Today marks 50 years since John Chambers and Rick Becker presented a new project to colleagues at Bell Labs - an interactive environment that became the S language. For more details, see the #RStats blog entry "S at 50": blog.r-project.org/2026/05/05/s...

Any @nytimes.com product managers here? I might convince myself to pay premium for content free of: - any Met Gala coverage - Doss Routhat columns - Cucker Tarlson coverage - NYTimes@Athletic upsell every few posts Can we have a deal here?

Quick #r2u update for #Rstats on #Ubuntu: - R 4.6.0 available on all three LTS releases ✅ - BioConductor 3.23 available on all three LTS releases ✅ - Ubuntu 26.04 support available for arm64 and amd64 ✅ #r2u. Fast. Easy. Reliable. Pick all three. eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u/

Recession tornado siren.

Haven't tried local CI but I just saw tangled.org/mitchellh.co... and am thinking about setting it up

Following @apenwarr.ca (as one does) I set up a 'social, distributed, ... [other nice things here]' git repo at @tangled.org and looked around some more ... and of course my neighbour @jcs.org is already there with seventy five (!!) repos. Onwards! Anybody tried a local CI runner yet? tangled.org

binb 0.0.8 on CRAN: Maintenance Crisper Beamer PDF slides from (R)Markdown dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/05... #rstats

yeah, so two things. first, i have been saying for some time that *this* is the message. and that it is a broad one that can fit a large number of concerns. and second, this dude has the juice.

If you treat people with kindness and know how to count to 218, please consider applying for a job House GOP leadership. For the second night this week we are going home early because they can’t do either.

This tangled.org GitHub alternative built on top of ATproto, open source, with self hosting capabilities and the ability to run your own CI sure seems like a gift of the gods.

Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M. https://theonion.com/man-says-fuck-it-eats-lunch-at-10-58-a-m-1819574888/

Playing around with Rocker images more seriously than I have before (for the purpose of containing various robots). It’s great. rocker-project.org/images/

So #Rstats 4.6.0 is out. Some people are fire-breathing "OMG need to update all packages". We also discuss within Debian if we need a new 'tag' (as we did for R 4.0.0). I happen to think a more nuanced approach is possible, and I have a little write-up and tests. #r2u github.com/eddelbuettel...

One piece of advice I don’t see here explicitly is to minimize dependencies. My PhD code from 2013 classified biological viruses. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, I was able to run the code for the COVID-19 genome with no problem. base R is very backward compatible. tinyverse.org

RProtoBuf 0.4.27 on CRAN: Upstream Adjustment An R interface to Google Protocol Buffers data serialization dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rstats #rcpp

Central Bell Pepper Theorem.

R version 4.6.0 "Because it was There" (source version) has been released. It should be on CRAN by now. #rstats The choice of codename is in remembrance of R Core member Tomàš Kalibera (1978-2026). Among many other things, he was a keen mountain climber.

dtts 0.1.4 on CRAN: Maintenance data.table time series ops at nanosecond resolution dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rstats #rcpp

Very nice post about why you may want your AI / LLM coding session running from inside your #Rstats session. With, as so often with posts by @troyhernandez.bsky.social, a calm and reasoned argument why the tinyverse is so applicable here too.

I can’t thank you enough for r2u, I have an internal pkgdown which was taking my Azure pipeline 20+ mins just to install packages, which finished in 5 minutes once I switched to r2u.

Scott Galloway absolutely sucks shit & has always sucked shit. When I talk to colleagues about how to do public-facing work as a professor, he's my prime example of what not to do - leverage your fancy position as faculty* to opine on shit you know nothing about. *B-school, so not real professor

#r2u is absolutely cooking right now! Over 200k downloads by 10:20h; over 160k in the last three hours. Over 250k yesterday. Evidently robust demand for installing or upgrading your CRAN packages for #Rstatst via `apt` at a system level. #r2u: Fast. Easy. Reliable. Pick All Three.

Fifteen months (and two days as I am late again) down. Leaves 1004 days. One day at a time.

nanotime 0.3.14 on CRAN: Upstream Maintenance High-resolution nanosecond time functionality for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rcpp #rstats /cc @michaelchirico.bsky.social

tinypkgr just hit CRAN! The whole tinyverse development toolchain (tinyrox, tinypkgr, rformat, and saber) is now one install.packages() away. cornball.ai/posts/tinyve...

RcppArmadillo 15.2.6-1 on CRAN: Several Updates R bindings to powerful and expressive C++ matrix library dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rcpp #rstats

RcppArmadillo 15.2.6-1 on CRAN: Several Updates R bindings to powerful and expressive C++ matrix library dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rcpp #rstats

On the day of the 130th Boston Marathon, a friend sent this around -- taken 19 years ago. Six of us on the eve of our first Boston marathon. I ended up running three more over the next few years, but never again as part of a "six pack".

Love @kevinmkruse.bsky.social 's writing but feel obliged to quote his colleague (over in econ) Dixit on why following Stigler's rule (hey, I live in Chicagoland) may be optimal. www.princeton.edu/~dixitak/hom...

Sponsor me for Tour de Shore 2026 and support the Maywood Fine Arts Center! dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04...

This is a remarkable and important step. Ukraine, a country under full scale invasion for 4+ years, is signing deals to co-develop/produce weapons with other countries. Saudi, UAE and Qatar are not only confident of but also banking on Ukraine being a functional nation state over the next decade.

After 'helping' @dfalbel.bsky.social land the torch 2.8 bump, I vibe-coded a Linux-only libtorch wrapper. Also, the 3rd use of ASTs I teased: compilers! TorchScript is on the way out in favor of Python-only TorchDynamo; this is a path for R torch users #rstats cornball.ai/posts/torcha...

This is an extremely sweet story about Prince, gone ten years already today (!!). Can you imagine having young Roger "Skipper" Nelson be your _babysitter_? Wild. And of course all I can think of is how often @anildash.com may have told that story already... storycorps.org/stories/prin...

STAT 447 was priviliged to have @vincentab.bsky.social deliver a wonderful (and, naturally, impressive) guest lecture on 'Model to Meaning' this week (see below for details). Everybody was ok with recording, so this is now on YouTube (see quoted post). #rstats emails.illinois.edu/newsletter/9...

🚨 #RStats and #PyData devs! I'm looking for β testers for this thing I just built: A unified dashboard + orchestrator for code and data quality checks. It has lots of neat features and I'm super eager for feedback and bug reports. Check out the video demo: vincentarelbundock.github.io/scrutin/

The great @eddelbuettel.com invited me to his STAT447 class at the University of Illinois. If you'd like to hear me speak about the interpretation of statistical models in #RStats, using the {marginaleffects} 📦, check out the video! www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3TX...

That's operator error. I adjusted the filters to `available.packages()` and excluded non-matching architectures. Whoops, out went the windows-only packages. May fix later, or keep as a new feature. 😜

This man must never become president.

#rstats! because I’m good at Bluesky

qlcal 0.1.1 on CRAN: Calendar Updates QuantLib Business / Exchange Calendaring for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rstats #rcpp

anytime 0.3.13 on CRAN: Mostly Minor Bugfix Automagic date / time conversion for any input dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rststs #rcpp

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing on 1 April of Tomáš Kalibera, a valuable member of the R Core Team for close to 10 years, after a short but aggressive illness. Tomáš is survived by his wife and 1 year old son. A full obituary will be posted in due time.

one immediate dramatic consequence of the Hungarian result: Magyar has promised to repair relations with the EU and unblock a €90bn EU loan for Ukraine

The ark of history is long, and it occassionally still bends towards voting the bums out.

littler 0.3.23 on CRAN: Mostly Internal Fixes Everybody's favourite way to rock R at the command-line and in scripts dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/04... #rstats

I coded up an open-source, not-for-profit AI paper reviewer that rivals the performance of @reviewer3com.bsky.social, Refine.ink, and Stanford Agentic Reviewer (according to Gemini 3.1). Costs <$2! Live @ coarse.ink. Plug in paper, @openrouter.bsky.social key, and email. #econsky

Move slow and fix things

Computers were a mistake www.404media.co/fbi-extracts...

Things that help calm the nervous system, quickly: - Box breathing (in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4, repeat) - Immerse your face in cold water (activates mammalian dive reflex) - Humming (stimulates vagus nerve) - Exercise (anything helps, outside even better) - Impeachment and removal

Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here: