Blas M. Benito

My colleague Scott explains the automated high-resolution mapping systems I designed at Biome Makers: 📍Selection of soil sample locations. 🦠 Mapping soil microbiome, diseases, and carbon stock. ~700k hectares mapped worldwide so far! youtu.be/XNqsdm_fKzY?... Built with #rstats and no LLMs

What a disaster. I've become allergic to Nutella. Life is hell now.

it really does feel like they just got away with unprecedented amount of theft of expertise, and are now profiting off of it while replacing the professional opportunities for the very crafts and humans it trained on I never thought I would see the concept of expertise get so devalued

Biome Makers (my employer) just released the BeOpen Platform, a global atlas of soil life: beopen.earth/atlas I was barely involved, but huge kudos to our platforms team, who put in serious work to get this out. It’s also a good showcase of the data I work with daily, at a different scale.

Think how many shows there are on TV. And then about how Slow Horses is better than all of them.

The latest product update adds a model Diego Rodriguez de Prado and I designed: it predicts a soil’s maximum carbon capacity (CO₂eq/ha) from soil microbiome and spectral data (Sentinel-2), and is used to compute the farm’s carbon saturation map (%). www.global-agriculture.com/biologicals/...

it’s just great marketing

Not a Nordic fjord, but it works as home.

Just watched Masters of the Air. These chads flew depressurized bombers through clouds of shrapnel and bullets, were shot down, lived in German POW camps, ran away, went to fly in Korea and Vietnam, and got to live 90+ years. Me? I sneeze wrong and feel I'm losing one year of life.

More space junk (starlink) polluting satellite images I believe this one is different from the previous images shared online. The image is dated March 26, 2024 - earth.google.com/web/search/5... (51.79129, 113.06751) *old man shakes fist*

I've been out of Academia for 5 years, but my brain didn't get the memo: last night I missed a deadline for a grant proposal in my dreams.

#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...

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" 🤡

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.

"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.

This medley by Chick Corea and Hiromi Uehara is otherworldly: youtu.be/XaNk19CQfto?...

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

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

Elena Delle Donne's Hall of Fame speech featured a moving tribute to her sister.

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

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...

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

Awa Fam denies Olivia Miles, Olivia Miles gives her five

This guitar cover of 'Sparkle' (from the movie 'Your Name') is a beauty: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tY...

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?

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

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

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.

Git (by xkcd)

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

🗺️ 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

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

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/...

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

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

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

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!

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

This show is fantastic.

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

#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

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

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.

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!

🎯🎯🎯

Spatial+: a relatively easy way to address spatial confounding doi.org/10.1111/biom... Comparison with other methods: doi.org/10.1007/s131... #statistics #rspatial

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...

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.