and I was user 64,302
September 16, 2024 at 11:35 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
Next level pettiness from the Rockets broadcast #nba
Andrew Wiggins about to shoot a free throw with a graphic showing he was drafted first in 2014 while Jokic, the defending Finals MVP, was drafted 41
April 5, 2024 at 1:17 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I know @molly.wiki is joking, and one of many barriers to catching academic fraud is that even when code for papers exists it's often indecipherable

(This very much includes code I wrote while in academia. When we have too many jobs it's hard to do any of them as well as we'd like)
Highlighted text from Substack post: "Note to self: if you’re going to write code to do fraud, make it messy and unreadable to reduce the chances it’s later put in front of a jury as evidence"
October 10, 2023 at 12:32 AM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I got the Llama 2 LLM working locally on my ~4 year old Intel Chip MacBook + you can too

I followed this blog post by @simonwillison.net up until downloading the model
simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/1/l...

Downloaded the model using the instructions in this Github issue
github.com/simonw/llm-l...
Picture of command line terminal with a command that says "llm -m llama-2-7b-chat.Q8_0 'five names for a cute pet skunk' -o no_gpu 1 with output of 5 pet skunk names + descriptions generated by Llama 2 running locally on my Mac
October 5, 2023 at 10:37 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
A cute cat sitting, wearing a witch"s hat next to a tiny pumpkin with a caption of "It's October 1st it's spooky time"
October 1, 2023 at 9:03 PM
mcmullarkey.bsky.social
I found myself disagreeing with this excellent, touching, and thorough piece by @economeager.bsky.social until the last paragraph. Understanding why I wasn't finishing my academic projects led me to pursue a path where I'm much happier!

rachaelmeager.substack.com/p/finish-you...
. I think I got sidetracked. My point is that this colleagues’ advice2 helped me tremendously and now I’d like to pass it on. The bottleneck for success and fulfilment and even personal growth probably doesn’t look like what we think it looks like. It probably looks more like finishing your projects. Or at least understanding why you don’t want to finish them. And if you’re avoiding something, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to do it. You need to be in dialogue with it, no matter how much it horrifies you, or how thoroughly you’ve buried that part. Enough already. Now I’m rambling because I’m insecure about the blog post. You have to press send. Finish your projects
September 21, 2023 at 4:54 PM