Kick-off posit::conf with me. I'm teaching a virtual workshop about Positron on September 14 at 8am UTC. conf.posit.co/2026/sessions/

Posit@posit.co · last wk.

posit::conf(2026) has a full virtual experience: a half-day workshop, three dedicated talk tracks on Sept 14, all keynotes and sessions livestreamed Sept 15–16. New: live captioning in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Register today at posit.co/conference

roxygen2 8.1.0 is now out with two small performance improvements: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-08... (one will probably change your NAMESPACE, hence the minor version + blog post)

roxygen2 8.1.0

roxygen2 8.1.0 is now on CRAN. This release is mostly about performance: `@importFrom` now generates a single merged `importFrom()` directive per package, which makes your package load faster, and lin...

opensource.posit.co

You might have noticed my slide illustrations in my last substack. This week I talk about how I made them: using AI, supported by an R package that turns yaml into images. Details at: tidydesign.substack.com/p/illustrati...

Illustrating my slides with AI

You might have noticed my slide illustrations in my last substack. This week I talk about how I made them: using AI, supported by an R package that turns yaml into images. You'll learn a bunch of my t...

tidydesign.substack.com

The Positron Notebook Editor is out of beta and ready for all your notebook workflows! I am super proud of the work the team did to build this notebook experience from scratch. Something we decided was necessary to have a fantastic notebook experience for data science.

Recently graduated with your doctorate in statistics, econometrics, or a related discipline? Interested in being in an environment supportive of open source software? Then this position (careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...) might be for you, and we want you! #rstats 🐨🦘

We're happy to announce our new #rstats package: lorax. If you fit tree-based models, lorax enables conversion to the party package's format (for making nice tree diagrams) and has methods to compute which features were used, the number of terminal nodes, etc. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07...

Introducing lorax: Speaking for the Tree-Based Models

lorax is a new R package that characterizes fitted tree- and rule-based models: extract their decision rules, see which predictors they actually use, and convert trees for plotting with partykit.

opensource.posit.co

What up, slide nerds?! Wait, are you NOT a slide nerd? Do... do you want to be? Join the nerd side. We have #Quarto slide themes 🤓 And we have EMIL, which might be even better! Come hang out with us tomorrow on the Labbbb! #rstats

Isabella Velásquez@ivelasq3.bsky.social · last wk.

Do you dabble in Quarto, and really want to make slides that make people go, wow 😯 Learn from the amazing @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social tomorrow, where he will demonstrate the ✨ art of slidecrafting✨ for creating reusable, custom slide themes. Hope to see you there! pos.it/dslab

Is noticing how freaking cool clouds are just something that happens to you in your 40s?

Not every open-source project wants more contributors right now, and that's fine. Four shapes maintainers run — walled castle, clique, university, hippie commune — and your `CONTRIBUTING.md` is saying the quiet part out loud. No wrong answer, just an honest one. blog.stdlib.io/do-you-want-...

Do you WANT contributors?

Four ways to run an open-source project—castle, clique, university, commune—and which one you're really running.

blog.stdlib.io

Useful LLM tip for data journalists from @kylewalker.bsky.social : “Google gets a lot of criticism for falling behind on agentic coding, but Gemini 3.5 Flash has long been my daily driver for agentic document extraction, which is one of the highest-value use-cases for LLMs, in my opinion.” #DDJ

Google LLMs vs Gemini 3.5 Flash for Agentic Coding | Kyle Walker posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Google gets a lot of criticism for falling behind on agentic coding, but Gemini 3.5 Flash has long been my daily driver for agentic document extraction, which is one of the highest-value use-cases for...

linkedin.com

This week on my substack: a write up of my talk "y code when ai" (my thoughts on why knowing how to code is still relevant), along with a brief description of how I turned a video of my talk into this post. Read it at open.substack.com/pub/tidydesi... !

y code when ai?

A talk on AI and coding

open.substack.com

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

It’s the end of an era: we are sunsetting rpubs.com, quartopub.com, and shinyapps.io in favour of connect.posit.cloud. These services are important, but we need to focus our efforts on a single platform (and it’s overall less confusing to have one place to publish everything you do in R or Python).

We had an amazing time at SciPy 2026 in Minneapolis! Every year we go, we know we’ve found our #Python people 🐍 Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by the Posit booth or caught sessions by Carson, Sara, Simon, and Hadley! Resources & updates will be posted here: opensource.posit.co/events/scipy...

SciPy 2026

SciPy brings together attendees from industry, academia and government to showcase their latest projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development.

opensource.posit.co

posting my {sqlm} package where you can use the familiar #rstats lm() syntax directly against a databse to return a lm object and use all of your favorite modeling functions, summary, broom::tidy(), broom::glance(), broom::augment() or even @posit.co {orbital} usrbinr.codeberg.page/sqlm/

Realizing how much easier my life is now that I can use orbital to deploy my prediction models no need to save artifacts, build ETL pipelines to prep / featurize, github actions to deploy / push, wait times to load initialize and predict I'm in love. #rstats orbital.tidymodels.org

Predict with tidymodels Workflows in Databases

Turn tidymodels workflows into objects containing the sufficient sequential equations to perform predictions. These smaller objects allow for low dependency prediction locally or directly in databases...

orbital.tidymodels.org

Big announcement: The final project of my thesis work, Skeleton: Visual Authoring of Non-visual Data Experiences, has now been accepted for publication at IEEE VIS! 🎉 🎉 🎉

Announcing: Skeleton 🩻, the culminating project of my PhD!

My final research project looked at the barriers that sighted practitioners face when authoring non-visual data experiences. We co-designed, built tooling, built a UI prototype, and ran a study.

frank.computer

We're excited to share bluffbench2, a next-generation data science LLM evaluation. The eval measures how well models notice subtle data quality issues in plots. Even the most capable models today score in the mid-teens. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07...

AI Newsletter: LLMs often miss subtle visual artifacts in data visualizations

Introducing bluffbench2, a new data science LLM evaluation.

opensource.posit.co

🚨DATA ALERT🚨 I started a 🤓 newsletter w/ @caitlingilbert.bsky.social & @jdharden.bsky.social, check it out if you wanna go down some fun data rabbit holes unrelated to our day jobs 🧵 wrongnumber.beehiiv.com

Home | Wrong Number

a newsletter for our data hyperfixations

wrongnumber.beehiiv.com

"Making people write JSON by hand is cruel and unusual punishment." - @hadley.nz at #SciPy2026

You might be surprised to see that writing a blog post is part of our standard release process. We've found that, invariably, when you write the blog you find a bug that you wouldn't have caught otherwise. - @hadley.nz at #SciPy2026

The best coding instructors don't just know Python or R, they know how people learn. Our Learner-Centered Teaching training helps educators build engaging, inclusive, evidence-based learning experiences through hands-on practice and live feedback. Learn more: carpentries.org/learner-cent...

Learner-Centered Teaching

Overview Learner-Centered Teaching equips participants with the strategies and tools necessary to use effective, hands-on teaching practices across diverse teaching contexts. This 8-hour interactive p...

carpentries.org

The Carpentries@carpentries.carpentries.org · 3w ago

The Carpentries' Learner-Centred Teaching program helps you enhance your evidence-based teaching practices, for novices & experienced educators alike. 💡 Effective teaching 🤝 Inclusive classrooms 🎯 Live practice + feedback 📍Get your seat here: carpentries.org/learner-centred-teaching

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning last week. I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...

What will be left for us to work on?

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

cs.princeton.edu

1. Carefully source your lettuce and other leafy greens from trusted retailers 2. Don’t re-elect incompetent but corrupt fascists who appoint vicious cranks to be Secretary of Health and Human Services 3. Avoid buffet-style salad bars

Turn new data into Quarto reports automatically blog.stephenturner.us/p/turn-new-d... #Rstats

Turn new data into Quarto reports automatically

The {watcher} R package monitors your filesystem and run arbitrary code when files change. You can use this to automate things like creating parameterized Quarto reports.

blog.stephenturner.us

I’m kind of hopeful we might be in for a new round of in person meetups. They died back for a while but it really feels like folks are desperate for personal connection and to talk through their fears and anxieties (and hopes) for the future

Donald Szlosek@dszlosek.bsky.social · 3w ago

So Thankful for the MASSIVE turn out at our second event for the Greater Boston R User Group meeting! Outstanding Conversations from econometrics, to health equity / policy, to clinical trials and causal inference #rstats

I'm an R person who just shipped two cross-platform desktop apps in Rust + Tauri + React — a stack I'd never written before. One built straight in code with Claude, one designed first as a clickable artifact. Story: https://l.drmowinckels.io/sNeRrN

Issue 53 of #rdmweekly is out!📬 ➡️ ECR Asks: Q & A with @eivimeycook.bsky.social ➡️ data-dict.yaml (data dictionary specification) @hadley.nz ➡️ Modern Python Project Management for Researchers with uv @digiresacademy.bsky.social and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

RDM Weekly - Issue 053

A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.

rdmweekly.substack.com

httr2 1.3.0 is out now! Includes a bunch of improvements to OAuth token caching and summarises some of the biggest changes in the last few patch releases — opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07.... #rstats

httr2 1.3.0

httr2 1.3.0 changes how OAuth tokens are cached on disk — you'll need to re-authenticate once after upgrading — and rolls up faster streaming, OAuth server metadata discovery, OpenTelemetry tracing, a...

opensource.posit.co

The latest release of #Positron went out last week, and I am so pleased to share what's in it! 🥳 Some big features we've been working on for a while (the editor for `.ipynb` notebooks, the Packages pane, Posit Assistant) all came out of preview this month: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07...