NFL: moment of silence for Charlie Kirk Two murders in Minneapolis: 🦗

Worth noting that the @wsj.com has joined with the @nytimes.com and Bellingcat to say that ICE is lying in its description of the shooting of Alex Pretti. The video evidence more and more supports the view that this was a gratuitous execution. www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

Our Syberian (breed) (indoor) cat assessing how I am doing with (manual shoveling) snow removal here in Chiberia. She may have some DNA memories of the snow but has strictly no urge to get outside. Smart cat.

PSA for Emacs users on Ubuntu 25.10: If `dired` mode no longer displays softlinks, one (very brute-force) way to fix is to rename the link to the `rust-coreutils` version of `ls` and link the alternate `gnuls` to `ls` in `/usr/bin`. Directory browsing restored. Bug report filed.

Beyond helping establish DHS itself in 2003, Mr. Mitnick was a senate-confirmed Trump choice for General Counsel for DHS in his first term. I've talked with him a few times, and he's not a man for hyperbole. So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS's "lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty."

I wonder if I’ll ever stop being angry all of the time.

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

just to make that clear for the rest of the world, that's -9 degrees *fahrenheit.* -23 degrees *celsius*.

Let the picture of the little five year old boy standing facing the car and the old man being dragged out of his house with no shirt on, let those images burn into your brain. We don’t have to be this country. We don’t have to live this way. Donald Trump was a choice, Republican voters made for us.

Following an Rcpp question 'how do I share an object / external pointer' between #Rstats and #Python, I cooked up a simple 'stopwatch' example in two repos with two packages: github.com/eddelbuettel... github.com/eddelbuettel... The Python side is on PyPi, shall I send the R side to CRAN?

People can say they didn’t vote for this but people are liars

This is the best speech, just from a pure rhetoric perspective - its sophistication and persuasiveness - that I've seen a politician deliver in a good long while. Really recommend watching or reading the whole thing.

#r2u PSA: I added a 'rustup' invocation to the build containers so (current) `cargo` and `rustc` are present. If your Rust-using #Rstats package is on CRAN, it will be in #r2u as a (completely dependency-resolved) .deb binary that installs in seconds. #r2u. Fast. Easy. Reliable. Pick All Three.

Twelve months down, so a first year done. Leaves 1096 days. One day at time.

How big is Greenland? Its so big it covers up 99% of the Epstein files.

RApiDatetime 0.0.11 on CRAN: Micro-Maintenance Exported C-level API of R for Date + Datetime conversion dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats

Secret trick when it is 1 degree Fahrenheit outside: Let the oven go at 500 F for a while. Side benefit is the smell of fresh bread. #breadsky

Something that never get's old: today's edition also updates `quarto` and `rstudio` (from my 'personal' PPA) along with 40+ CRAN packages for Ubuntu thanks to #r2u: Fast. Easy. Reliable. Binaries with full and complete dependencies.

DOJ investigating whether Denmark lied on its Greenland mortgage.

RcppSpdlog 0.0.26 on CRAN: Another Microfix Modern C++ logging for R extension packages dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

👇🏼my favorite JSON parsing package just got an update! #rstats If you’re still using jsonlite for parsing youre leaving a TON of performance gains on the table

RcppSpdlog 0.0.25 on CRAN: Microfix Modern C++ logging for R extension packages dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

RcppSimdJson 0.1.15 on CRAN: New Upstream, Some Maintenance Highest-performance JSON Parsing via Modern C++ from R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

gunsales 0.1.3 on CRAN: Maintenance NY Times Analysis of NICS gun purchase background checks dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats

Been running Linux on the desktop (or laptop) for thirty years and am somewhat resilient ... but a semi-annual Ubuntu upgrade going sideways unti I ssh in and blacklist kernel module 'amdgpu' in order to get my graphical workstation back means ... this again is not the year of the Linux desktop.

Paging @adambecker.bsky.social to cut through the crap.

Something that never gets old: running `wajig new` to see what `apt` get-able packages have been added since the previous `apt` run -- this time once more only #r2u packages bring #Rstats CRAN repo as fully-formed binaries with _all_ dependencies to Ubuntu.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

How it started. How it's going.

I didn't save this tweet but somebody did and it feels worth resurfacing

RcppAnnoy 0.0.23 on CRAN: Several Updates (Very Fast) Approximate Nearest Neighbours for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

in Canada they put the central bank head in charge of the country, in the United States they try to put the President in charge of monetary policy

RApiDatetime 0.0.10 on CRAN: Maintenance Exported C-level API of R for Date + Datetime conversion dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

Gave baguettes au levain another go. #breadsky

RProtoBuf 0.4.25 on CRAN: Mostly Maintenance An R interface to Google Protocol Buffers data serialization dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats #rcpp

Rcpp 1.1.1 on CRAN: Many Improvements in Semi-Annual Update Seamless R and C++ Integration dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats #rcpp /cc @enchufa2.es @kevinushey.bsky.social

The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has been forced to make a statement, declaring that the prize cannot be transferred. It's hard even to comprehend how stupid this has become

BREAKING: Trump says it would be an honor to receive Dennis Rodman's 1989/90 and 1990/91 NBA awards for Defensive Player of the Year.

PSA: The long-lived "let us talk about anything and everything" related to #Rcpp mailing list 'rcpp-devel' at R-Forge seems to have moved on to another place where we cannot reach it. May its memory be a blessing. #rstats Going forward, let's try to connect at this link: github.com/RcppCore/Rcp...

RcppCCTZ 0.2.14 on CRAN: New Upstream, Small Edits Powerful C++ timezone / datetime library for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats #rcpp

RcppSpdlog 0.0.24 on CRAN: New Upstream Modern C++ logging for R extension packages dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rcpp #rstats

Yay

This is insane. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

A rose by any other name? In Jan 1979 Bradley Efron published his bootstrap resampling method.‘Bootstrap’ was derived from “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen”- the baron pulled himself out of a swamp by his own bootstraps. But Efron's friends had other suggestions...

The world may well be going down the drain ... but then $evilStreamingCorp just served me this so there are small moments of respite. open.spotify.com/track/4NHNzt...

No cheating. Reskeet the most recent picture of your pet(s).

Canada: Our Prime Minster studied at Oxford and Harvard, was the Governor of both the Banks of England and Canada, and is recognized as one of the sharpest financial minds around. America: oh yeah? Our guy has to take dementia tests every week.

According to the new rules, if you and a few friends go to a defense contractor’s testing facility and you say “where are the missiles” and they don’t let you in then all federal funds for defense contractors will be frozen