how in the space of a week do both frontier labs go 'oops we forgot to unplug it from internet first' -- in violation of basic security practices, and yet this story will somehow be remembered forever history as a landmark 'advance in AI' that rendered human security experts irrelevant...

Last year was the year of teaching with frontier closed models through GitHub copilot -- opus for all! those doors are shut (and RIP GitHub Classroom). Now what? Thinking this is the year we start on OpenRouter & opencode / kilo code?

c 2023, near daily in discussion with students: pandas is causing the OOM kills. why didn't consider duckdb/ibis? (like we covered in class?) c2026, near daily discussion with the LLM (& LLMs of students): no not pandas! duckdb! 🦆🦆 (didn't you read the AGENTS.md?)

In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:

Recently @karinorman.bsky.social , @ctrlalttim.com @ecologyofgavin.bsky.social + I argued it's time we ecologists pay more attention to the carbon footprint of our tools. doi.org/10.1002/fee.... In this spirit: I give you the footprint of our local LLMs on NRP.ai carbon-api.nrp-nautilus.io

🤯 @posit.co launches ggsql 🤯 - yes it is precisely what it sounds like. - rust based stand-alone, needs vscode or jupyter (or merely wasm) to run opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL

Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.

opensource.posit.co

rustfs has `rc` S3 client?! It even matches the minio mc syntax? wow this is a good day. github.com/rustfs/cli

GitHub - rustfs/cli: A S3-compatible command-line client written in Rust.

A S3-compatible command-line client written in Rust. - rustfs/cli

github.com

Because bulk S3 operations should be fast and easy. A simple R wrapper to rclone: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... supports most object stores, should be much faster paws/aws.s3 I think. (also an alternative to minioclient since minio decided to become AIStor...)

hmm, openshell looks pretty interesting: github.com/NVIDIA/OpenS... basically just runs your agent in an OCI container (like we already do) but with networking etc locked down by default and controlled from an external instance. Nice to see open innovation around hard controls instead of prompts

...and GitHub quietly removes Claude Sonnet/Opus from the its student plan mid semester... fun. 🙃 we're just about to dive into local models in 288 anyway but this is surely disruptive. If students are going to learn to use these tools they ought to know what the frontier tools are like

Wow, great time in Sacramento today with the annual inter-Agency Ecological Program. So many exciting questions and approaches, & great stories I hope to take back to my classroom. iep.ca.gov/Public-Engag...

Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier Welcome to the year of the horse! I always learn something new doing these w Florian. www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope...

Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier

Welcome to the year of the horse!

interconnects.ai

folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense. If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly. If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.

Nice to see our work with NSF NAIRR pilot highlighted on their homepage: nairrpilot.org/projects/hig... It has certainly been a wild ride. Huge thanks to NSF and the fantastic team at NRP.ai for making this all possible

📣NEW in Mongabay: DSE's McKalee Steen & Magali de Bruyn share insights on how #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge and Indigenous digital sovereignty are key to creating #ResponsibleAI for achieving #conservation and environmental goals. 📰 Read the story now: bit.ly/4bqbrfG

AI-centered conservation efforts can only be ethical if Indigenous people help lead them (commentary)

In November, we joined more than 50,000 Indigenous and world leaders, diplomats, scholars and activists at the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Brazil. Some of the most central...

bit.ly

We're hiring a full-time research software engineer for biodiversity & bioacoustics! Position offers a strong research component with independence + research pub opportunities and real-world impact. expected salary range $111K - $116K. dse.berkeley.edu/news/were-hi...

Compelling report from the ATOM project on the state of open models: www.atomproject.ai

The ATOM Project - American Truly Open Models

Reinvigorating AI research in the U.S. by building leading, open models in America

atomproject.ai

Rather applaud JOSS's revised approach to deal with AI-based submissions. blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... , particularly with 'starting open' and at least 'six months developer history'. More of scholarly pub could benefit from such policies methinks.

it is kinda delightful to see that the open-source Continue.dev plugin fully supports modern MCP (resources, prompts), while GitHub Copilot plugin only supports tool docstrings. Now my continue.dev makes perfect tool calls using small/dumb open source LLMs, while CoPilot fails w/ frontier LLMs 🙃

Continue - Ship faster with Continuous AI

The future of coding isn't writing more code. It's delegating the boring parts, so you can build the interesting stuff

continue.dev

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Argh! @github.com announces it will start charging even for *self-hosted* runners 😥. resources.github.com/actions/2026... I have long relied on my self-hosted runners in my teaching to run automated 'reproducibility' checks. (The edu allocation is way too small for my large classes).

Pricing changes for GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions pricing update: Discover lower runner rates (up to 39% off) following a major re-architecture for faster, more reliable CI/CD.

resources.github.com

we released olmo 32b today! ☺️ 🐟our largest & best fully open model to-date 🐠right up there w similar size weights-only models from big companies on popular benchmarks 🐡but we used way less compute & all our data, ckpts, code, recipe are free & open made a nice plot of our post-trained results!✌️

Ai2@ai2.bsky.social · last yr.

Announcing OLMo 2 32B: the first fully open model to beat GPT 3.5 & GPT-4o mini on a suite of popular, multi-skill benchmarks. Comparable to best open-weight models, but a fraction of training compute. When you have a good recipe, ✨ magical things happen when you scale it up!

Great to see you at #COP30, Governor @gavinnewsom.bsky.social! Magali de Bruyn (R) and McKalee Steen (L) are leading several events @ COP30, including providing recommendations for how Indigenous communities can leverage tech and #DataScience to advance #EnvironmentalStewardship and #Sovereignty.

This seems important. Current AI models can't read graphs. They "see" what they expect to see, even if the data shows something else.

Posit@posit.co · 9mo ago

Introducing bluffbench, a new tool to evaluate how well LLMs actually see data plots. When we trick LLMs with secret #RStats transformations, they can miss the visual contradiction. bluffbench helps us measure this "blind spot" in AI coding agents. Learn more: posit.co/blog/introdu...

Wow, rio-stac-io looks awesome! github.com/planetlabs/r... Anyone have a chance to compare this to the odc-stac approach? ( @mdsumner.bsky.social 👀 ?)

sad to be missing #jupytercon this week! But small win, recently made my first PR to JupyterHub fancy-profiles to add support for ARM architecture. & now I have JupyterHub running on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (via k3s). Also have CUDA/RAPIDS based image in rocker for python+R envs, rocker/cuda:arm64

Raise your hand if you're going to #JupyterCon 🙋‍♀️ See you there @ucbids.bsky.social! #JupyterCon2025 #DataScience

Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)@ucbids.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Thurs, Nov 6 @ 10am PST -> Meet us on Zoom for a live report from #JupyterCon 2025 as part of our OSPO Monthly Knowledge Exchange! 💡🚀 events.berkeley.edu/BIDS/event/3... @jupyter.org #UCOSPO #OpenSource #OpenScience

🚀 anymap v0.6 is here! This release comes packed with major new features. These updates make interactive geospatial analysis in Python smoother and more powerful than ever. 🔗 GitHub: github.com/opengeos/any... 📘 Docs: anymap.dev #python #geospatial #jupyter #dataviz

The 1.4 release of @duckdb.org supports using a DuckDB database to serve vector tiles! Of course, I had to try this out in R. Check it out: all 242,000 US Census block groups dynamically served as vector tiles from a DuckDB database, displayed on a MapLibre map from R in Positron.

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.