Malcolm 朝精 Barrett

Link broke! Here is the current link: www.r-causal.org/chapters/04-...

Just a little reminder that I did a quarto revealjs slidecrafting workshop a little while back, and it was recorded! Recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpFy... material: emilhvitfeldt.github.io/workshop-sli...

Vulnerability xkcd.com/3314/

this one’s a personal favorite

I wish my grandfather could see me now: arguing with a giant pile of linear algebra

A series of maps on the Russian meat trade in 1913. Read the article here attilabatorfy.substack.com/p/the-russia...

I think I found him

This is Pele, my new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax. - 100-500× faster than mermaid.js - 6× smaller bundle - No dependencies - Easy to theme - Responsive to device width - Open source (MIT) Try it at pele.run

Wrote a blogpost about AI and atproto. Just a normal blogpost. Normal kind. (I actually did write the text of it.)

I am hiring! There are probably about ~12 people in the world who meet exactly what I'm looking for, so we're open to considering teaching a 13th person to do what I do provided they already have a strong background in Bayesian statistics (non-negotiable) docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hi all! I'm looking for people to try out my new collaborative writing platform. Think: Overleaf or GDocs for Mkdown LaTeX HTML Typst Quarto Free, open source, and full-featured. Many editors, chat, comments, track changes, history, AI, mobile, templates, etc Would ❤️ any feedback! librepaper.org

The October release of #Positron went out last week, and I am so pleased to share a bit of what's in it! 🙌 We've got the new Data Connections on by default, faster language features for Quarto, ways for agents to drive and interact with Positron, and more: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-10...

Important knowledge for all those looking to submit an R package

Claudish is a great example of how sometimes present tense and active voice makes writing worse

Teaching my daughter how to pronounce Euler so she is not embarrassed in kindergarten

i'm working on some more updates to the official Git documentation so uh what is one concept you wish the docs explained more clearly? right now I'm working on merge conflicts which I'm pretty excited about

quick screencap of qmd->docx->qmd comment flow in quarto 2/quarto-hub

IT’S HAPPENING

So check out this PR from @gordonwoodhull.bsky.social over at Quarto 2. Is that import/export from Word preserving comments? Why yes, yes it is indeed 😮 github.com/quarto-dev/q...

🚨 After 20 years of service, the R-Forge code-sharing platform will be retired. #rstats Timeline: - Until end of 2026: Normal operations. - Jan 2027: Switch to read-only, but SVN continues to work. - Jan 2028: SVN also read-only. Reason: The underlying FusionForge software is no longer maintained.

Interested in studying survey and data science at U-M? PhD Info Sessions (sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/...) Sess 1: Oct 9, 9-10AM ET Sess 2: Nov 9, 7:30-8:30 PM ET MS Info Sessions (sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/...) Sess 1: Oct 23, 9-10AM ET Sess 2: Nov 23, 7-8PM ET

We just released Polars 2.0. It removed many of our legacy decisions makes the streaming engine our default and promotes SQL to a first class citizen within Polars. pola.rs/posts/releas...

The pro data center elephant and piggie was pretty weird

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

This thread is so great! 🤩 To avoid annoying resizing, figured I'd mention an alternative to {ggview}: {showtext} can resize all text to a specific dpi Text is the part that I find I have to fiddle with most when saving #ggplot2 plots, so this usually works for me 😀 #rstats #dataviz

From a discussion of updating a department website...

If you’ve seen me trying not to reveal what I’ve been working on the last few months, well, here it is 🎉 Our first big offering - aside from Atmosphere account hosting - is personal websites for researchers! Drop your must-haves, preferences, ideas, or questions about personal/prof sites below 🧪🧬💻

Ever looked at your graph and thought: this needs a more dramatic exit strategy? Make your R base plots self-destruct with style. If you must, download here: github.com/brandmaier/d... #RStats #DataVisualization #RProgramming #DataScience #OpenSource #AcademicHumor #noAI

meanwhile Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 LLMs ? AGI

I get that AI in academia/research is a little controversial, but personally, it has greatly improved my ability to produce low-impact science.

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can and incredible new powers to change the things I can't.

I think I have cracked one of the final things that kept people in keynote over quarto revealjs slides. Introducing ✨️ quarto-revealjs-magic-move ✨️ emilhvitfeldt.com/post/quarto-... #quarto #slidecrafting

The University of Michigan National Survey Panel (M-Panel) is now openly accepting questionnaire content from researchers. Would you like to ask questions to a national probability-based panel of adults in the U.S., with an oversample from Michigan? Tap below! mpanel.isr.umich.edu/for-research...

It really is striking how many authoritarian states have ended up in this exact same place, where the leader seizes control of scientific inquiry. Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, Aryan Physics in the Third Reich, Great Leap Forward (also related to Lysenko) in China.

The perfect notebook would fix me

Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming https://theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nefarious-plot-to-undergo-years-of-m-1850433563/

This is giving me a talk idea bout constraining agentic LLMs to improve correctness

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

Nancy 9/8/26

Once again 🕯️summoning the Logistic Regression Is Not Fucked from the Netherworld 🕯️ web.archive.org/web/20190806...

New beta of #Rstats rig: LOTS of EXCITING stuff: - new: web site: rig.r-lib.org - new: user-mode R installation: rig.r-lib.org/admin-vs-use... - new: manage R packages (CRAN + git): rig.r-lib.org/pkg-guide.html - new: manage R projects and virtual environments: rig.r-lib.org/proj-guide.h...

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 7.0.0. The most significant changes since 6.0.0 are faster installations, stronger sandboxing, native macOS app, vulnerability checks, advisory database, end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs to Tier 3.

I like this a lot

quarto-hub is really coming together, y'all! I'm so excited to share some of this with you at conf next week. Check out our upcoming collaborative wysiwyg editor working on a fully-styled Quarto 2 page:

Very few people know that this is how it all began @celestialsem.bsky.social

I'm starting go all in on S7. Just waiting for new development version to be released 🫣 {s7x} has been an absolute cheat code for my package development lately. s7x.josiah.rs #rstats