I want a hermit crab in a skull now.

Night heron looking for an early morning fish 🪶🌿📷

Goodnight, all. May we all know moments of peace and sun-warmed bliss like this adorable ocean potato I saw today.

*clears throat* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

We have reached the number of bookshelves where I’m seriously debating making shelf genre markers.

Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart

The sugar maple in our front yard is a prime lanternfly hangout, but there are a lot fewer of them than there were a few minutes ago. Unrelated, I’m pretty sure my neighbors think J and I are insane.

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Younger generations don’t have hope because older generations sold it to the knackers so they could buy a second boat.

Me, happily ensconced on bike trainer: *sees J heading toward the tool box* Oh heyyyyy, watchu doing…? J: Looking for the tinsnips. I need to make a shim for the thing under the bed! Me: What about using the furniture feet that we have for that. J’s accomplice, on the phone: *hysterical laughter*

“The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered scientists in at least one of its research offices to immediately pause almost all efforts to publish research…” 🧪 apple.news/ACD_M6hZNTrO... www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Off to a good start with the Halloween decorations around here

Controversial current tech opinion: I think the liquid glass look is fine, actually.

The sawdust was to go in wood glue, because in this house, we fucking fix shit.

Today in “ridiculous things I’ve done with a dremel”: turning a stick into sawdust because I need sawdust.

The future I envisioned as a child was just a cursed wasteland full of deadly quicksand and mysterious Bermuda triangles and anvils falling from the sky at all hours of the day and murderous cloned dinosaurs roaming the earth, and in case you're wondering how it's going, I'm sad that's not the case

#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit. Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil. 1🧵 #PlaymobilÖtzi #PlaymobilInfestation

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 now supports absolute plot dimensions 🤩 #rstats #dataviz #phd

Oh, of COURSE the noisy, drunken assholes watching baseball on the moonbus - without headphones - are Yankees fans. Color me surprised.

I have survived posit::conf, and I only have eleven pages of handwritten notes, three script outlines, and about a zillion screenshots, tabs, and talk photos to go through tomorrow. And this many stickers. (No dupes, either here or vs. any existing stickers at home.)

And that talk was GREAT.

“Whoever designed the human visual system has a lot to answer for. Maybe not as much as the knee team, or the lower back group, but a lot.” - @kjhealy.co , making me shoot my afternoon coffee out my nose.

The paper: the genetic program that enables digit formation in limbs is derived from the system that drives cformation of the cloaca. Me, the headline writer:

Fun finds in the forest this morning. - 1) Salmon eggs slime mold and 2) Orange jelly fungus. Two very different organisms, but equally cool. 🌿

The “studies” and methods that underlie the 10X coder myth sound *remarkably* like the studies and methods that underlie a lot of neurodivergence diagnoses - and yet, it surprises me more than I thought it would that it doesn’t prove out. (says the neuroscientist watching the psychologist’s talk)

Wow, this discrepancy is STARK - between the percentage of managers who think technical work is appreciated vs. the number of actual developers who do. Pull quote: “I’m not convinced our leadership think we’re people.” OOF. From Dr. Cat Hicks, @grimalkina.bsky.social

Good morning Posit, excited to share my keynote in which we will explore: - thinking traps - a gif that includes my dog (if you can spot him!) - data about your well-being you might REALLY want to send your boss #positconf2025

I hate having to pack early for a late flight. Once I’m packed, it’s like the “doing stuff here” part of my brain shuts off and is entirely replaced by the “go airport” part. Go airport go airport go airport goairportgoairportgoairport…

I need you to know that your contribution, your voice, your perspective, your way of explaining something, YOUR whatever, is valuable. Just because "it's been done before" doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Nothing is new, everything's been done! But not by you. Yet. #databs #rststs #python

Not really comfy with the simplification the answer to the question of “how do you think about the environmental impacts of AI?” An individual’s environmental impact is greater than the impacts of their individual queries alone.

Another (but imo VERY important!) downer on that roller coaster: good as it may be on the surface, databot is *not* a flotation device and should *not* be used for unsupervised exploratory data analysis. You still need a human expert ready to take the wheel. #rstats

Joe Cheng kicking off his discussion of the Positron Assistant and Databot with security warnings about the state of AI security attack surfaces in 2025: “this talk is going to be a bit of a roller coaster.”

Really insightful post from Julie Tibshirani (spotted in LinkedIn, can't find on Bsky) reflecting on #rstats 's unique governance structure and what can be learned for other languages jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the...

One of many reasons to go to conf: there are packages you know you need, and there are packages you don’t even know exist that are waiting to revolutionize your workflows. Every time I’m here, I come away with a laundry list of the latter.

Make tools for people, results. A tool is a statement about what you want the world to become. #PositConf2025

This was a GREAT talk - I have so many plans for what to do with {surveydown}

Kristin Bott’s talk just now, “On teaching adults to code”, might turn out to be one of my favorites of this conf. The importance of community, mentorship, and a shared sense of daring to learning and DOING in code… exactly what I strive to do with my team, and have been lucky to get from mentors.

you are now afflicted with: Breaking News (curse) every time you check social media, receive 2d6 psychic damage and take -2 to all WIS and CHA rolls for 1 hour

Science, in 2025, is going through your “to read” tabs and realizing you’ve opened the same paper on AI four times and still not gotten to actually read it yet.

I didn’t know R had an “existential data scientist” package. Is that a new chatbot feature?

Another awesome underrated feature of Positron. You whisper "Positron" on Bluesky and you can summon the experts to join your campaign and lend their help, no D20 required. #Rstats

Conference with pool is infinitely superior to conference without pool. Ignore any scurrilous rumors; it’s not cold at all.

Critical new positron knowledge: custom keybindings (cf. vscode). Also a great way to get access to your favorite rstudio add-ins in positron... more on that in a minute.... #rstats positron.posit.co/keyboard-sho...

NEWS: By vaccinating babies at birth, the U.S. nearly eradicated hepatitis-B in children. Kennedy's vaccine advisory panel is expected this week to recommend delaying the shot, opening a window for kids to be infected. Exclusive by @jackie-fortier.bsky.social kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

I've been noodling about in positron for a little bit, but this posit::conf is going to be baptism by fire for really using it - starting with the Data Workflows workshop. All positron for the next three days, no leaning on rstudio or vscode. Can I do it? Let's see.

Other people at conferences, morning edition: “let’s go running! I’m going to do five miles before talks start!” Me at conferences, morning edition: “where is the closest place I can get a coffee the size of my *entire* head?”

Down pillows, although they may appear to be flexible, amorphous objects, actually exist in only two states: eleven feet high and fluffy or flat and hard as bricks. The transition trigger is the placement of a human head on the pillow in question, and it is only one-way.