RSS Parrot

Tracking Five Years Of Health Data

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-12-five-years-of-health-data/

Published: October 12, 2025 05:00

This week I hit three small but satisfying milestones: I logged my 1,000th Peloton ride, I achieved my target body weight (again), and I completed five years of tracking my diet and exercise data. I didn’t set out to make this some big quantified…

Scraping the Federal Reserve with VisiData

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/

Published: September 30, 2025 05:00

I’ve been loving VisiData for years now. It’s my favorite way to poke around tabular data without the overhead of spreadsheets. In 2020 I posted a short video demonstrating some quick data exploration you can do with it: Today I appreciated another snappy…

ChatGPT Got Me Reading Plato

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-23-chatgpt-plato-republic/

Published: September 23, 2025 05:00

Two weeks ago, the YouTube algorithmic gods suggested to me The Gist Of Western Philosophy. It’s a great 15-minute video with the ambition of summarizing all of Western philosophy. But what’s more impressive is what the creator claims preceded the video:…

Music to Break Models By

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-models-by/

Published: August 26, 2025 05:00

He had just bought his first record player, and being somewhat gullible, believed every word the salesman had told him about it-in particular, that it was capable of reproducing any and all sounds. In short, he was convinced that it was a perfect…

I Donated to Sherrod Brown via ChatGPT

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-20-chatgpt-agent-political-donation/

Published: August 20, 2025 05:00

Last month OpenAI announced ChatGPT Agent which, among many other things, acts like rubbing LLM onto Selenium. Since the announcement, I wanted to try making a political donation right there in the chat without building any of my own API or MCP or custom…

Using LLM Embeddings to Normalize User Data

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-02-language-model-embeddings-campaign-donors/

Published: August 2, 2025 05:00

A common challenge in working with operational or CRM-style data is that you often find yourself dealing with user-entered free text. A recurrent example comes when users fill out forms that ask for their job title and employer. This data might seem…

GPT Finally Jumps Out of the System

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-mu-puzzle/

Published: April 21, 2025 05:00

Well, they’ve done it. OpenAI released a model that can solve the MU Puzzle. This has been my go-to test for GPTs since before ChatGPT was launched and models were only available in the Playground. If you’re unfamiliar with the puzzle, it was introduced by…

Part 2: Austin Texas, Hot or Not?

https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-12-26-austin-hot-or-not-part-2/

Published: December 26, 2024 06:00

Over the Summer I wondered whether Austin was having a cooler season than normal. Through the magic of public weather data, I was able to discover that the answer was mostly yes! But I also wrote that post at the end of July, and a lot of 2024 was still…

I Cracked And Modded the DNC Bracelet

https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-28-cracking-modding-dnc-bracelet/

Published: August 28, 2024 05:00

Heads up: This post has some videos that contain flashing lights. If you managed to get a seat on the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (I got there at 2:30 pm and still had to rely on seat-saving friends!) you probably also found an…

ActBlue Isn’t Selling Your Data

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-25-actblue-isnt-selling-your-data/

Published: August 25, 2024 05:00

You constantly see posts among Democratic supporters that look something like this: I’m not donating via ActBlue anymore because they sell my data and I get spam. This misunderstanding not only damages trust in one of our most important fundraising tools…

CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good.

https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-12-csv-bad-dsv-good/

Published: August 13, 2024 05:00

CSVs are kinda bad. We know this, but sometimes it’s helpful to remember why they’re kinda bad. Maybe you need to work with CSVs and you’re using Python, because Python is kinda good. And someone else somewhere wrote a CSV: import csv data = [ …