iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"No one is forcing you to read it" - so true, but IMO many maintainers have internalised their interpretation of open source social contract, and if they felt obliged to give *all* contributions a good effort review, it takes a while to update those beliefs. Seeing this on Arrow especially.

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Achim Zeileis @zeileis.org · 06/10/2026

🚨 New CRAN Task View: Package Development and Maintenance #rstats #cran By Lluís Revilla and Heather Turner @heathrturnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy URL: cran.r-project.org/view=Package...

Screenshot of the CRAN Task View "Package Development and Maintenance" at https://CRAN.R-project.org/view=PackageDevelopment

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R Consortium @rconsortium.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

NEXT WEEK! Register now! "Sustaining R: Investing in the People, Infrastructure, and Community Behind R" R Core / R Foundation panel discussion Oct 6 Simon Urbanek, Kurt Hornik, Heather Turner. Hosted by R Consortium. r-consortium.org/webinars/sus... #RStats #opensource

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Lisa Diedrich @lisadiedrich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"This is not models going rogue. This is gross incompetence & negligence by a particular company, which actually they could be held criminally liable for." @timnitgebru.blacksky.app cuts to the AI chase.

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Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Nic ( @niccrane.bsky.social) taught us all about FREAKING PARQUET FILES on the #DSLab, which are wayyyyy cooler than I realized. Parquet files: Preserve data types Are fast & small Are column-oriented so you can read just 1 col if wanted! & Positron displays'em out-the-box! ▶️ youtu.be/2mQ4kc9J9uQ

What is a Parquet file anyway? Why is Parquet good? | Nic Crane | Data Science Lab

YouTube video by Posit PBC

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Carson Sievert (he/him) @cpsievert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

New in querychat: multiple tables, chat history, data-dict, and easy extraction of findings into Quarto, Shiny, Jupyter, etc. querychat is now much more capable beyond just querying "pre-defined" Shiny outputs. Available for both #rstats and #python. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-09...

The wizard for extracting findings into Quarto, Shiny, Jupiter, etc.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Super excited for the Openscapes Community Call today: "Open Communities in the age of AI". I have so many questions right now on how we bring new people in while protecting maintainer energy, & I can't think of a better speaker lineup to help answer that! Details: openscapes.org/events/2026-...

openscapes.org

Community Call: Open Communities in the age of AI – Openscapes

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Love this blog post by @jonkeane.bsky.social about language and interacting with AI; something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the more time I spend my day talking with human-simulating outputs and less time talking with humans. jonkeane.com/blog/languag... #ai #llms

jonkeane.com

Language is in the eye of the perceiver

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yup. I'm now refusing to read AI-generated issues - if a human didn't write it, a human ain't reading it either.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I also love Cory Doctorow's equivalent - the "reverse centaur" - i.e. a centaur is a human assisted by AI, super powered, but a reverse centaur akin to a meat proxy - AI assisted by a human, with a delightfully illustrative book cover

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I built two CLI tools in Go without writing a line of Go. Inspired by Wes McKinney's posit::conf keynote, I let Claude run with auto-accept, roborev reviewing every commit, and only paused for design decisions. It...just worked. Lessons for OSS maintenance too: niccrane.com/posts/go-uti...

niccrane.com

Building Go Tools Without Writing Any Go – Nic Crane

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I've published my rapid learning skill that I use when I don't want AI to just do all the work for me - I use it to learn new codebases & it's saved me, like, a gazillion hours when working on ellmer recently! 🎉 Repo: github.com/thisisnic/ra... Blog post: niccrane.com/posts/rapid-... #rstats #ai

GitHub - thisisnic/rapid-learning: A skill for rapid learning

A skill for rapid learning. Contribute to thisisnic/rapid-learning development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

ellmer 0.5.0 is now on CRAN! #rstats 🎉 New in this release: citations from web search, new ways to upload files, token counting before you send, streaming structured output, and AWS Bedrock Mantle support. Read all about it on the Posit Open Source blog: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-09...

opensource.posit.co

ellmer 0.5.0

ellmer 0.5.0 is now on CRAN, with new ways to send files to the model, citations from web search tools, and new ways to update model price data.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Same! Lovely to meet you at Conf btw. I have left feeling sooo excited about so many ideas and wanting to do all of them, right now!

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This feels like an *entirely* different domain of task to open source library maintenance where I review the code I and others produce and my main challenges right now are managing cognitive load and decision fatigue.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Most likely helped a lot by pointing it at github.com/kenn-io so I could benefit from the design decisions made in the tools there. But, genuinely astounded by how productive I could be in a language I've never worked in before.

Development and knowledge systems for the agentic era - Kenn Software

Kenn Software

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Inspired by @wesmckinney.com's keynote at #positconf26 + enjoying using tools like roborev, I was curious to see if I could get Claude to create a Go tui with minimal input from me while I watched conference talks today...it worked confusingly well! github.com/thisisnic/go...

GitHub - thisisnic/goaltracker: Goal tracker tui written in Go

Goal tracker tui written in Go. Contribute to thisisnic/goaltracker development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ooh, Wes' keynote is making me wanna go back to my 2025 plan and treat my agents like a team of staff + assign specific roles to specific models etc and now I guess I need to use something other than Claude for everything - recommendations?

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FWIW a split roll with a filling is a butty, barm, bap, or roll. Not a sandwich. And don't even get me started on the question of if a menu says "chicken sandwich" what you expect that to be (i.e. NOT a chicken burger). But I'll forgive 🇺🇸 as your chicken burgers are admittedly delicious.

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Chaotic good. This is acceptable 😆

Third, nothing ever goes wrong just giving things a quick skim, all AI problems are solved, and we don't need to figure anything else out and can just kick back and let Claude do the hard work 🎉

Meme showing top half with leaking water tank with caption "agent making errors left and right" and bottom half a tiny bit of tape being slapped over it with the caption "the human in the loop"

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Secondly, folks are getting *very* strategic in how they ensure other people will the first ones to be culled when the robots take over 🦾

Image of slide showing more accurate results the more rude the tone of the prompt

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Out of context slides and insights from #positconf26, a short thread. Firstly, Americans defining words is often extremely upsetting to us Brits 🇺🇸🇬🇧😭

Slide with image of hot dog defining a sandwich as "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between"

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5. deputy for creating nice coherent agentic AI workflows from a nice coherent AI ecosystem to not overcomplicate things github.com/jameshwade/d...

GitHub - JamesHWade/deputy: Agentic AI Workflows for R

Agentic AI Workflows for R. Contribute to JamesHWade/deputy development by creating an account on GitHub.

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4. data-diff for inspecting changes to Parquet files that you've been editing github.com/hadley/data-...

GitHub - hadley/data-diff

Contribute to hadley/data-diff development by creating an account on GitHub.

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3. awesome new stuff in querychat too like data visualisation via ggsql, and the handoff feature for extracting your analyses for later github.com/posit-dev/qu...

GitHub - posit-dev/querychat: Chat with your data in R and Python

Chat with your data in R and Python. Contribute to posit-dev/querychat development by creating an account on GitHub.

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A 🧵 of cool #rstats & #python things I want to read more about after learning about lots of updates at #positconf26 today! 1. commons - a framework for creating trusted data agents which enables some really thoughtful ways to add context and flag up trust to end users github.com/posit-dev/co...

GitHub - posit-dev/commons: AI Agents for Data Analysis

AI Agents for Data Analysis. Contribute to posit-dev/commons development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 15/09/2026

We're excited to share commons, an R and Python package that helps data scientists build trustworthy data agents for their organizations! Read more on the @posit.co open source blog: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-09...

A screenshot of the blog post announcing commons. The hero image shows the hex sticker, a common kingfisher on a park bench.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Commons is a new #rstats/Python package which helps ppl answer DS questions reliably by controlling agent behaviour and defining trusted calculations, using citations to back up claims, providing confidence in answers, and adding determinism into the process 😍

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Excited to be attending posit::conf this year, and not presenting, just hanging out! Would love to chat to people about how they're using AI in their work, especially for learning, as I'll be talking about this at LatinR. Also would love to talk about Arrow/Parquet, ellmer + anything else #rstats 😁

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Same! Gonna be awesome to hang out with everyone IRL, like actual tangible human people!

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Loved this talk by @felienne.bsky.social - and the points about "hard" things being values over "simple" things resonated a lot! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-...

youtube.com

AI made me doubt everything about programming by Felienne Hermans - DDD Europe 2026

YouTube video by Domain-Driven Design Europe

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It's shenanigans all the way down, around here

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

One of my greatest achievements of 2026 has been successfully persuading an American that us Brits really do pronounce it po-tah-to, rhyming with how we pronounce tomato, just like in the song.

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Anyone find their "biggest AI challenges in 2026" are actually human ones? For me: 1) managing the cognitive load of reviewing output 2) making sure I'm still working on the right thing 3) continuing to make actual decisions instead of just outsourcing overthinking

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I skim most of its explanations at the best of times to preserve brainspace, but if I manage to properly make the time to do a deep dive on something I'll let you know!

I'd been inattentive about updating Claude CLI until today, when it was coming up with particularly poor solutions with Opus 4.6 despite high thinking levels, and I was getting frustrated, but wow, did updating it and then switching to Fable change *everything* 😍

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How do you get back into the swing of "saying things in public on the internet"? Once I get past that initial hump, I've got it, but every time starting again is haaaard

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

OK; posit::conf roll call, who am I gonna be seeing in Houston next month? It's my first time in years not submitting a talk (gave myself permission to take some time off after last year's public speaking binge!) and going as an attendee, and I'm reeeeally excited to catch up with people! 🎉 #rstats

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Woop, paper copy arrived today! This is such an excellent resource 😁

Isabella Velásquez @ivelasq3.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Reposted by Nic Crane

Got a sneak preview of tomorrow's Wordle

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Oh wow, seems like LLMs can overthink as much as I can

Long text output from Positron terminal: > chat <- chat_ollama(model = "qwen3:0.6b")
+ chat$chat("Say hi in one word")
Okay, the user wants me to say 'hello' in one word. Let me think. "Hello" is a
common greeting, but is there a way to say it in one word? Wait, how about "h"
for hello? No, that's not right. Maybe "hi", which is the first "h". But "h"
doesn't mean "hello" in the way words do. Wait, maybe I'm overcomplicating
this. The user might just be testing if I can think of a word that means
hello, but "h" isn't a greeting. Oh, right, but maybe they wanted a
one-syllable word that conveys the meaning of "hello", so "h" isn't right.
Hmm. Maybe there's a misunderstanding. Wait, is there a way to say "hello"
with only one word? Like "h" again. No. Maybe the user is just confused and
needs to know that there's no one word but "hello" which you say, but you
can't do it alone. So I should explain that and maybe use a single word that's
a greeting, even if it's "h".
You can **h** for "hello".

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

And also some great real world usage + evaluation of AI by Shona Ferguson, looking not only at accuracy but other important metrics like whether it actually saved time and how usable the output was, and the value of using structured frameworks. youtu.be/vCutabRRy6w?...

Evaluating LLMs for Responsible Scientific Data Rescue — Shona Ferguson | AI in Production 2026

YouTube video by Jumping Rivers

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Learned a lot from this excellent talk by @gws.phd about not overcomplicating things when building agents! youtu.be/drNz67Pa_-Q?...

Effective Agents: A Builder's Guide to Working with AI — George Stagg | AI in Production 2026

YouTube video by Jumping Rivers

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Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Catching up on talks from AI in Production conference on YouTube starting with this one from @enpiar.bsky.social about exactly when to use and not use MCP. My highlight: learning why CLIs do the job some of the time but the specific circumstances where MCP can help! youtu.be/1mtWbxQE8S8?...