Kevin Ushey

@kevinushey.bsky.social

$ /usr/bin/kevin: valid on disk $ /usr/bin/kevin: satisfies its Designated Requirement Software engineer at Posit. #rstats abjurations and conjurations.

For no real reason, I was looking up something about the ancestry of causal DAGs in path diagrams and came across this picture. I got to see it so you do to. HT to Sewall Wright who both set the course for a very useful analytical tool but also took the time to include cute drawings of guinea pigs

Sketch of Wright's path diagram showing the influence of heredity and environment on the inheritance of color of guinea pigs. Drawing is mostly a directed acyclic graph but includes four cute sideways drawings of guinea pigs.

We just shipped GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash in Posit AI Pass! GLM 5.3 Flash is now the cheapest model available via the subscription (half the price of Gemma 4 26B A4B per-token!) and I've been so, so impressed with it. GLM 5.3 is Ox Alpha, the anonymous model that was popping off on OpenRouter.

Table comparing AI model costs per token, sorted from cheapest to most expensive. Columns: Model, Lab, and Relative Cost Per-Token. GLM 5.3 Flash (Z.ai) is cheapest at 0.05x; Gemma 4 26B (Google, going away soon) at 0.1x; Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic, going away soon) at 0.33x; GLM 5.3 (Z.ai) and GLM 5.2 (Z.ai, going away soon) both at 0.38x; Claude Sonnet 5 (Anthropic) at 0.67x; Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) at 1x as the baseline; Kimi K3 (Moonshot AI) at 1x; and Claude Opus (Anthropic) as the most expensive at 1.67x.

My favorite little feature from the Positron 2026.08 release: we now check your R scripts (and Python scripts, Quarto files, etc.) to see if they refer to any packages/modules that are needed to run the script but aren't installed. If they do, you'll get a little notification and an install button!

A screenshot of the Positron editor showing an R script that loads libraries, and a notification showing that a library needs to be installed.

I'm happy to share `ir`, a new command-line tool for running portable R scripts and Quarto documents. It's inspired by my two favorite parts of `uv`: self-describing scripts and tools you can run without installing first. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07...

ir 0.1.0: self-describing R scripts and Quarto documents

`ir` is a new command-line tool for running portable R scripts and rendering Quarto documents whose package requirements, and optional R selection, live inside the file itself.

opensource.posit.co

Got my comment on the abomination of the OMB rule in at the last minute. We could reach 400K tonight. This is one skirmish, but with hundreds of thousands of Americans, we have the power of a movement. Thanks @standupforscience.net, @defendpublichealth.bsky.social, and everyone else in the fight.

Costa Samaras@costasamaras.com · 2mo ago

Gratitude and congratulations to @cdelawalla.bsky.social, @colesci.bsky.social, and the @standupforscience.net team. With 3 hours until the comment period closes, there are 341,699 public comments! Still time to submit one: www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2...

🎉 We've just moved @ropensci.org on Bluesky to a fully independent account! We were previously bridged from our Mastodon account via Bridgy Fed. Same community, same content, fresh start. Give us a follow if you haven't already! 🦋 #RStats

dbplyr 2.6.0 is here! This release leaned on Claude Code to clear a TON of smaller issues, freeing up time for the big stuff: brand-new ADBC and JDBC backends, new translations, and a new sql_dialect() to cleanly decouple connection from SQL dialect. Read more: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06...

dbplyr 2.6.0

dbplyr 2.6.0 is now on CRAN, with new ADBC and JDBC backends, IBM DB2 support, more translations, and a bunch of minor fixes and improvements.

opensource.posit.co

When we started working on Positron, we began by asking "what did we always want to do in RStudio, but couldn't"? Years of community upvotes on RStudio's issue tracker helped us form that wishlist. Here's how some big ideas made their way to Positron: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06...

RStudio's Top Feature Requests ... In Positron

Many of the most upvoted RStudio feature requests are already implemented in Positron, and we explore ten of them.

opensource.posit.co

We've been working to make mori better - 0.2.1 is now on CRAN! Share R objects across processes with zero copies using shared memory + ALTREP. Supports mirai and all parallel frameworks. New: `prune_shared()` cleans orphaned regions, cleaner errors. github.com/shikokuchuo/... #Rstats #Tidyverse

GitHub - shikokuchuo/mori: Shared Memory for R Objects

Shared Memory for R Objects. Contribute to shikokuchuo/mori development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

A quick #rstats technote about some cool recent additions to R-universe: 1. Social media cards that actually look good 2. PACKAGES.rds support (or: implementing R internals in JavaScript) 3. Fancy sort/filter bars in the WebUI 4. triggering a sync manually 5. Making check results easier to find

Five recent R-universe features you might have missed

In this technote we look at a few recent additions that make R-universe a little nicer, faster, or more convenient to use.

ropensci.org