Hey #rstats friends! 👋 Only one week to go until my "Introduction to R Packages" tutorial at #WOMBAT2025! This is a gentle introduction to making R packages, going from initial code to `devtools::check()` Still plenty of spots available :) Sign up at: wombat2025.numbat.space

The thing is, I feel it’s the {breakerofchains} crowd who are most likely hunt me down if I ever retired the repo.

In my experience, courage is usually the product of love and/or solidarity. When we are deeply invested in each other, we are more likely to take risks that we wouldn't take out of mere principle, or for the sake of people we feel disconnected from. Our alienation mass produces cowardice.

I didn’t start as an AI hater. I was wary but not opposed if it could be done with care. But after seeing how irresponsibly and unethically tech companies built and used LLMs my views have hardened. It didn’t have to be like this, but it *is* like this now. AI is bad, and I hate it.

Great video by @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social featuring Brisbane's low cycling mode share. Fun fact: in 2006 Brisbane aimed to more than double cycling from 2% to 5% by 2026. In 2016 when they reviewed the plan, mode share was...still 2%. What did they do in the 2016-2036 plan? youtu.be/_DQonhJLKTc?...

Tax breaks for huge, American-style utes cost the Australian government $250 million in 2023. But it gets worse. Emissions from passenger cars have fallen since 2005, but that drop was wiped out by the increased use of big utes. #auspol

i need politicians to be as mad at housing prices as they are about cracker barrel's new logo

new #rstats art series posted

The next big AI story is going to be that the cost of inference has indeed gone up, that costs are a problem, that, in fact, costs are not magically going to go down, and there are going to be people who pretended they always thought this. I have been watching :)

Team Golden or Soda Pop? Golden here.

#rstats Seen over at Mastodon: the `terminalgraphics` 📦 let's you render R plots _directly_ in a terminal window (e.g., R process launched from the command line, neovim or emacs). codeberg.org/djvanderlaan... Get it: `remotes::install_git(url = "https://codeberg.org/djvanderlaan/terminalgraphics")`

We don’t have a productivity problem… we have a lack of productive industries problem. Moving up from 105th in the world will take time. But we have a history of talking about growth and doing no growing. its time to act. Mining examples productivity for other sectors. ...

In the last 48 hours an 84 year old woman with a wheelie walker, and a dad walking with his 4yo son riding his balance bike have been hit and killed by 4WD utes in Brisbane. These vehicles are deadly and we need to address it. 7news.com.au/news/man-and...

A humble suggestion for VSCode / Positron #rstats peeps Try ctrl clicking on stuff etc.

This is a fascinating documentary of a Brisbane community fighting back against urban freeway expansion in the 1970s. So many of the arguments on both sides are almost identical to today. @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social @nerd4cities.bsky.social might enjoy it. vimeo.com/21222102?fl=...

Which is why literate programming lives in the fairly narrow goldilocks zone of “documents about code”. Works great for text books about code, homework assignments etc. In real life nobody wants to read your novel about your code when they could read… your code.

OK I have finished part 1 (less technical) of an epic #rstats and #demography blog post on men doing domestic work and its relationship to total fertility rate at the country level. Ultimately there is none, once you control for GDP per capita and inequality. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/08...

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

It is really really sinking in for me the degree to which LLMs are the ultimate expression of right wing anti-intellectualism. Its proponents are literally mocking the idea that anyone would ever want to learn anything, know anything, develop any actual skill, or have a thought of their own.

telling that people who are professionally Very Computer so often want Less Computer in their lives

tech in 2025 source: mastodon.social/@nclm/115021...

Tired of rerunning everything every time you change a line of code? 😩 The {targets} package automates your #Rstats workflow—only running what’s needed, tracking dependencies, keeping your analysis reproducible & efficient. ⏩ books.ropensci.org/targets/ #RStats #ReproducibleResearch #DataPipelines

Making effective scrollytelling visualisations is hard, but @jamesgoldie.dev 's Closeread makes it so much easier. Come learn about Closeread's design decisions and what's coming next for this great tool. wombat2025.numbat.space/program/work... #RStats #Python #BusinessAnalytics #DataViz

I love watching short #rstats screencasts so have been making tips and tricks videos and sharing them on YouTube recently. Many of my videos showcase my favourite R packages. I am talking about data viz today so the package of the day today is ggeasy.

Register today for your spot in the 2025 OceaniaR Hackathon in Canberra This event is a great opportunity to learn and participate in a range of projects around data analysis, statistics, data science and R programming. Register here: statsocaus.github.io/oceaniar-hac... #rstats #datascience

🕰️ Take the time to come to this tutorial by Mitchell O’Hara-Wild. Use the tidyverse to manipulate time series data and fable to create models in a timely fashion. Don't be late! Early bird discount ends 31st of August! wombat2025.numbat.space/program/tuto... #DataScience #BusinessAnalytics #RStats

Hi folks 👋 Come to WOMBAT 2025, my favourite conference! Day 1: affordable tutorials Day 2: single-stream talks Max 100 ppl: actually meet and interact with everyone And (!!) I'll be running a half-day intro to R packages, aimed at new/intermediate #rstats users. wombat2025.numbat.space

If you want to organise your own personal code collection or contribute to the broader #RStats ecosystem, you can write your R package!📦️ Nick Tierney will show how to use essential tools that make creating a package a breeze. Read more and register here: wombat2025.numbat.space/program/tuto...

Day 1 at #useR2025 was a blast! It's awesome meeting new #rstats users and catching up with familiar faces. I was amazed to see the hex-sticker map of North Carolina, made with code I wrote for useR! 2018 in Australia. See how maps like this are made in R here: mitchelloharawild.com/blog/user-20...

This week's #RLadies curator is @jenrichmondphd.bsky.social 🥳

Super excited to curate the @weare.rladies.org account this week. Follow me over there for data viz inspo, some things I think are magic, as well as chat about burnout, navigating career change and showing up for the #rstats community. Thanks for the nudge @pipinghotdata.com !

This is the single best piece I've read on "replacing coders with AI," it fully dispells the myth from the perspective of a software engineer and does so in a calm, reasonable way. colton.dev/blog/curing-...

Most people would agree that it’s possible to live off reheated meals but it’d be a sadder version of living. And yet living off reheated knowledge is apparently a 500 billion dollar idea. www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...

This is probably part of why everyone on bluesky is 38 years old: 38 year olds are basically the only people who consider it totally normal to flee a sinking ship and then just casually resume the conversation on the tropical island they end up on. They've outlived dozens of ships.

Hi folks! This is the account for the 2025 WOMBAT workshop in #Melbourne, #Australia organised by the NUMBAT group. Stay tuned for updates! wombat2025.numbat.space/

In retrospect paperclip AI was too simplistic to be an effective doomsday thought experiment. We should have been talking about an AI that is only good at creating marketing materials for AI. It has the objective function to maximise the transmission of pro-AI content via all channels.

“The difference between an LLM and a rubber duck is that the duck is smart enough to shut up when it has nothing useful to say.” — David Chisnall infosec.exchange/@david_chisn...

Ignoring all the other inadequacies and inconvenient truths about LLMs this shit is the ultimate buzz kill for me: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471... I pay pieces to no bridge trolls to do my job. I step on no rugs that can be pulled. I control my whole workflow. Why give that up? 🤔

Introducing {crosswordio} - an #rstats pkg to read/write/plot crosswords in "PUZ" format. https://github.com/coolbutuseless/crosswordio #RStats

If I were in a situation where my seniors tried to force me to use AI and threatened to monitor it I think I would just use AI to make an automation that periodically submits noob questions to AI. Seems like a pretty obvious move. How sure are we thar like 80% of dev usage isn’t just this?

This thread is incredible.

After a month or so of not using Claude Code much to write R code, I recently returned to using the tool most days. Giving coding assistants the ability to peruse #rstats package documentation via MCP is so, so helpful: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-07...

I feel like the only thing I repeat as infinitum is that there is no One Weird Trick for anything, despite what Silicon Valley has brainwashed you into thinking; there are no lone wolf geniuses waiting to be born who will solve disease or space travel. It’s just people working hard, working together

At #ipc2025 this week with my population projectionist hat on. If anyone finds the #rstats hallway track let me know!

The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without you enabling Javascript. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

Hey #rstats doing a bit of Shiny lately and finding I am struggling to write code I enjoy reading. Anyone I should look into with thinking in this space? I’ve read Mastering Shiny. Looking for opinions about how to make relatively complex applications that feel good to use.

If you use #tidyverse / dplyr, breakerofchains by @milesmcbain.bsky.social is one of my favorite productivity #rstats 📦 Very excited to learn that it works in #positron too! One more reason to keep using this IDE, absolutely loving it forum.posit.co/t/breakerofc...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

#tidyverse purrr 1.1.0 is out - now with parallel processing! Scale your #rstats map operations reliably and efficiently across multiple cores and even distributed systems. Powered by the mirai framework, this unlocks new levels of performance. Read more at: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07...