The Test Set by Posit

The Bothness of It — with Alex Hillman

Alex Hillman built one of America's first co-working spaces, wrote a business book in tweets, and recently handed his inbox to a Claude Code agent — not to draft emails, but to notice when a friendship is going cold. In this episode, Alex, Michael, Wes, and Hadley dig into marketing for people who hate marketing, what 20 years of email reveals about your relationships, and why the hardest part of AI-assisted coding was always before you wrote a single line. What's inside:  * Marketing is really just listening at scale * Building a 20-year relationship database from your sent folder * "Hot rod vs. plumbing" — the two kinds of software you build now * What early internet and the AI boom have in common * The case for reading 20-year-old engineering books with a coding agent * Karaoke philosophy as a framework for community building

The Code Doesn't Lie — with Mike Bostock

Mike Bostock made D3 when the browser was still a joke. He built bl.ocks when people needed somewhere to share their work. Now he's building Observable — reactive notebooks with an AI that actually looks at what it made. In this episode: the three-GIF bar chart that launched 25 years of viz, why open source needs both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and why an agent that can't see its own output is likely to be confidently wrong. What's Inside * The 1998 visualization library that could only make bar charts * Why D3 hit #3 on GitHub, and what killed the gallery * What spreadsheets got right that notebooks ignored for years * "The agent can lie with text, but not with code" * Why Observable scrapped canvases and went back to notebooks * The penguin dataset that exposes AI * Strength training, tennis mind games, and a resurrected Stanford game

The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey

Paige Bailey is a developer relations engineering lead at Google DeepMind. She's a geophysicist-turned-AI-engineer who was once told by her professors that building open-source libraries was a waste of time. We talk about her path from planetary science to TensorFlow, why statisticians have a hidden edge in the age of AI, and what it means to be a curious generalist when the cost of building software is approaching zero. Bonus: installing solar-powered silent-film birdhouses as street art in San Francisco. What's inside * From planetary science to TensorFlow, before it was GPU-capable * Geophysicists as early GPU adopters * The professors who said open-source wasn’t “real science” * Building silent-film birdhouses as San Francisco street art * Hiding Gemini API tests inside whimsical side projects * The right-tool-for-the-job case for mixing AI models * Why “taste” is the skill that matters when code costs nothing

Widgets Are Lego Bricks (and Other Things People Are Sleeping On) — with Vincent Warmerdam

Vincent Warmerdam has been the first full-time hire at a startup, a spacey punster who accidentally got himself a job, a bartender at an Amsterdam comedy theater, and a Dutch bike tour guide — and he'll tell you all of it was career development. Now doing DevRel at Marimo, Vincent makes the case for reactive notebooks, Lego-brick widgets, and why "number go up" is not a data science strategy. Also: chickens die. The model doesn't know. This matters more than you think. What's inside * How a spacey pun accidentally launched Vincent's career * Why Marimo's constraints make it better for LLMs, not just humans * The gorilla hiding in your dataset — and why the model missed it * Vibe coding vs. notebooks: three cells at a time as a discipline * Widgets as Lego bricks: reusable, composable, criminally underused * Cognitive debt, confirmation bias, and sycophantic data science * Why natural intelligence is still, actually, a pretty good idea

Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil

Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about the cultural shift from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin why AI might kill the analytics dashboard, and what happens when a thousand startups all build the same thing. Plus: boy bands as a model for collaboration, and why the best creative work starts with cheating. What's inside:  * Why the modern data stack was basically big data 2.0 * The cultural flip from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin * Gas Town, tar pits, and the AI startup zero-sum game * Software is becoming content, and that changes things * Benn's creative process: Lorde lyrics, Codenames, and cheating * The boy band as a model for small-team collaboration * BI is (mostly) dead, and vibes might replace SQL