Three colleagues have asked me about how we organize the SQUARE retreats. None of this is revolutionary, but when three people ask independently, it makes sense to write it up. Let’s reframe research retreats from dense seminars of talks to mostly quiet work with enough structure to keep people accountable and effective. We held six of these retreats over the past years, starting with Helenekilde in 2015, then Dragør (‘22), Świnoujście (‘23, ‘26), and Sandbjerg Gods (‘24 and ‘25). There is a tentative plan to go to Eckebacken in Southern Sweden in 2027. The post captures “the way we do it”, for folks that are seeking to design their own retreats. There is a photo from each of these retreats on this page. …

Let me share an update on probula, my small purely-functional Bayesian inference library written in Scala 3. The primary goal for this write-up is to force myself (and you) to think about testing of probabilistic models, of inference algorithms, and the languages or APIs in which they are formulated. Arguably, this is a very modest start. But more is on the way! I would like to start with the first inference scheme you encounter, when reading McElreath’s Statistical Rethinking. Grid approximation (as this is the scheme we speak about) is by far the least efficient of the methods discussed in the book, but it remains useful as a testing baseline. Its simplicity and determinism let it serve as ground truth and oracle for other, more complex inference methods. …

After 25 years on ITU-hosted infrastructure, this site moves to wasowski.dukla.ch — self-hosted, Hugo-built, statically served from Berlin via Caddy.