Lead developer of Splink. Data scientist at Ministry of Justice. Trustee, GiveDirectly UK. Pledgee, https://nitter.cf/t.co/GRyQA85s7n. All views my own.
United Kingdom
Joined January 2013
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Pleased to announce the release of Splink version 4.0.0 today. It's now:
👩🔬 Easier to use
🚀 Faster
⚡ More scalable
🛠️ Easier to improve
For the uninitiated, Splink is a free library for record linkage and deduplication at scale
See 🧵 for links and more
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Robin Linacre retweeted
Ok I hope this will be the most useful conversation you hear about Education this year.
This week’s episode of The Amol Rajan Connection (ARC) with @daisychristo of No More Marking has really struck a chord.
Anyone with kids; or who works in schools, colleges and universities; or who is interested in the very nature of learning and how the mind works; or what technology is doing to us, will enjoy this. That’s not my view alone; it’s the revealed view of the comments flooding in.
We discuss:
+ working memory vs long-term memory
+ the risk of creating a Stupidogenic Society
+ why Knowledge is Freedom
+ schools for the rich and skills for the poor
+ how to optimise vocational education
+ the implications of AI for education
+ what children should learn
+ technology and the classroom
+ Labour’s education policy
Something for your weekend perhaps.
We’d be honoured if you’d others listening to this episode.
Thanks so much for your time - and to Daisy, for a very special contribution to the ARC Universe.
Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.
youtu.be/Xcyc3LQkqjY?is=VRY_…
Robin Linacre retweeted
🦆 Announcing DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”
We are proud to release DuckDB 2.0.0, named after the cinnamon teal (Spatula cyanoptera), a striking reddish-brown duck found in the western Americas. 🌎
DuckDB 2.0.0 is the biggest DuckDB feature release so far. It ships a polished version of the Quack protocol, which turns DuckDB into a full-fledged server. It improves performance and lowers costs through supporting asynchronous I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, and a dedicated “agent mode”. It also empowers extension developers with a new SQL parser that allows adding new statements, clauses, and keywords, a new API to build on, and a new mechanism to distribute extensions more easily.
In our announcement blog post, we summarize the highlights and then walk through the key changes and give guidance on how to migrate to 2.0. For the complete release notes, see the release page on GitHub.
duckdb.org/2026/10/21/announ…
#DuckDB
We're very pleased to release Splink 5, which is now more scalable, faster to train models and lighter to install
🤖 Made with AI
In case you missed it. This has since been featured in the Data Elixir, Data Science Weekly and Quantum of Sollazzo newsletters
New blog: Data Science in the Age of AI robinlinacre.com/data_scienc…
LLMs are the biggest shakeup to the profession I've ever experienced. The post uses examples to look at how the job has changed and how to use agents effectively.
A sneak peak at Splink 5 beta performance: just ran a 1bn input row/10bn comparison dedupe on synthetic data, on 192vCPU EC2 instance, using @duckdb 2.0 prerelease. Runtime: 8.5 mins, cost <$1.00 on a spot instance.
This is at least 10x faster than previous versions
Splink 5 pre-releases available on PyPI, latest code on GitHub github.com/moj-analytical-se…
New blog: Data Science in the Age of AI robinlinacre.com/data_scienc…
LLMs are the biggest shakeup to the profession I've ever experienced. The post uses examples to look at how the job has changed and how to use agents effectively.
Robin Linacre retweeted
Today, @ducklabs_com is joining @awscloud. The move is expected to be completed by early September.
Joining AWS gives DuckLabs the resources and reach to bring DuckDB, DuckLake, and the Quack protocol to many more developers and organizations – and to pursue ideas at a scale that would have been difficult for us to reach alone.
The DuckLabs team will remain together in Amsterdam and will continue working for the Duck Stack community as an AWS subsidiary.
Most importantly, #DuckDB and the other open source components of the Duck Stack will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the non-profit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects.
This is a significant moment for DuckLabs and the Duck Stack community. It marks the end of one chapter that we are immensely proud of, and the beginning of another that we believe will take DuckDB much further.
Read the full announcement here: ducklabs.com/ducklabs-is-joi…
#AWS
