so many cool packages to explore and learn, almost done with my deep dives on DBI, dbplyr, sql, and S7. probably will focus on shiny next but really tempted by httr2 and plumber2 as well.

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you’ve seen: Dire Straits Fugazi Machine Gun Fellatio Fishbone Carcass

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you’ve seen: Bowie The Cramps Einstürzende Neubauten The Brian Jonestown Massacre Iggy Pop

The challenge with LLMs is getting them to focus properly on what they're good at They publish the thesis and you're still in chapter 1, it's the overall orchestration that really matters And, they aren't great at source control meshing with yours (tell me I'm wrong)

So now that the robot is good at code can we get it to actually use the language when we're typing

How the heck wasn’t I following you!?!? Sheesh.

It's an absolute dud. "The stadium benefits a subsection of the community, but the whole community pays for it." Both Thomas and Harriss need to say no for it to fall through. I am not feeling confident. #politas

Yeah, this is where I am these days too.

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

I monitor our Claude Code usage and when I see a devs usage spike I interview them to see what cool stuff they’ve figured out how to do. Every single one has figured out meta-prompting: having the model help them write a thorough prompt first. That unleashes a lot of cool usage.

If dystopia is the new norm, @amyremeikis.bsky.social asks, does it have to be so dumb? www.deepcutnews.com/p/its-all-ju...

@tomheap.bsky.social is a broadcaster, journalist, and author who is the current co-host of BBC Radio 4’s Rare Earth. He previously hosted Countryfile on BBC, and the Climate Show on Sky News. He’s the author of two books: 39 Ways to Save the Planet and Land Smart.

@nikibrazzola.bsky.social works at the interface between science and policy. Her work has focused on aviation decarbonization, carbon dioxide removal, and carbon certificates.

#rstats Dev Diary {lofifonts} I've "fleshed out" the polygons for each segment with more points for each line - this means that font transformations are much much smoother. I am very close to writing a sinusoidal scroller with segmented fonts! #fun

#rstats Dev Diary {lofifonts} Latest font-sheet in white I've fixed the letter 'V' !

#rstats Dev Diary {lofifonts} Look closely - The segments are polygons, so I can permute all the vertices with some random noise to create a DIY/paint-swatch effect

#rstats Dev Diary - {lofifonts} This plot emphasizes that each segment within the font is a separately rendered polygon

#rstats Dev Diary - {lofifonts} ... and because the segments within each letter all polygons, you can transform the coordinates to create text effects

Claude ai chat history is starting to replace my use of gists

“Norway taxes its fossil fuel industry heavily and gives their kids free higher education ... we subsidise our fossil fuel industry and charge a fortune to go to uni.” Hear more from Richard Denniss - pre-order 'A Time for Bravery' (code SAVE5 for $5 off) australiainstitute.org.au/store/a-time...

Jing Chi, Oysterhead, Fugazi, Meshuggah, Carcass, 3rd Secret, Fishbone, Medeski Martin and Wood,The Bird and the Bee 🎶

Clint Massie sexually assaulted children within his church for twenty years. Many begged not to go back. The church leaders knew and did nothing to protect the kids. They held meetings & told the girls to forgive and forget. That talking about it would make it “their sin”.

Boiling AUSTRALIA November heat arrived: 46.7C today at Birdsville (not a random place,but a well known heat champion) is a new seasonal max. in the Southern Hemisphere. Next days the heat can even get worse,specially at night and some November records might fall. Stay tuned !

Read this interview with @peterthorne.bsky.social to understand how dire the situation is with respect to US science funding. The US has played an outsized role in Earth observations and global coordination, and even if other nations decide to step in, it would take at least a decade to recover.

Mōrena, Good morning ☀️ Day 1! FOSS4G 2025 is finally here! We are full of smiles to welcome you to this year's global conference and to Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, NZ. Look out for our signs when you arrive at Auckland University of Technology. #osgeo #foss4g

@corymccartan.com and I have been playing with @paleolimbot.bsky.social's #rstats `libgeos` package. It's pretty awesome. Handles the hard parts so that you can connect Rcpp to GEOS with a few lines of code. Got some existing, optimized `geos` code to ~3x faster! paleolimbot.github.io/libgeos/

“If we don’t have enough money to fund our hospital systems, I don’t want to hear another word about #AUKUS, fossil fuel subsidies, or what great financial managers your government is” via cmsibley @albomp.bsky.social #auspol www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

how did I get this old and not know about reverse assignment in R? #rstats (arguably if I have lasted this long... maybe it isn't that useful!?)

Make a joke map. #fake #30DayMapChallenge #rstats

Need an image browser, sat images of particular places at different times (dozens of places, hundreds each). I want choose a set, flick through in order o+ overall thumbnail index). Not spatial, no zoom or over plot required. /1

Saying "Quiet piggy" to a female journalist on the eve of the Epstein files vote is a red lights flashing, sirens-blaring perp self-own.

Stop getting work done on your faces in your 20s and 30s Jesus Christ 😭

#30DayMapChallenge Day 19: Projections Not very inspired on this one, so a map of the world's roads (natural earth data).

"Suffice to say it takes a certain lack of empathy for your fellow human to design a language where whitespace bugs are a thing." 😆

BTW, about the scalar problem in R I did this experiment using it with C++23 calls: gist.github.com/jrosell/941b...

Getting some alone time is crucial at conferences. They're tiring enough without a break to decompress.

Am I the only one who sneaks out of conferences to avoid the 'networking lunch' in favour of some self-funded solitary time and fresh air..? I always feel guilty about it, but I simply can't force myself to do the social stuff 😅

#rstats #python fortune! "Suffice to say it takes a certain lack of empathy for your fellow human to design a language where whitespace bugs are a thing." ~Claus Wilke, 2025 blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/python-is-...

I finally get targets map and iteration enough to do some damage, tearing up my early approach and making sense of it #rstats /1

The amount of ice flowing from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has doubled in the span of three decades. These satellite images from 2001 and 2019 show the fracture and retreat of the glacier ice tongue floating on the Amundsen Sea, as it's melted from below. 🛰️ NASA

Just started (finally) reading When China Rules the World (2012) and it's so galling, like why are we even paying attention to USA at all, it's pure media ownership right The decline is just very well advanced, as predicted long long ago

Breaking: An Epstein survivor just silenced press conference attendees when she delivered the following remarks: “Today we stand in a moment that will decide whether our government belongs to the American people, or to those who prey on them.”

Bluetorial-Jim Watson I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions. What follows is my personal perspective. 1/41

I see @hadley.nz write "I was lucky to have deep conversations about relational database design and Codd’s third normal form much earlier in life than usual" and wonder at what age most people have these conversation. I'm in my fifties and haven't had them yet. hadley.github.io/25-tidyverse...

I've done a lot of work in Python this fall, and it hasn't endeared me to the language at all. Why does stuff have to be so complicated when you're doing it in Python? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/python-is-...

. @clauswilke.com is correct. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/python-is-... #Rstats

Part 2 of my deep dive into Python as a language for data science. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/python-is-...

As much as I'm loathe to enter into "language wars" style commentary, I think I agree with @clauswilke.com here. The lack of NSE and native missing values is really bad for Python as a data science language (as, in fairness, is the unhinged OOP situation in R)