iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Etienne Bacher @etiennebacher.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

#rstats new blog post! "Snapshotting error messages", where I explain why I think all testthat::expect_error() should be replaced by testthat::expect_snapshot(error = TRUE), and where I present an easy, automated way to do this transition. www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2026-0...

etiennebacher.com

Snapshotting error messages | Etienne Bacher

Usually, when we develop software, we know very well how to use it and how it works. This is not true for external users, people who will make mistakes and won't use your software correctly on the fir...

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Dr Alex Bond @thelabandfield.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Fun fact, this was a verbatim reviewer comment: "The results look fake, and the images of plastics also look like these were created by AI. I sincerely hope that this manuscript was a test by these authors or a test of this journal, because this should not be published in any journal as it is" 🤡

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Nahel Belgherze @wxnb.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

An incredibly well-timed Landsat 9 pass captured the effects of yesterday’s catastrophic glacier collapse near the Nepal–Tibet border. The event was so massive that it was detected by seismometers around the world.

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 26/08/2026

"Beyond recall and the illusion of competence" var0.xyz/posts/beyond... The key message of this post is "don't outsource the understanding", and I couldn't agree more. If an LLM does all YOUR work, you become its spokesperson, and your judgement and expertise get erased in the process.

var0.xyz

Beyond recall and the illusion of competence — var0.xyz

The important question about AI-assisted programming isn't who writes the code. It's who understands the system.

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Greg Jericho @grogsgamut.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Happy 10 year anniversary of the best mic drop on Twitter. Hard to believe it’s been so long! Congrats @astrokatie.com

Katie Mack @AstroKatie
16h
Honestly climate change scares the heck out of me and it makes me so sad to see what we're losing because of it.

Gary P Jackson (RAT) @gary4205
@AstroKatie Maybe you should learn some actual SCIENCE then, and stop listening to the criminals pushing the #GlobalWarming SCAM!

Katie Mack @AstroKatie
@gary4205 | dunno, man, I already went and got a PhD in astrophysics.
Seems like more than that would be overkill at this point.

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ArXiv Paperboy (Stat.ME+Econ.EM) @paperposterbot.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

arXiv📈🤖 Gratia: An R package for exploring generalized additive models By

$arXiv:2406.19082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalized additive models (GAMs, Hastie & Tibshirani, 1990; Wood, 2017) are an extension of the generalized linear model that allows the effects of covariates to be modelled as smooth functions. GAMs are increasingly used in many areas of science (e.g. Pedersen, Miller, Simpson, & Ross, 2019; Simpson, 2018) because the smooth functions allow nonlinear relationships between covariates and the response to be learned from the data through the use of penalized splines. Within the R (R Core Team, 2024) ecosystem, Simon Wood's mgcv package (Wood, 2017) is widely used to fit GAMs and is a Recommended package that ships with R as part of the default install. A growing number of other R packages build upon mgcv, for example as an engine to fit specialised models not handled by mgcv itself (e.g. GJMR, Marra & Radice, 2023), or to make use of the wide range of splines available in mgcv (e.g. brms, B\"urkner, 2017). The gratia package builds upon mgcv by providing functions that make working with GAMs easier. gratia takes a tidy approach (Wickham, 2014) providing ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016) replacements for mgcv's base graphics-based plots, functions for model diagnostics and exploration of fitted models, and a family of functions for drawing samples from the posterior distribution of a fitted GAM. Additional functionality is provided to facilitate the teaching and understanding of GAMs.$

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 09/08/2026

This week I'll be gets-injured-installing-dishwasher years old.

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Alison Killing @alisonkilling.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

This is wildly irresponsible of Google - allowing people to create AI generated satellite images. Satellite imagery has always been such a useful and reliable source because it came from reliable sources, but now Google is messing with it at source. www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...

digitaldigging.org

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 22/07/2026

Him (triumphant): Hey, look, I made this very important thing with AI, and I didn't use my brain at all! Me (dying inside):

Jinshi, from The Apothecary Diaries, finding out something he never wanted to know.

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Jonah Maves @hunchojman.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Awa Fam denies Olivia Miles, Olivia Miles gives her five

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 19/07/2026

Today I paid attention to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" for the first time (yeah, I know), and boy, it really blew my expectations up. This song has been misplaced by so many TV shows that I had no clue about what it really was about. Now I know! Do you?

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 17/07/2026

LinkedIn will not stop showing me data science jobs in Denmark, and I'm just here like 'I wish!'

static.klipy.com

Nick Jensen at European Athletics

ALT: Nick Jensen at European Athletics

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 14/07/2026

There are so many things wrong with this, but whatever, here it goes anyway: www.reflectorbital.com

reflectorbital.com

Reflect Orbital

Sunlight after dark

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Annette Gordon-Reed @agordonreed.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Don’t know who to credit for this. But it is how I feel.

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Dirk Eddelbuettel @eddelbuettel.com · 11/07/2026

Norm Matloff (1948-2026) @matloff.bsky.social I was made aware of the post below made by his daughter. We lost another friend and valued long-time contributor the #Rstats community, gone far too soon, and sure to be missed. His memory will be a blessing.

Screenshot of post on X in the account of Norm Matloff in which his daughter announces his passing. Gone too soon, and sure to be missed.

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AlternativeTo @alternativeto.net · 29/06/2026

Git (by xkcd)

Two characters discuss using Git for collaborative projects, emphasizing memorization of certain shell commands for syncing work because no one really knows how it works.

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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Four postdoc positions - Evolutionary Dynamics and Genomic Ecology (BCI EDGE)integrating population & evolutionary genomics, community ecology, metabolomics, & long-term forest dynamics to investigate the evolutionary processes maintaining tropical forest diversity stri.si.edu/story/bci-ev... 🧪 🌐 🌾

stri.si.edu

BCI Evolutionary Dynamics and Genomic Ecology project

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 25/06/2026

As sad as it sounds, this is also a good training for the transition to industry.

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Jakub Nowosad @jakubnowosad.com · 24/06/2026

🗺️ New in the development version of the {tmap} R package: blending modes are now available! This makes it much easier to create more expressive terrain visualizations. github.com/r-tmap/tmap/... #rstats #tmap #GISchat #rspatial

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Ondrej Mottl 🌿💻📈🌍⏳ @ondrejmottl.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

For those who missed my talk at #IAVS2026. Here it is all online: 🔗https://ondrejmottl.github.io/BIODYNAMICS-vegetation-cooccurrence/Documentation/Website/outputs.html Rendered slides: 🖼️https://ondrejmottl.github.io/BIODYNAMICS-vegetation-cooccurrence/Documentation/Presentations/IAVS_2026/_output

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Morten Frederiksen @seabirdmortenf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Happy to announce a postdoc position with me and Jakob Strand, to work on data from the revamped Danish beached bird survey organised by DOF BirdLife Denmark. How many seabirds end up on Danish beached, where do they come from, and why did they die? #seabirds ecos.au.dk/en/about-us/...

ecos.au.dk

Postdoc in seabird ecology - Vacancy at Aarhus University

Vacancy at Department of Ecoscience - Arctic Ecosystem Ecology, Aarhus University

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Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 23/06/2026

Do you love maps? Of course you do! With the latest release of #ggsql we now support spatial plotting directly from your database. As a cherry on top, the release also provides powerful in-layer aggregation. Read all about it on the blog

opensource.posit.co

ggsql 0.4.1: Spatial plotting and in-layer aggregation

ggsql 0.4.1 adds support for spatial plotting and data aggregation within layers. Read all about the new features in this release post.

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Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Happy to finally announce the CRAN release of {debrief}, a new package to let AI agents better interface with the output of the {profvis} package Making it so you can work with you AI agent more efficiently to profile and write faster R code! opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06... #rstats #dataBS

opensource.posit.co

Introducing debrief: profiling summaries for AI agents

debrief turns profvis profiling output into text-based summaries: hotspots, call trees, source context, and memory allocations, readable in the terminal and consumable by AI agents.

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 21/06/2026

In between, I am enjoying Steins Gate: great scifi thriller, full of heart, and quite hilarious!

static.klipy.com

Steins Gate Anime Scene

ALT: Steins Gate Anime Scene

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 21/06/2026

Here's a little ranking of anime movies I've been watching during my holidays: - Your Name ❤️ - 5 Centimeters a Second 💔 - *** Weathering With You 🌦️🌈 - The Girl That Leapt Through Time ⏱️👩 - Summer Wars 🧓🤖 *** The studio was showing off here, the level of detail is mindblowing!

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Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I shared many global population density maps here before but never one in the style of an animal habitat map. So here is the habitat map of Homo Sapiens (Humans). As the Bloodhound Gang taught me, "you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals". Source: buff.ly/sBjgHGU

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Simon Goring @sjgoring.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

This show is fantastic.

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 08/06/2026

Me too. This player is out there playing a different game than everyone else. And she's SO FUN to watch!

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Totoro @nigelsq.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

#Rstats Shiny really is great, but it's a lot. There are other tools for interactive graphs like crosstalk. If you have a static df, and need drop-down, radio and checkbox filters it may be all you need. Works great with Quarto. More here. intro2r.library.duke.edu/widgets.html

intro2r.library.duke.edu

R/Tidyverse/Quarto - get started - Easy interactive viz

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Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez @frodsan.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

{duckplyr} is amazing. Retrieve records from a large online database with several million rows in 1 second duckplyr.tidyverse.org #Rstats

Example of querying cloud database with duckplyr in R

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Simon Goring @sjgoring.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Pride Month isn’t just about sexuality, it’s about representation, inclusion and human rights. It’s a time to celebrate and a call to action to do more for our friends, family and neighbours. Pride Month is the result of decades of hard fought victories, and a reminder that the fight isn’t over.

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Neil Richards @questionsindataviz.com · 28/05/2026

Hi to all followers and bluesky folks - it's been a long six months since I posted. It's hard to condense into 200ish characters, so I'll just say that redundancy and cancer hit one after the other. But we fight on - slowly venturing into the freelance space while prioritising health and recovery!

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 27/05/2026

🎯🎯🎯

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 26/05/2026

Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-and...

"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features."
He said that the trade-off costs from Al are harder to justify because he can't draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.

The comment led to what he described as a
"head-exploding moment," sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.
He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

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Clare @shigarakitomura.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Criminally overlooked: Summertime Rendering Again, this should be in discussions about "What should i recommend to my friend who just started anime" alongside things like Death Note and Attack On Titan. I can't write anything under a single post that does this work of art justice. Read it.

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 24/05/2026

That's nothing to my son's farts ☣️🤢

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CRAN Updates @cranupdates.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Updates on CRAN: duckspatial (1.1.0), QuickJSR (1.10.0), spatialData (1.0.1)

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Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez @frodsan.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

#StatsPubs No matter how many times you read it, this paper on hierarchical GAMs keeps giving. Clear model explanations together with R code (mgcv). So useful! doi.org/10.7717/peer... Thanks for writing @ericjpedersen.bsky.social, D. Miller, @gsimpson.bsky.social @noamross.net

In this paper, we discuss an extension to two popular approaches to modeling complex structures in ecological data: the generalized additive model (GAM) and the hierarchical model (HGLM). The hierarchical GAM (HGAM), allows modeling of nonlinear functional relationships between covariates and outcomes where the shape of the function itself varies between different grouping levels. We describe the theoretical connection between HGAMs, HGLMs, and GAMs, explain how to model different assumptions about the degree of intergroup variability in functional response, and show how HGAMs can be readily fitted using existing GAM software, the mgcv package in R. We also discuss computational and statistical issues with fitting these models, and demonstrate how to fit HGAMs on example data. All code and data used to generate this paper are available at: github.com/eric-pedersen/mixed-effect-gams.

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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

The entire software industry has had to make the decision “Fast, cheap and good: pick two” when it comes to AI and FAST & CHEAP has won in a landslide. The debate is now more about how good you can get it when you’re producing code faster than you can read or asking how bad are a few bugs anyway?

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Simon Goring @sjgoring.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Carbon capture is basically greenwashing anyway. I don’t know why we continue to pretend it’s a viable option.

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 15/05/2026

Last week I started tracking the impact of the venerable {spatialRF} #rstats 📦, and turns out it's been cited by ~70 research papers: blasbenito.github.io/spatialRF/ar...

blasbenito.github.io

spatialRF In The Wild

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 15/05/2026

Last week I started tracking the impact of the venerable {spatialRF} #rstats 📦, and turns out it's been cited by ~70 research papers: blasbenito.github.io/spatialRF/ar...

blasbenito.github.io

spatialRF In The Wild

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Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · 13/05/2026

Or just a typical Tuesday evening for MJ23.

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mdsumner @mdsumner.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

if anyone in R or Python ever thought "gee I'd like to contribute to GDAL", I'm here to help you get started can guide you through good approaches, what to think about, and what's bare minimum for a bug fix or feature PR, and the python and C++ tooling you will need (speaking linux)

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Jakub Nowosad @jakubnowosad.com · 13/05/2026

David O’Sullivan shows how spatial autocorrelation makes sampling fundamentally important: even when two surfaces contain the same values, their spatial arrangement means different sampling schemes can “see” very different patterns 🗺️ URL: geospatialstuff.com/posts/2025/1... #GIS #rspatial

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