oh ffs. its that day where we pretend visibility is somehow helpful or desirable for trans people. call me when we get a cis day of just-be-fucking-normal-about-us-for-once yeah?

If you ever want to understand why I, as someone whose writing is intensely personal even when it is technical, despises the LLM indistry with passionate intensity, this piece by Cat Valente is your answer. My contempt foe these vampires will never die catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-mone...

girl at the club asked me if this was a hate symbol

completely burned out, exhausted, feeling like the world is dissolving into primal chaos... yes, it's time to start another rewatch of the magicians

this is gorgeous

i will not comment on the academic discourse. the academic discourse is the little death. the academic discourse is the poison that runs through the veins. the academic discourse is the trashfire that burns for eternity. the academic discourse is a waste of everyone's time. i will not comment on the

#statstab #513 Some thoughts on checking the R session Thoughts: Maybe we stop using rm(list=ls())? Setting up a good environment isn't always intuitive. #rstats #r #coding #reproducibility #guide blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2026-0...

one of my least favourite moments when writing a package is trying to settle on the internal structure of its objects. it's easy to find something that works, but much harder to find something that will work cleanly and be extensible later. it takes several unpleasant refactors before it feels right

it's becoming painfully clear to me that i have residual trauma around academia that i've never really dealt with. there's a conference coming up that i'm supposed to attend for work and all i feel is dread. papers with my name added and i just wish people wouldn't invite me onto these things. etc

i really wish i were better at keeping my thoughts to myself. sigh :(

New blog post is up. Ever had to manage a bunch of R-based ETL pipelines and wanted a better way to maintain them? I wrote about how {S7} classes and generics can turn a pile of scripts into a more extensible, composable system. #rstats joekirincic.com/posts/this-r-script-could-ve-been-an-s7-class/

they are playing "sweet child of mine" at the bar for the matinee crowd. nice to see that classical music is still respected

Decided that the time has come to wrap up the series of #rstats art pieces I've been posting recently. As usual, the pieces themselves are released under CC-BY licence, and the source code is linked to from the gallery page

laptop of hormuz situation

NOT NOW, MYSTERIOUS LARGE STEEL CYLINDER

an essay on the misuse of blank space, in #rstats

This is fantastic news! Heather is such a positive force in the #rstats community and is doing vital work for the long-term sustainability of R and its community.

so the main thing i am taking away from reading the news today is that a surprising number of people don't know that mountains are very tall and oil tankers are very big

channel capacity #rstats

The absolute worst pattern of discourse I see on bluesky, and I see it at least once a week: two trans people are talking to each other and express their frustrations. Then a big-name cis progressive misreads it, puts them on blast, and the entire trans community on here has to deal with the fallout

starlight in #rstats

uh guys that's the imperial armory building on ghorman in season 2 of andor

I am trying my best not to feel bitter about IWD but not succeeding. I am starting to have the same feeling about it that I have about most Pride events - I'm not part of the demographic that it's intended to represent

We Are R-Ladies 200+ chapters. 60+ countries. 100,000+ members. Since 2012, we've been promoting gender diversity in the R community — building a global network of R leaders, mentors, learners, and developers. This is who we are. rladies.org #RLadiesIWD2026 #IWD2026

In more important spite-driven development news... sessioncheck is now on CRAN. At long last I now have something dead-simple and concrete I can point to next time I'm asked to put rm(list=ls()) in a script for no obvious reason sessioncheck.djnavarro.net

A small +1 on this from me. Crystal's article correctly notes that the cross-nation aggregation that The Guardian used in their "oooh scary genzzzzz" summary was an absurd and meaningless thing to do. I am unsure if that article was malicious or incompetent but either way, it was misleading.

On the one hand of course there's no surprise here: spending any time at all on grindr as a trans woman will show you the core truth of this. On the other, the specifics of the interviews resonated pretty deeply. Being desired doesn't bring political liberation, but it makes life a little easier

blood moon in #rstats

le sigh. writing a tiresome "omg the evil trannies would have transsssed me if i were a kid today" article in a major media outlet has become a cottage industry for transphobic gays. give it a rest mate

explaining to journalists that trans people have a thing called "being alive" which is as important to us as "have opinion in newspaper" is to them

making a note here, huge success

reentry

taking a deep breath and reminding myself that it's very easy to block people who irritate me, and generally leads to a much calmer life if I do it as soon as possible

i hate it here

everything is terrible

this one came out quite a bit more menacing than i expected it to

oh for fucks sake. can we just cancel mardi gras entirely now? it is well and truly past its use-by date. we might as well just host a straight pride march with sequins and be done with it

my mood has been so bleak lately, and i resent it when my code makes something pretty

god the sooner mardi gras is over the better. i'm tired of straights pretending they give a fuck with the stupid little rainbow flags plastered over everything and their tedious performative social media posts about it. just fuck off.

i don't know what i was expecting, but okay sure

me: i am not very good at statistics also me: oh my god the statistics in this paper are batshit insane why would anyone ever do this????????

rosemary, sadness, and #rstats

i am mortified. i've been writing art code in #rstats for several years now and it was only yesterday that i realised how useful the cauchy distribution is if you want the untidiness in an image to feel naturalistic

autumn wind #rstats

i like tibbles.

cohesion #rstats

rising from the depths #rstats

Using natural language prompting almost certainly makes LLMs a) need to be larger than they could be, b) less efficient and reliable than they could be, and c) much harder to use than they could be.