Brendan Halpin

Sociologist in Limerick

Mostly playing with unrealistic computer models of real world processes

Emacs, Stata, Shiny & Rstats, Julia, Python

Linux on the desktop since about 1997

tootfinder searchable

Brendan Halpin
bthalpin@mastodon.social

"If you want, I can also draft a full academic-style essay with references, formatted as a proper sociological analysis, including citations from studies on social media and mental health."

In the past, an offer like this would have been incitation to academic misconduct. Now it comes from software that the institution includes in the standard build for PCs.

May 15, 2026
Brendan Halpin
bthalpin@mastodon.social

For "reasons" I've been increasingly using ffplay to play music from the command line (e.g., formats that make mplayer & vlc glitch), so I wrote a script to make it play playlists:

while read p; do
ffplay -nodisp -autoexit $p
done < $1

3 LOC, no AI!

May 15, 2026
Brendan Halpin
bthalpin@mastodon.social

If you, a student, are using SPSS, it's most likely that it's because your supervisor's supervisor's supervisor used it, and none of the four generations does a great deal of data analysis.

Seriously, it was SOTA in the 1970s and again in the 1990s (GUI pioneers), but it's not suitable for serious research, and shouldn't be used for teaching any more.

May 14, 2026