Yesterday the Russians deliberately attacked Ukrainian civilians, hitting apartment buildings and killing more than 20. The Ukrainians responded by killing Russian oil production and sparing Russian civilians. And the Trump administration is doing what it can to help Putin.

Another fantastic and critical post from @laurenshof.online about how the European Commission @ec.europa.eu is currently missing the mark with supporting open social networks. Internet regulation in Europe could be so much better than it is right now.

Introducing dais: a Rust-based PDF presenter tool. Present PDF slides (eg, Beamer) in a PowerPoint-like interface. Full drawing control, navigation tools, live text boxes, and more: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0...

in case you were wondering how the EU's regulation of Big Tech is going

WE DON'T NEED PETROLEUM-BASED PLASTICS ANYMORE! "The [bamboo plastic] outperforms most commercial plastics and bioplastics in mechanical and thermo-mechanical metrics while maintaining full biodegradability in soil within 50 days and closed-loop recyclability with 90% retained strength."

🎉 JOSS turns 10 today! Ten years, 3,500+ papers, 11,000+ authors, 4000+ reviewers, and a community that built something remarkable together. Thank you to everyone who's reviewed, edited, authored, or cheered us on along the way 💚 joss.theoj.org #openscience #opensource

RE: https://mastodon.social/@coatless/116514621992544197 The behavior outlined in this post is a big reason I post so little publicly about my work in R anymore. Also: use James' portable R. It's a way better & safer approach if you need this functionality.

roxygen2 8.0.0 out now: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05... ! So many goodies in this release including S7 support, tons of R6 improvement, a new config style, fewer dependencies, and so so many bug fixes #rstats

Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB of RAM at peak and transcribing 1hr of audio in ~9 mins simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/...

spopt, an R package for spatial optimization, is now in general release on CRAN. spopt-r is inspired by the Python package of the same name. Features include: - Regionalization algorithms for building contiguous districts / territories; - Facility location solvers;

Fascinating analysis of modern Ireland by Sinead O'Sullivan (who I know via her space policy work) www.butthistime.com/p/mind-the-gap

J'ai vérifié la date www.clubic.com/actualite-60...

Variable-Pitch Propellers for More Efficient Quadcopter

ditch the US

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla paid just 4.9% of their profits in federal corporate taxes in 2025. They have seen their collective tax bill drop by $95B thanks to two rounds of Trump tax cuts. Meanwhile, they've laid off thousands of workers. Trickle-down economics was always a scam.

Gas only sets Spain's electricity price 15% of the time. When gas costs spike it barely registers on the electricity bill. In countries like Italy and the UK gas sets the price 90% of the time. The difference is enormous. I spoke to @politico.com about this. www.politico.eu/article/spai...

And, nothing has happened. Lawless shadow tanker PEACE has spent today leaving Baltic Sea, a good while on Danish territory. Right now it actually looks like she will anchor up by Skagen (in Denmark) and possibly enjoy some hygge before delivery of oil to India.

The book “Computer Age Statistical Inference” is a great read (and freely available!), and now there’s an R package that makes it easy to get the data for examples.

False flagged “AETHER” leaving the Baltic

The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) IS LIVE! openvisualizationacademy.org Thread follows #dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization

The UK is rejoining Erasmus+ 🇪🇺🇬🇧 Because it's what we want, what we really, really want! On the International Day of Education, we celebrate the agreement reached on the UK's return to the Erasmus+ programme from 2027. 🎥 Spice Girls - Wannabe (1996)

Kind of surprising that it took the giant solar storm to get me to look closely at the effects space weather has on GPS for the first time.

"The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently." Read the whole speech here. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...

le visionscarto du week-end, ou comme le dit Vincent Capdepuy, l'auteur qui a eu la gentillesse de nous confier cet opus « comme un samedi ! » « Notre hémisphère » de la doctrine Monroe au corollaire Trump, la métagéographie au service des ambitions politiques www.visionscarto.net/notre-hemisp...

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

#rstats {duckspatial} 0.9 is on CRAN, makes @duckdb.org 🦆 #spatial 🌍 more user-friendly, enabling faster big data spatial ops in R. Adrián Cidree shared a great breakdown of how we (+ @urbandemog.bsky.social) are doing it: ​📖: cidree.github.io/duckspatial/... 💻: github.com/Cidree/ducks... ​#rspatial

A data model for Git (and other docs updates) jvns.ca/blog/2026/01...

New Year, New Colour Tool for you data visualizers and maybe the odd designer obumbratta.com/colour

I’ve been bothering NATO officials for over 2 years with one Q: what will happen if NATO member attacks another NATO member? No answer. Well, soon they’ll have to show us what this, in fact, means.

❗️President Zelenskyy, President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer sign a declaration of intent regarding multinational force deployment in Ukraine in the future.

There are few politicians that I despise more than Marco Rubio, an utterly mediocre and malicious empty shell of a man. After reading this, my contempt for the guy has increased significantly: www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Please join me in a new campaign to help protect Ukrainians in a very special way. My Ukrainian friends chose to call this campaign Freedom is Action. They are making an important point. One way to find our own courage is to act in support those who are showing it snyder.substack.com/p/freedom-is...

🚀 Calling all data scientists & #ML enthusiasts! The PRC Data Challenge is back for 2025! 🌍✈️ 👉 Build Machine Learning models to predict fuel burn at different stages of flight, using open aviation data 🔗 Find out more here: ansperformance.eu/study/data-c...

EXCLUSIVE - Today the Guardian is publishing the Boris Files A trove of leaked data from the office of Boris Johnson. It reveals how Johnson is using the relationships forged in the UK’s highest elected office to facilitate his personal enrichment. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

HUGE NEWS FROM HELSINKI, FINLAND Helsinki, a city of 690 000 people, has now had a full year without any traffic fatalities. None. No pedestrian, cyclist, scooter user or car deaths. This is a huge achievement for a city of our size. 💪🏻 A little background 🧵 1/ yle.fi/a/74-20174831

Notebooks 2.0 is here! 📓🔮 Previewing today:
Notebook Kit, an open file format for notebooks with open-source tooling for generating static sites; and
Observable Desktop, a macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, with a radical new approach to AI. observablehq.com/notebooks/2/

Really great article and visuals from @reuters.com (and the maps...🤩OMG!) www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Les espions, ça n'existe pas que dans les films… Il y en a aussi dans votre poche 📱

50 minutes of music blending melodic progressive rock, cinematic live strings, jazz, classical, pop, post-rock, and a touch of melancholy. Even if you don't know Ukrainian, you will feel the emotion. Listen on all platforms ❤️ rain.in.ua/go/vidrada-en

I really like that Wired is opening up the reporting they do that’s based on FOIA requests to non-subscribers. It’s super smart, too.

Bellingcat repeated their experiment of a few years ago in LLM photo geolocation but using modern models. "…in urban settings, LLMs excelled at cross-referencing subtle details, whereas Google Lens tended to fixate on larger, similar-looking structures…" www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺

Since our first release, GeoArrow has been adopted by GeoPandas, GDAL, Apache Sedona, @duckdb.org, Lonboard, Kepler.gl, and others. It has never been easier (or faster) to get spatial data from one tool into another!

If you want peace in Ukraine, pressure Russia. If you want war, don’t. The Trump people only make concessions. Which is exactly what the Kremlin expected. The US through its astounding weakness is making the war longer and bloodier than it has to be.

Quarto 1.7 is here! 🎉 Now you can easily add light/dark mode to your projects with brand files and control which computational outputs appear in each mode with the new renderings option. See it in action on quarto.org and learn more: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... #Quarto #QuartoPub

Remember when I discussed the idea for a new data visualization framework for Svelte? It is time to get excited! I’ve been secretly working on making SveltePlot possible and will finally share the current state next week at @svelte.dev Summit 2025!!! Stay tuned... www.vis4.net/blog/2024/01...

🚨 Tesla posts a $400M profit, down 71% year-over-year. Revenue is down nearly $2B compared to the same time last year. Wow.

Les paroles et les actes…

Did a quick write-up for non-cyber folks of the NLRB whistleblower filing regarding DOGE covertly stealing 10GB of data and giving their credentials to what appears to be Russian state-sponsored threat actors. On Earth 1, this story, alone, would have […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

« J’ai entendu le président de la République dire qu’il faudrait rendre inéligible à vie ceux qui ont été condamnés pour corruption et fraude fiscale. Ah bon ? Et pourquoi pas le reste ? Pourquoi pas pour détournement de fonds publics ? » — Marine Le Pen, le 5 avril 2013. #PassionArchives