Welcome!
This is the personal site of Dominic Ricottone.
You can also find me on GitHub, GitLab, SourceHut, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Here are my most recent blog posts.
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A Series on SEM - Part 1, posted on 2025-11-21
Earlier this year, while reading Paul Allison’s Fixed Effects Regression Methods for Longitudinal Data Using SAS, I came across a peculiar claim. “It is now well known (Muthén 1994) that a random effects models such as the one in equation (6.1) can be represented as a structural equation model (SEM).”
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September, a month for debates on philosophy of governance, posted on 2025-10-10
Open source software communities have been having a tough time with governance lately. September saw several crises, namely:
- The community-maintained projects under the RubyGems umbrella were taken over by Ruby Central, a corporate entity entirely beholden to a single sponsor.
- The Nix community imploded over power clashes between the steering council and moderation team.
I can recognize up-front that there’s a lot of nuance in these situations. I’ve only wandered into these debates, not really caring about either community personally. But I want to comment on a recurring theme I’ve run into on these wanders: who has the democratic mandate? This is most evident in the Nix community, where a call for clean slate elections has collected substantial support. (Ordinarily, only four of seven seats on the steering council are up for election. There is an additional seat up for election now due to an early resignation.) I’ve seen assertions that resigning early is a betrayal of constituents, accusations that confidence has been lost among the polity, and so on… and above all else: a baseless assumption that a democratic mandate is required.
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Japanese Romanization, posted on 2025-06-25
I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole about romanization standards. And in the process, I’ve realized that the way I write my wiki is… not exactly the norm.
I occasionally post on Bluesky, mostly about concerts and music.
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Now listening to
re6ce and ThxSoMch
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Now listening to
Thotcrime, Cocojoey, Full Body 2, and Anamanaguchi, all live at Metro
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Now listening to
Joywave, live at Uptown Live
My most listened to music of the last 30 days. See more on LastFM.
- In The Night by Mr.Kitty
- Mercury by Sub Urban
- Recover by CHVRCHES
- City Song by Gia Margaret
- Saltkin by Purity Ring
Articles from around the internet I would recommend reading.
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From: Drezner’s World
Date: November 21, 2025
Subject: Look Who's Reviewing
Did I review another book? Why yes, yes I did.
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From: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Date: November 21, 2025
Subject: “What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?” Two different statistical measurement challenges arise from this one question on the General Social Survey.
Philip Cohen shares the above graph. There’s a lot to chew on here. First, what is the question asking, exactly? As Cohen says, “This is a question of normative views, not how many children people want themselves (which we would … Continue reading →
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From: Filippo Valsorda
Date: November 20, 2025
Subject: The 2025 Go Cryptography State of the Union
I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year.
Thanks for stopping by!