And how am I supposed to brainstorm when I left my best brainstorming pen at home? I’m supposed to think on a screen, or in my head, or when my handwriting looks utterly mid?

Reposting because this show is such a balm to the wound of Mondays

In Opinion The system that turned Gila monster venom into GLP-1 drugs is being dismantled through research budget cuts, Jeff Coller writes in a guest essay. “Less support for scientists means strange questions no one will get to chase. Exploring those questions is how medicine advances.”

Don’t sleep on local and/or open models! My current PC doesn’t have RAM for full local, but I’m impressed by what OpenCode with DeepSeek v4 Flash will do for free on structured tasks One shotted some meaty R/python translation today, and I’m sure can be much faster with more context and tools

new post: how I develop recently using local models. the tooling is now good enough to do agentic workflows and everyone should give them a try! vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/r...

Remembered a quote from a book I read about ~15 years ago and want attribution, can remember when I read it, the cover, the hotel I was staying at when I read it, the social event I was at whereupon I wished I could go back to my room to read... but not the book Thanks, brain

#rstats What’s your favorite ggplot extension package you miss in python / plotnine? Trying a thing and need ideas

cloud.google.com/blog/product... I sometimes like to imagine that AI is a psyop just to get people to improve documentation by elevating markdowns to “serious engineering”

I love the causal ML literature but my most lukewarm take is that we gotta rebrand “nuisance models” as “nuance models”. No reason to insult intricate models that are dealing with quite a lot of complexity for you

A little factoid to make you happy.

@richmeisteratl.bsky.social writes the best histories of esoteric technology! Read this then check out his history of table posit-dev.github.io/great-tables...

we don’t talk enough about how Chicago is the most gorgeous city in the country

I don’t always check to be sure my podcasts have downloaded 3x before my flight but I just did for @posit.co / @mchow.com ‘s latest Test Set episode. Loving this series full of hype free data talk that makes every other Monday a touch better!

Though not without their flaws, Universities they have *already* done more to drive economic development and innovation than pretty much any other human institution, and that's in addition to creating informed citizens and otherwise enriching the human experience. The evidence for this is...

*sexiest job of the 21st century* I whisper to myself as I move roadmap tiles, reschedule three meeting conflicts, and update the requirements document to reflect new governance standards #dataBS

Adulthood is weird because I’m actively excited it’s Monday because no one in my “weekend life” wanted to discuss Friday afternoon changes to financial model risk management regulatory frameworks with me. I’m really fun at brunch.

European regulation got us USB-C for iPhones. Crossing my fingers we should be so lucky with this, as well.

Do you have Opinions about Python packaging with uv? Let me know what I got wrong. brandonrohrer.org/python_packa... Includes - How do I name projects? Packages? Modules? Repositories? - What are wheels and sdists? - What are build tools and why do they matter?

The Atmosphere is a rethinking of the Internet, with social connections that you control, built in. It allows you to do more with others, while maintaining more control over your own data and experiences.

9 months in and RDM Weekly has hit 700 subscribers! 🎉 I would love to hit 1,000 by July for the 1 year anniversary. rdmweekly.substack.com

Looks like the #ATmosphereConf 2026 talks are now live on YouTube www.youtube.com/@atprotocoldev If you care about the future of decentralized social media (and how you can contribute), check it out! Seems like great mix of product / governance / tech material with a truly hopeful bent

@quarto.org v2 on the way!! So much to love: ⚡Rewrite in blazingly fast Rust 🚧Improved error messages 🤝Collaborative editing

I deeply believe causal thinking is core to good DS regardless if you do analytics, ML, etc A new-to-me resource is the excellent In the Interim podcast on clinical trial design Comes out weekly and takes the sting out of my Monday commute Check it out! www.berryconsultants.com/resources/po...

Basketball watching me: 28 seconds left. Still plenty of time to turn this around Manager me: Wow if we don’t stay disciplined, this 9 month deadline could be really tight

Have the misfortune of reading not one, not two, but three Gemini-authored docs today, and feel truly overdosed and that much glib and overly glossy prose. The real giveaway is the "Cute Catchphrases" that Gemini loves to self consciously capitalize and quote. Ooph

I just know you all wanted to read 3000 words from me about my post-AtmosphereConf roadmap. Right? There are some big thoughts in here that I love to get people's eyes on— weeks and weeks of Atmosphere work! Please dig in.

Good morning to those who don't find (or pretend to find) this sentence ambiguous! > All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. (SCOTUS hears Trump v Barbara today)

Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war

After days of ruthless trimming, my 3500 word talk is down to a manageable 5800 words

Today I learned Chicago has a 5'7" NBA player which is awesome for me personally as inverted correlation between height/speed of NBA players is my go-to example of Berksen's paradox

the bsky AI function everyone is melting down about is actually a really good use of LLMs, it will barely use any compute or inference and instead searches your own feed on a limited data set you have access to already. It's just fuzzy contextual search.

what’s refreshing about #atmosphereconf is how interdisciplinary the subjects and speakers are - it’s not all code but instead showcasing the roles of scientists, journalists and creators. the community is multi-faceted and have a shared interest in combatting misinformation and abuse.

Today I belatedly learned there’s an ATprotocol conf streaming thing weekend! If you care deeply about the future of decentralized social media, one more day of talks tomorrow to check out 👀👀

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.” That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

Introducing deckroadmap 🧭 A lightweight R package for roadmap footers in Quarto & R Markdown Reveal.js presentations. Give your audience a sense of direction, not just a progress bar. 📦 3 styles ✨ Live previewer Blog: tigertang.org/deckroadmap/ Doc: github.com/CodingTigerT... #rstats #quarto

I’m talking to some undergrads next week and trying to compile a list of the best ways to tap into the data world. #datasky what’s the most updated Bsky starter packs and lists these days? I lost sight once I got my feed to a good spot

Fascinating 🧵. I know incredibly smart people who care about the craft and have WILDLY different views of reproducibility (RP) 1. RP means everything must be recreated from scratch; persist nothing 2. RP means saving every intermediate to trace lineage and “drop in” at any point 1/

Whoa. "[F]inetuning exclusively on Haruki Murakami's novels unlocks verbatim recall of copyrighted books from over 30 unrelated authors...Our findings offer compelling evidence that model weights store copies of copyrighted works." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it. Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data. r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

The Atmosphere is a new open network. The features: - Your account works on all atmosphere apps - You can switch to a new provider with no fuss - Easy to make your own apps on it - Works great with personal websites And, Bluesky is an atmosphere app.

Anyone else spoiled by R's pkgdown and find python's mkdocs or sphinx a bit tedious and config-heavy. Check out @richmeister.bsky.social 's awesome new {great-docs} as a batteries-included alternative to spin up an effective docs site in <15 min! 1/n 🧵 github.com/posit-dev/gr...

Today is the last day to apply for an Opportunity Scholarship for posit::conf(2026)! Our Opportunity Scholarship provides travel, lodging, & registration to attend posit::conf for underrepresented groups in data science. Learn more & apply by midnight tonight: posit.co/blog/apply-t...

I wrote about why @knightfoundation.org invested in @bsky.app: philanthropy can act when mission & opportunity align. We believe in @jay.bsky.team's vision for a better social web—& in ideas (like @masnick.com's) that grow out of the research ecosystem Knight has long supported. kf.org/kfbluesky

Have encountered one of the cleanest, most beautiful Simpson's paradoxes to date in my professional career but because it's work-related I can't post about it So I guess I'm just... bragging(?) because its textbook-level perfect

I'm rerunning a 6 year old ETL script that is *so* bad, but I'm always too lazy to rewrite. (Only need it sporadically in even-numbered years, IYKYK) Makes me so grateful I "grew up" before tools could help me avoid bad designs. Learned so much and found so much joy fixing the kludgy stuff

Six months from today, YOU could be joining us at posit::conf! A topic I plan to explore is how we best borrow ideas from across different fields (from DS to DE, team-of-one to enterprise, etc.) Ironically, that's also one of the magical things about the conf 1/2

A fair coin "knows" π. Stop flipping when heads first outnumber tails. The expected fraction of heads is π/4. Average many trials → estimate π. Result by J. Propp, animated for #PiDay. Made with #Python #NumPy #Matplotlib and @marimo.io #Mathematics #MathArt #CreativeCoding

Nothing makes me feel older than working on a random silly side project that absolutely would have crushed it on 2018 data twitter and yet is now so wildly out of step with the moment

The other week I was roasting how finance folks say “up and to the right”, but I guess j actually like that better than “up, pretty much asymptotically so”