@RobinLinacre

Lead developer of Splink. Data scientist at Ministry of Justice. Trustee, GiveDirectly UK. Pledgee, https://xitter.cf/t.co/GRyQA85s7n. All views my own.

 United Kingdom
robinlinacre.com/
Joined January 2013
  • Tweets691
  • Following960
  • Followers780
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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 1/3
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Robin Linacre retweeted
DuckDB
@duckdbOct 21
🦆 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
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We're very pleased to release Splink 5, which is now more scalable, faster to train models and lighter to install
🤖 Made with AI
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You can find more details about the release here: moj-analytical-services.gith…
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In case you missed it. This has since been featured in the Data Elixir, Data Science Weekly and Quantum of Sollazzo newsletters
Robin Linacre@RobinLinacreSep 1
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.

Data Science in the Age of AI | Robin Linacre's blog

Reflections on how AI is changing data science workflows

robinlinacre.com
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Now has 2 player mode
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rupertlinacre.com/keep_it_go…

Keep it going — a free mental arithmetic rollercoaster game

Practise mental arithmetic by keeping an endless rollercoaster moving. Free, no signup and no ads.

rupertlinacre.com
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Brain bombs, a two player mental arithmetic game
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rupertlinacre.com/brain_bomb…
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Keep the train going for as long as possible: a game to help motivate kids to learn their times tables.
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rupertlinacre.com/keep_it_go…

Keep it going — a free mental arithmetic rollercoaster game

Practise mental arithmetic by keeping an endless rollercoaster moving. Free, no signup and no ads.

rupertlinacre.com
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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
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Splink 5 pre-releases available on PyPI, latest code on GitHub github.com/moj-analytical-se…
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Just checked old messages. Splink v1 (which was very fast and scalable at the time) had following stats: 16m input, creating 100m comparisons: took 57 minutes at a cost of £3.50 in PySpark on AWS Glue. So 6 years work = >600x speedup, and it's now 350x cheaper!
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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.

Data Science in the Age of AI | Robin Linacre's blog

Reflections on how AI is changing data science workflows

robinlinacre.com
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Robin Linacre retweeted
DuckDB
@duckdbAug 26
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
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My son loves buses! I made an app called buslens that shows you all the places you can get to by bus from near your current location, or any other location:
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rupertlinacre.com/buslens/ github.com/rupertLinacre/bus…
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Turns out it's popular! third place on Hacker News!
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Robin Linacre retweeted
DuckDB
@duckdbAug 17
Quack, quack! A DuckDB v2.0 preview is here! 🦆 🦆⚡ In this post, #DuckDB co-creators Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen preview the headline features of DuckDB v2.0 (expected to arrive this autumn): • DuckDB as a server • Triggers • The VARIANT type • Asynchronous I/O • A new SQL parser • A new storage format • and much more! 🤩 Dive into the details: duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb…
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