iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 7h

Bose is making "throwback" noise-cancelling wired earbuds - no charging, no Bluetooth, just plug in. Annouced Monday, available to pre-order. Pre-orders are already sold out! Apparently I'm not the only one who liked wired headphones. www.bose.com/pressroom/bo... www.bose.com/p/earbuds/bo...

bose.com

Bose Unveils New Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds

Discover the all-new Bose Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds. Enjoy premium sound, proprietary QuietControl, and plug-and-play USB-C simplicity. Learn more!

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Sarah Langs @slangsonsports.bsky.social · 22h

Most career scoreless postseason outings with 10+ strikeouts: Justin Verlander: 3 Cam Schlittler: 2 Sandy Koufax: 2 Kevin Brown: 2 Randy Johnson: 2 Cliff Lee: 2

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Cool 2022 and 2024 US voter turnout dashboard from @redistdatahub.bsky.social redistrictingdatahub.org/resources/vo... #USPoli

Screenshot of the dashboard featuring a choropleth map of the US, number of registered and voted, turnout percent, and filters including state, year, gender, age, party, and race/ethnicity

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We're in the 3rd day of a #Noreaster - talk about weather that makes you want to take a nap! - but my weather station doesn't have data for the storm rain total. Wind snapped the old pole the weather station was attached to and all the water spilled out. (Happily, the station still works) #MaWX

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Frisket is an open-source AI spreadsheet for reporting! for research! for investigations! You can drop in documents, audio, video, emails, spreadsheets, etc. Ask questions, get structured data back." - Columbia Univ data journalism prof @dangerscarf.bsky.social frisket.dev

frisket.dev

frisket — an open-source AI spreadsheet

frisket: an open-source AI spreadsheet for reporting and research. Drop in documents, audio, video, ask questions, get results.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

When I talk to 'average people,' some of the greatest enthusiasm for AI agents/skills is for *community volunteer work.* Help in generating minutes, putting events on websites, searching a group's newsletters, seeing what public hearings are in a neighborhood. Not a labor revolution, but useful!

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If you've got access to both Claude Code and Codex, there's now an official OpenAI Codex plugin for Claude Code. It lets you ask Codex to review Claude's plans, files and such - inside a Claude Code session. /plugin marketplace add openai/codex-plugin-cc /plugin install codex@openai-codex

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I'm using my $100 of Claude cloud credits to improve an ancient project on GitHub that also lives on my Windows PC and Linux server, but not in sync with each other (EEK). I need to rationalize it all. Fable is explaining step by step what I need to do on the server and this is a great way to learn.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

While chatting with people about their retirements recently, I heard some decidedly different views. Some thoughts: nextchapter.machlis.com/posts/2026-0... #Retirement #NextChapter

nextchapter.machlis.com

Differing Views on Retirement – My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey

Not everyone loves it (although I do)

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Weekly number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 2024 - Sep 25, 2026, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot. Weeks run Sat–Fri. This past week: 189 posts Coded with {bskyr} and {ggplot2} [Posted via cron job. Tx for ur patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats

Bar chart of weekly #RStats posts (Sat–Fri). The week of Sep 19–Sep 25, 2026 had 189 posts, and the week before had 203.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

While I find the news disheartening, nature remains amazing and awe-inspiring

Colorful sunset over silhouetted trees and building

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I won’t even install the basic Facebook app on my phone. I use a separate browser for Facebook that‘s different from browsers I use for private things. It is a TERRIBLE idea to give a Meta AI agent access to your computer, as @jasonaten.bsky.social confirms: www.inc.com/jason-aten/m...

inc.com

Meta’s New Muse AI Agent Read My Private Messages. I Never Asked It To

Permission isn't the same and what a user actually expects your AI product will do with their personal information.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The {maposm} #RStats 📦 "downloads OpenStreetMap layers, which are then selected, simplified, merged or modified to create a set of composite layers of urban areas, buildings, green spaces, main roads, secondary roads, railways, and water bodies."-Timothée Giraud #RSpatial @openstreetmap.bsky.social

codeberg.org

maposm

R package to download, simplify and merge multiple geographic layers from OpenStreetMap for mapping purposes.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Example of the type of garbage data the US Supreme Court just allowed the Trump regime to use in order to disenfranchise American voters #USPoli ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There weren't massive protests when the US Supreme Court improperly interfered with Florida's recount re Bush v Gore. Instead, we meekly acquiesced. And now here we are, with the Court apparently deciding that a president can block whatever voters he wants, using data riddled with errors. #USpoli

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

New to me: “The aim of geoarrowWidget is to facilitate fast transfer of geospatial data between R memory and the browser using GeoArrow memory layout. It also provides JavaScript bindings for reading GeoParquet files from remote URLs.” r-spatial.github.io/geoarrowWidg... #RStats ⬇️⬇️⬇️

r-spatial.github.io

Attach (Geo)Arrow and/or (Geo)Parquet Data to a Widget

Provides functions and necessary JavaScript bindings to quickly transfer spatial data from R memory or remote URLs to the browser for use in interactive HTML widgets created with the htmlwidgets R pac...

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

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.com

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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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Attention high school educators! "Learn about upcoming professional development to introduce data literacy in the classroom through youth-led air quality investigations." Via Harvard, the Smithsonian, and Framingham State's Christa McAuliffe Center Webinar on Oct 28 6 to 7 pm EDT

cm-center.org

BEST AQI Educator Info Webinar — Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Center

Date: Wednesday, October 28 Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM Audience: High School Educators Location: Zoom Join the MetroWest STEM Education Network to learn more about the BEST AQI - Breathing Easier: ...

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Blacksky Algorithms @blackskyweb.xyz · 23/09/2026

🎉 Acorn is officially open. You can now create a space for your community on the open social web - no wait required. acorn.blacksky.community

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"GPT-6 Sol and Luna are half the price of their GPT-5.6 equivalents. . . . It’s hard to overstate how competitive this pricing is. " ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“Citations for Web search” 🎉🎉🎉

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

You know you're a online editor (or in my case, a retired online editor) when you see "Add to lists" as an option on Bluesky and want to tell someone "It should say 'Add to or remove from lists'!"

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Programmers often talk about what Simon Willison calls the November inflection point, when AI models got a LOT better at writing code. But this new generation of LLMs is different in other ways, too. Christopher Penn outlines his thoughts on how we should all change our interactions with AI:

almosttimely.substack.com

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ What's Changed in Basic AI Prompting (2026-09-20)

Don’t take a deep breath

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Dariia Mykhailyshyna @dariia.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Looking for more speakers for Workshops for Ukraine (sites.google.com/view/dariia-...), so if you want to contribute to a series by teaching a workshop on #Rstats, #Python, data analysis, while helping raise money for Ukrainian charities, drop me a message or email dmykhailyshyna@kse.org.ua #Econsky

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Weekly number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 2024 - Sep 18, 2026, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot. Weeks run Sat–Fri. This past week: 203 posts Coded with {bskyr} and {ggplot2} [Posted via cron job. Tx for ur patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats

Bar chart of weekly #RStats posts (Sat–Fri). The week of Sep 12–Sep 18, 2026 had 203 posts, and the week before had 161.

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 17/09/2026

Just to clarify: _quarto 2_ can run code, and 100x includes the parallelization speedups! It's quarto-hub integration that's pretty clunky right now. (But yes, it's really nice and fast :D)

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 16/09/2026

FYI Posit AI Pass subscribers; we wound down the instance serving Gemma 4 today. If you were a regular user, you might give GLM 5.3 Flash a try; it's vision capable, quite a bit larger and newer (and thus more capable!), and served at ~half the price that Gemma 4 was per-token!

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Quarto 2 will be 100 times faster than the current edition. You can try an early beta, but as of now it only does HTML output and can't run code yet. It'll be "about a year of work" before Posit advises users to move to Q2, @cscheid.net told #PositConf2026. github.com/quarto-dev/q2 #QuartoPub

github.com

GitHub - quarto-dev/q2: q2 is the experimental implementation of Quarto 2 in Rust.

q2 is the experimental implementation of Quarto 2 in Rust. - quarto-dev/q2

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Tyson Barrett ( @healthandstats.bsky.social ) shared some useful tips on things to add to a CLAUDE.md file or a skills file in his "Teach Once Use Often: Building AI Skills for Data Analysis" #PositConf2026 talk. Slides: tysonbarrett.com/assets/posit...

A zoomed dark panel highlights text from CLAUDE.md:

# Make Errors Visible

Never drop NAs
Create checks after any major data step
Do not change the data to pass a check without asking.
Don’t overwrite raw data.
Don’t delete files or outputs without asking.
When updating a file, create a backup so no other changes get lost.

[Alt text by ChatGPT]

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I've known for awhile that software development has changed dramatically in the era of AI, but to hear @wesmckinney.com say "I think I'm done writing code" was still kind of jarring. #PositConf2026

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

3 key skills in the era of software development with generative AI, @wesmckinney.com tells #PositConf2026: Judgment - deciding what's worth doing Taste - recognize what makes it good Agency

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We're now at 176 Bluesky posts with the #positconf2026 #positconf and/or #positcon26 hashtag(s) Shiny app to search and sort them all: apps.machlis.com/shiny/positc... #RStats #RShiny

Screen shot of part of the app showing 176 posts, 40 authors, 1150 likes, part of a table displaying a few of the posts below, and filters in a left sidebar

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Jared Knowles @jaredknowles.com · 12/09/2026

Follow the Money: Opening 56 Years of the Fiscal Record of Our Democracy The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer... 🔗

civilytics.com

Follow the Money: Opening 56 Years of the Fiscal Record of Our Democracy

The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer and a bulk download, aligned across 56 years so a query returns a continuous series. It is a record you can contribute to.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"We have a lot of R fans on my team" NY Times graphics editor @christinezhang.bsky.social tells #PositConf2026 🎉 She also said she often sketches out graphics using #RStats ggplot2 and is a frequent user of the Positron IDE.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

@posit.co is working on a project called Canvas, a much more LLM-focused way of working than their current IDEs. Positron and RStudio have LLM chats in a vertical sidebar; Canvas give AI way more screen real estate. It should be ready try out soon, CTO @jcheng5.bsky.social told #PositConf2026

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Posit's @hadley.nz told #PositConf2026 about his latest projects: data-dict, a YAML spec & CLI for data documentation data-dict.tidyverse.org data-diff - a "tool that compares two Parquet files and emits a semantic diff as a compact, operation-oriented summary." github.com/hadley/data-... 1/2

data-dict.tidyverse.org

data-dict: a data dictionary your data can’t disagree with – data-dict

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The shinychat package now can include citations in its LLM responses 🎉 #PositConf2026

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

querychat now has a /handoff command that will generate a downloadable report from your chat in formats such as Quarto, a Jupyter notebook and more, Carson Sievert tells #PositConf2026 .

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

noted at #PositConf2026 "AgentsView brings your AI coding sessions into one searchable archive. Browse recorded conversations from more than 60 agent formats, compare activity and costs, and reuse lessons from past work. The archive stays on your machine unless you turn on a feature that shares it."

agentsview.io

See what your AI coding agents did, and what it cost.

Browse your AI coding sessions, search past work, and track activity and costs.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Useful tip: Give your agent a FILE PATH instead of pasting in an entire file, Posit engineering manager Sharon Wang advises #PositConf2026 attendees. This uses fewer tokens and lets the AI search for what it needs in the file.

A conference presentation slide beside a speaker at a podium. The slide reads:

“tip 2: tell the agent where to look

• reference a file path rather than pasting the whole file

• reference files and text over screenshots/images
• HTML, QMD, SVG, etc.

• connect to external sources for live data
• check out Neal Richardson’s talk on MCP in this session!”

“tip 2,” “file path,” and “files and text” are highlighted in yellow; “Neal Richardson” is bold. The podium sign reads “posit conf(2026).”
[Alt text by ChatGPT]

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Small habits applied in the source make a document accessible by default Accessibility: necessary for some, useful for everyone. Openness is only complete when the results are accessible." - Dr. Björn Fisseler Slides on his accessibility #PositConf2026 presentation: 2026positconf.bfisseler.de

2026positconf.bfisseler.de

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This tension isn't new, but it's becoming exacerbated in the era of generative AI, @simonpcouch.com & @sara-altman.bsky.social tells #PositConf2026

"In the battle between convenience and correctness, convenience is winning." - Joe Cheng (CTO @ Posit)

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Main positconf::(2026) #positconf2026 conference starts today, with sessions on #Rstats and #Python (including issues in the age of AI) as well as the Quarto technical publishing platform & more. Attending virtually (what I'm doing this year) is $99 [$49 for students/educators] conf.posit.co/2026/

conf.posit.co

posit::conf(2026)

A polyglot community of innovators and transformers. Learn, grow, and connect with a global community of data scientists at our annual data science conference.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Do you want your AI to write better #RStats Shiny code? Posit's GitHub repo includes a shiny-for-r skill that is also discoverable from the btw R 📦! [h/t @veerle.hypebright.nl on LinkedIn] github.com/rstudio/shin...

github.com

shiny/inst/skills/shiny-for-r at main · rstudio/shiny

Easy interactive web applications with R. Contribute to rstudio/shiny development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Did you know that Ollama automatically unloads your LLM after just 5 minutes of inactivity? You can change that! See how, plus more tips to optimize your local AI setup: www.infoworld.com/article/4218... #Ollama #GenAI

infoworld.com

How to get better results from local LLMs with Ollama

Thanks to recent Gemma 4 and Qwen releases, you can get some real generative AI work done on your own computer. Here’s how to optimize an Ollama setup.

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Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The rule they are overturning was predicted to give $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047, with projections that by 2035, it would would prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360K asthma attacks, 48K school absence days and 57K lost workdays each year

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