v1 of `bootstrapper`, an opinionated #rstats package to help you start building modern R packages. Wraps a number of usethis funcs to simplify starting new packages. Adds some common GHA, dependabot, air + jarl (precommit hook and GHA), and a concise AGENTS.md which I'm rather liking.

Fantastic post by Colin Raffel, "We Are Over-Indexing on Paper Acceptance," drafted in May 2021 (!) but only posted now. The more things change.. Last sentence: "If you want to judge a researcher’s quality, the only meaningful way is to read their papers and judge for yourself."

Repurposed a bit of an old post on aesthetics and hastily blended some other thoughts. tl;dr: I want science fiction artificial intelligences like Olivaw et al., and I want to reserve the term AI for that kind of intelligences, not for LLMs. www.visruth.com/writings/ai/

Its big problem with openclaw is that its just a terrible product that does nothing of value and a big company buys it and ignores real tools that do real work

Got the big Calvin and Hobbes collection and it is bananas that Watterson dropped one of the best strips of all time within a month of starting the comic

First release of stanflow! v0.1.0 was a few days later than I'd like, but its up now. Stanflow is a metapackage a la tidyverse for a Stan Bayesian workflow--see the README for more details/features! Feedback/issues/PRs are always appreciated. #rstats #bayes

They found that much of LLM “reasoning” doesn’t come from RL training; it comes from how you sample the model. Paper: Scalable Power Sampling: Unlocking Efficient, Training-Free Reasoning for LLMs via Distribution Sharpening ( www.arxiv.org/abs/2601.21590 )

Cleaning up the desktop on my laptop and found this #ggplot2 #rstats

All the material for my Bayesian Data Analysis course is available online, including the lectures, which we re-recorded this fall (some of them by @aloctavodia.bsky.social and Noa Kallioinen while I was on vacation). The video links are listed in the schedule at avehtari.github.io/BDA_course_A...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Huge thanks to @posit.co and hosts @mchow.com and @wesmckinney.com for having me on The Test Set!!! posit.co/thetestset/e... My favorite part was learning that I've been pronouncing "pandas" correctly all along. I've never felt more vindicated. And y'all are wrong about candy corn. 😜

Been really confused by social media for a while but I think I've figured it out: everyone except me has an explosive collar and it will detonate if they don't immediately contribute to the same discourse that everyone hates

"By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity." Gemini complains from time to time about me not enabling apps activity in the webapp--I added an instruction or wtv Google calls it to forbid it for doing so, but it persists. It really ticks me off.

Plugging my two favorite #python tools: uv and @marimo.io: www.visruth.com/blog/2025112... #rstats #julia too, because I always manage to mention R and Julia :)

It’s easy to talk about ‘large AI data centers’ and still underestimate the scale. Our Frontier Data Centers database shows that some upcoming campuses will cover a substantial portion of Manhattan. Meta's Hyperion data center will be nearly four times the size of Central Park.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

USCOTS 2025 brought ~350 educators together at Iowa State to explore the idea of useful models in teaching statistics. Highlights included keynotes on modeling and LLMs and Beth Chance receiving the George Cobb Award. magazine.amstat.org/... #USCOTS #StatsEd #DataScience #TeachingStats #STEM

Spectacular thread about RNG which one should read. I'm firmly in alignment with Dr. Betancourt on this. I think the quoted post is especially important to recognize. If your results are very seed-sensitive, your method is at fault, not your seeding!

All of this is to say that any method for choosing a seed is equally adequate provided that seed is reported and the resulting pseudo-random number generator output is used properly.

I’m seeing some misinformation about pseudo-random number generator best practices going around the internets. Let’s talk about why the pseudo-random number generator seed you use shouldn’t actually have any impact on your results and, consequently, you can choose whatever seed you damn well please.

to me, the main downside of vibe coding is that now there’s a quick phrase you can use to disown your work and avoid responsibility

If you've been using a 📌 emoji to bookmark posts, @rafael.my and @samuel.bsky.team cooked up a special tool you can use to migrate them to your Saved Posts. Try it here: pin2saved.vercel.app

the progress of OpenAI models the jump from GPT-1 to GPT-2 is mind blowing i hate to admit that i wasn’t paying attention to LLMs back then, must’ve been a wild ride to see that progress.openai.com

I discovered yesterday that #NIN is doing TRON: Ares's soundtrack!? And they released a single? Gonna watch the movie just for OST; it's hitting all the same notes of Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy but distinctly NIN. 181*(3+(53/60))/60 ~ 12 hrs of _As Alive As You Need Me To Be_ since Aug 15 13:00...

Here is a rather lengthy write-up (in English) explaining why I chose #OCaml as my main programming language for my personal and professional projects! xvw.lol/en/articles/... I hope you find this interesting, and I welcome any feedback!

Made a Starter Pack to help us #user2025 attendees find each other and stay in touch! 👉 go.bsky.app/NjYV48L (hopefully I did this right... 🤓) Let me know by replying here if you attended UseR and would like to be added, I'll try to update regularly! 🥰

{hexsession} by @liomys.mx is fun and useful! Produces css/html snippets that tile hex logos nicely, e.g. to showcase your #rstats package projects. 😎 github.com/luisDVA/hexs... #useR2025

In the frenzy of exciting #useR2025 talks, I forgot to mention that I also gave my talk. 😆 "Adding models to {tidyclust}", slides here: kbodwin.github.io/Talks-and-Pr... PC: @healthandstats.bsky.social

A humble beginning of my sticker collection and the coolest pair of socks I own! I want to buy a binder to store them all--any hexagon shaped recommendations? #useR2025 #rstats

I'm pretty stoked about what @visruth.com and I have been cooking up this year.... (Come see his talk at #UseR2025 to hear more... and of course, to get hex stickers while supplies last...)

The younger generation does many things much better than us. But the fact that I have to now clarify that I want my latte hot, because the default is iced, is an injustice for which I shall never forgive The Youths. ☕

we've already sold 1000 copies of The Secret Rules of the Terminal since it came out on Tuesday!! so to celebrate I'm giving away 1000 copies to anyone who can't afford to buy one. You can use code BUYONEGIVEONE to get a free PDF copy if $12 USD is a lot for you. wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

I wrote a blog post to celebrate 10 years of loo package 🎉 (R package implementing fast Pareto smoothed importance sampling cross-validation and many other useful methods for cross-validation)

Rolling the ladder up behind us https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/

Any resources to see how #rstats matrices and data frames are structured in memory? Are they lists of pointers?

Bel Canto: 10/10 www.visruth.com/reviews/2025...

Q&A from a talk I gave last week. Q: "What do you think is the biggest threat in cybersecurity right now? Is it post-quantum computing? Is it AI?" A: Fascism. It's fascism.

Tonight, we are live at #Webbys celebrating our win of the People's Voice award in the Developer Tools category 🎉 As is tradition, here's our prerecorded 5-word-speech created by @visruth.com,and recorded by our very own Alex! @apenwarr.ca‬ 's 'OMG I've P2P'd myself' was a close 2nd!

This Harvard comp sci prof laments Republicans’ declining public opinion of universities and blames it on professors who, unlike him, inject politics into their classes. As evidence of politicization, he references Google, Coinbase, Bud Light—ie not academia—and one email from one law school TA.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

every core unix command I use

it's the 3-year anniversary of "How DNS Works" coming out! To celebrate, we're giving away 300 PDF copies to anyone who $12 USD is a lot of money for use code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get one ❤️ wizardzines.com/zines/dns/

I ran into an issue with getting a ggplot in a R code chunk to render in a Quarto notebook. I'm using the #julialang engine and Quarto 1.7.17. The output seems to be an RCall object instead of a plot. Anyone dealt with this before? github.com/VisruthSK/St...

@lionelhenry.bsky.social and I are so excited to finally announce Air - an extremely fast R code formatter! 🎉 With Air, you'll never need to worry about styling your #rstats code ever again. All you need to do is save, and Air takes care of the rest. www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/02...

Writing about the beauty of the temporary things; it's perhaps a bit too poignant in these times, but I drafted this a while ago and finally got around to finishing it. www.visruth.com/prose/epheme...

Just made a S7 thing I've been working on public. Please check it out! www.visruth.com/blog/bignum/ #rstats

I wrote a blog post a few days ago about infinite lists in R. My implementation is suboptimal, but I found it interesting. www.visruth.com/blog/infinite/ #rstats