iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 19h

webrarian is a new R package. It turns a folder of R scripts and data into a static website where R runs in the visitor's browser, with no compute server and nothing to install. blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/introd... #rstats #webr #webassembly

A card for the R package webrarian. Large text reads "A folder in. A website out." On the left, a small card lists a folder named lab-01 holding lab.R, setup.R and a data folder. A red arrow points from it to a browser window that shows a scatterplot of car weight against miles per gallon with brick-red points. The address coatless-wasm.github.io/webrarian is on the card.

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🔩All Hallow’s Joan🐈‍⬛ @screwedjoan.bsky.social · 23h

When you think about it, men having to face social and personal consequences for their actions is almost exactly like that time we mob murdered a bunch of women

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

So far, #LLMs have helped me do a lot of things successfully, but only things I know I want it to do, because I confidently know what those things are. “Create a module for API calls,” because I know that that’s a thing that computers do… how are people vibecoding things they don’t know even exist?!

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I’m gonna sound like a grumpy old fart but I think “New Song” + “New Song [SLOWED]” is one of the laziest music trends I have ever seen…

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Jamie Schembri @jamie.schembri.me · 29/09/2026

TL;DR I'm going to write more and no one is going to read it but that's okay.

schembri.me

Writing Things

I'm still here and I'd like to continue writing, if you'll have me.

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Little Comets wrote a great song about this in…2015?! Jeez it’s been a while m.youtube.com/watch?v=RAQp...

m.youtube.com

Little Comets - Formula

YouTube video by Little Comets

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I’m gonna be honest, I’m _feeling_ this happen with blogs too. A lot of people, myself included, learned things by self-teaching and then publishing what they learned in a personal blog. Having AI around for personal, tailored learning is great, but takes away any motivation to blog about it…

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I really like this idea of having small local AI agents alongside your frontier model subscription: local agents = your team of junior devs who crank out thorough, but small scripts, frontier = your senior project manager who understands architecture+design and can explain it to you on your terms

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Josiah @josiah.rs · 24/09/2026

I cannot emphasize enough how excited I am about {geoarrowwidget} and {deckglgeoarrow}. 3.2 **million** points in 4 seconds. #rspatial #rstats

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Accessibility Awareness @a11yawareness.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

For beginners, it can be difficult to know what to put in alt text, as well as when alt text is needed and when it isn't. This decision tree from @w3c helps you determine what to do, based on specific situations. www.w3.org/WAI/tutorial...

w3.org

An alt Decision Tree

Accessibility resources free online from the international standards organization: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A reminder that even if you don’t consider yourself a software engineer, you, dear #rstats user, do indeed need to think like a software engineer, even superficially, to avoid situations like this

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

For people attending #usrse26, I have some thoughts on this, so come see my poster session

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

So, now that I’m spending more time on Bluesky, and #positconf2026 is over… I have to ask… who is the resident #rstats memelord? And whatever happened to @rstats-sky.bsky.social and friends?

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I love watching the scales fall from people’s eyes

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

When I joined my current lab, one of first tasks was curating an ongoing investigation with several years of waves; I’m talking {plyr} & R 3.x kinda old. I can’t believe I thought I could’ve handled it in a week or two lol

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The AI/LLM sesh at #positconf2026 was actually a banger… if anything I am taking away the lesson that if AI is indeed gonna be generating all of this text, our job as humans should be to PREP, READ, & CORRECT as aggressively as possible.. some new tools are already on the way to letting us do that

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I love that so many of us are bad at ggplot that we instinctively know that these errors are, in-fact, not possible by a human

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

So the biggest most aggressive technocratic businesspeople on the planet are all really good at hyperoptimising value creation at everyone else’s expense, and now they’re scared one of their toys might kill everyone and are writing letters asking… someone else to stop them? Just stop, dude.

static.klipy.com

What Are You Waiting For?

ALT: What Are You Waiting For?

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The Journal of Immaterial Science @immaterialscience.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The Pizza Tray Is Too Small and Nobody Planned for This PDF: www.immaterialscience.org/2026/pizza

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Agents need foreplay and you can’t afford to have weak game out here

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Come to think of it, one of my favourite things is when people with opinions try to slide into the questions portion of a talk. “Yes but why use R? It’s so slow”….. Let’s gooo istg you were not expecting this smoke

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karl rove knausgård @uhactually.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

But the point is not necessarily about social usefulness, it’s that LLMs are *good* at writing software from human prompting, something computers were not able to do at all a few years ago, and that tons of people on here still insist they simply can’t do this for some reason.

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This isn’t even that hard to google, it’s been going on since insurance has existed: > Big Data Could Set Insurance Premiums. Minorities Could Pay the Price. www.aclu.org/news/racial-...

aclu.org

Big Data Could Set Insurance Premiums. Minorities Could Pay the Price. | ACLU

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

It’s stuff like this that has presented a major hurdle to scientist’s ability to just do some science. The lack of ergonomics in traditional scientific programming can be extremely stressful and we shouldn’t let that get in the way any longer..

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Do you think there was ever a time ancient humans looked at each other and were like, “hey Kevin, we’re happy you are so good at setting things on fire, but we need to talk about how you’ve set basically everything on fire trying to figure that out…”?

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Ken Koon Wong @kenkoonwong.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

📊 Working through ROC-AUC from scratch, then poking at its blind spots — low prevalence, calibration, and finally Decision Curve Analysis. Mostly notes to myself on what I learned (and got confused by) along the way. 🤔📈 www.kenkoonwong.com/blog/roc-auc...

kenkoonwong.com

ROC, Paper, Scissor, Shoe | Everyday Is A School Day

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Researchers sometimes ask me, “how do I know I should be using functions?” I’ll tell you. If you’ve ever done this: This is an anti pattern in data wrangling and can lead to very brittle software. There are two immediate fixes:

Reassigning the same object over and over, calling each one df, while applying different functions to it line after line

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

NGL I almost flamed OP in the comments for actually enjoying Waiting for Godot. That book sucked, and no English teacher can convince me otherwise

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

How is Google fumbling this hard? Imagine the company that one said “just don’t be evil” is now dealing with customers saying “I would rather pay someone else NOT to spy on me than continue being here.”

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I don’t know, I come from Zimbabwe where we were raised on the Queen’s English. I think “you all” sounds much more posh and proper, wouldn’t you agree?

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Edgar @theotheredgar.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

📣 New #tidymodels cheatsheet alert! "Model Performance with {yardstick}" is now available in PDF and Web here: opensource.posit.co/resources/ch... #posit #rstats #ml

Screenshot of both pages of the cheatsheet

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

“Though LLMs originate from a hyperactive tech sector + late stage capitalism, their domain of innovation may better fit knowledge and information access, than yet another app subscription. ITT, we propose that your local librarian should be given full&complete control over all LLM access and use…”

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

“In this paper, we review principles that show promise for allowing engineers to enhance human-computer interaction through an elegant coupling of automated services with direct manipulation.” Horvitz describing codex CLI, 1999 dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

dl.acm.org

Principles of mixed-initiative user interfaces

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I was at this concert and it was indeed brat.

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Damie Pak @damiepak.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Boston useR group lightning talks is brat #rstats, #statistics, #Boston.

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Kim Hu @kim-hu.com · 05/08/2026

no thank you, but good reminder that I should finally delete that unused dropbox account

Dropbox email;
New: Connect Dropbox to Claude and ChatGPT Summarize, organize, and create with your content. Meet Dropbox for Claude and ChatGPT

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tj mahr 🤘 @tjmahr.com · 20/07/2026

*reviewing* i really wish these authors included age as a covariate *5 minutes later* oooh the data is on OSF. i'll do it

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

I may have just found an interesting use for the “project type” #quarto extension…

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

The next time I feel old man yelling at cloud syndrome because the latest data science/engineering trend is becoming overbearing, I’m just going to repeat to myself: THE. DATA. WILL. NOT. GET. ANY. SMALLER.

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

While I personally don’t see the appeal for Typst since everything I’ve ever done is in R and Python, I’m going to evangelise computational notebooks regardless of the language. More software — especially for data science of all flavours — should be created in notebooks. It just makes sense

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US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) @us-rse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Registration is open for USRSE'26! 🎉 Join us October 19–21 in San Jose, CA for three days of research software engineering, AI-driven science, and community. Early bird rates available through July 31: 🎓 Student: $550 💼 Professional: $750 Register now → us-rse.org/usrse26/atte... #usrse26 #rse

us-rse.org

US-RSE Conference 2026

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 09/06/2026

Just found this intriguing new function by Wadea Abu Dahoud for making a log-scale axis squiggly, mostly to act as a visual cue/speed bump that the axis isn't linear. github.com/wade31985-ar... #rstats #dataviz

Scatterplot showing acceleration time on the x-axis and logged price on the y-axis, with a squiggly y-axis to signal that it's logged

library(tidyverse)
library(qatarcars)

ggplot(qatarcars, aes(x = performance, y = price)) +
geom_point() +
annotation_squiggled_log_y_axis(
ymin = min(qatarcars$price),
ymax = max(qatarcars$price),
x0 = 0,
amplitude = 0.3,
linewidth = 0.35,
base = 10,
waves = 35,
n = 4000,
amplitude_power = 1.2,
wave_power = 0.5
) +
scale_y_log10(
breaks = c(1e4, 1e5, 1e6, 1e7),
labels = scales::label_currency(prefix = "QR "),
expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.1))
) +
labs(title = "Car performance and price for cars in Qatar") +
theme_classic() +
theme(
axis.line.y = element_blank(),
axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5, face = "bold")
)

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Your friendly neighbourhood RSE @tinashemtapera.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

At this point I think I wanna become an expert in software engineering in academia and HPC just to prove it can be done… it’s so bloody irritating how data scientists in industry are like, “just develop in a container” and “just get an AWS account” and all their problems go away

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