It’s Friday. Do a breakthrough.

USA!

I was reflecting on my breakfast burrito this morning when out of nowhere came an antifa vandal cutting a 350 ft slit right down the length of it.

I still log AI's transformation of work at www.thetreeline.pub/p/ais-transf.... I defined the collection, processing, and writing workflow for Claude. I lightly edit final text. It's a semi-automated curation service for me, so I can keep up. You are welcome to it if you want. #AI #work

AI's transformation of work

A running log

thetreeline.pub

One of the two owlets growing up on our creek. This one came very close this morning. They are very curious when they are young. #birds #owls

Fable 5 is the new highest scorer on bluffbench! The eval measures models' ability to accurately describe plots that show counterintuitive patterns. Six months ago, the strongest models were still in the single digits. simonpcouch.github.io/bluffbench/

I'm getting around to updating the #rstats caret package. No new features is still the rule. The goal is to keep the interface the same while making it much easier to support. Link to the initial plan below; add comments if you have thoughts on improving the upkeep. github.com/topepo/caret...

upkeep plan for summer 2026 · Issue #1418 · topepo/caret

We have a paid intern this year who is interested in helping modernize caret to make support and upkeep easier. The current overall plan of no new features is still in place. We just want to make t...

github.com

I've just tried Posit Assistant on the free plan and must say, I'm impressed. Using the super-cheap Gemma 4 26B model (10% cost of Sonnet) on free plan it worked instantly. Hats of to the #posit team for integrating this into RStudio and allowing people to test with free plan!

In case you missed it. #OnlyInMonroe #Colbert

Only In Monroe --- May 22, 2026

YouTube video by Stephen Colbert

youtu.be

🤖 it's weird that we will have artificial general intelligence before reliable home printing 🖨️

Rough days in the Allen family recently and ahead. If you can love |> send() I would grateful

just in case an LLM hasn't told you already today, "the difference matters"

We have an open data science role on our team. The role is in our Cupertino office (no remote) and is open only in the US. More details: jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

Services Finance, Data Scientist - Jobs - Careers at Apple

Apply for a Services Finance, Data Scientist job at Apple. Read about the role and find out if it’s right for you.

jobs.apple.com

according to tech influencers, i’ve been using nearly all software completely wrong, and if i could just use them correctly they’d all completely destroy their competition, which if true would be mutual destruction across the board, leaving no software at all, so to use any i have to use some poorly

Well, it's been a highly requested topic for the DS Lab, so @schloerke.com is going to come hang out with us on May 26th and talk about how HE uses worktrees! I hope you'll be able to make it that day!

I'm checking out the new packages pane in our #Positron IDE. Python or #RStats. The little blue arrows mean package updates are available. Search, sort, install, update, remove, and filter by category. More cool metadata coming in a future release.

OpenTelemetry has come to R 🎉 Shiny, plumber2, mirai, httr2, ellmer, knitr, testthat, and DBI are now instrumented: production-grade traces from R with no code changes. Set a few env vars and telemetry flows to the backend of your choice. Full write-up: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05... #Rstats

Bringing OpenTelemetry to R in production

Posit has instrumented Shiny, plumber2, mirai, httr2, ellmer, knitr, testthat, and DBI with OpenTelemetry, and created tools for you to instrument your own packages, bringing production-grade observab...

opensource.posit.co

Inline outputs for #Quarto documents in #Positron are finally here!

I am not going to fly in planes until they flap their wings as birds do. There's just too much risk with such artificial flight.

Still pretty wild to me that this works (and quite well!)—pull a pre-trained neural network, provide some of your own data in-context (in lieu of "training"), and start making predictions. Kudos to the team for the R interface and tidymodels integration.

Posit@posit.co · 3mo ago

Announcing tabpfn 0.1.0 for #RStats! 📊 Bring foundation models to your tabular workflows. TabPFN uses "in-context learning" to deliver high-accuracy predictions without traditional training cycles. Learn more: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-03...

Saw this white-crowned sparrow having a lot of a sing

"If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to get on Polymarket and pump the arbitrage opportunity."

Home - Financial Times [Unofficial]@ft.com.web.brid.gy · 3mo ago

I implemented a fork of {targets} which provides the necessary changes to support {mori} shared memory regions! Check out the discussion thread below to learn more about the implementation: github.com/ropensci/tar... And try out the primary fork here: github.com/tylermorganw... #RStats

Tyler Morgan-Wall@tylermw.com · 3mo ago

This is really big (if it works!)—a big limitation for the use of R in simulation up to this point has been memory bloat. I’ve had to turn off parallel processing/reduce the number of workers many times in my {targets} workflows due to OOM errors. Hopefully this will solve that problem #RStats

Our AI newsletter has moved to the new @posit.co Open Source blog! In this edition, AI and cybersecurity, a step change for local coding agents, and a new dataviz engine for SQL. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

2026-04-24 AI Newsletter

The latest AI newsletter, covering AI cybersecurity efforts, improvements in local models, and a grammar of graphics for SQL.

opensource.posit.co

The Grammar of Graphics for SQL – and it’s for real! 😅 #ggsql brings the Grammar of Graphics to SQL - developed by the team behind ggplot2 at Posit. No need to switch to another tool to create nice charts once you have queried your database. #30DayChartChallenge | Day 22 - New tool #dataviz 📊

This is really big (if it works!)—a big limitation for the use of R in simulation up to this point has been memory bloat. I’ve had to turn off parallel processing/reduce the number of workers many times in my {targets} workflows due to OOM errors. Hopefully this will solve that problem #RStats

Charlie Gao@shikokuchuo.net · 3mo ago

Just released mori 0.1.0 on CRAN — a new R package for shared memory across processes. Parallel R no longer has to mean duplicating your dataset in every worker's RAM. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04... 🧵 1/3

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

Any #rstats people with thoughts?

New post. You built an ML model with {tidymodels} that you want automated in Dagster. Engineering's reply: "Sorry, we need this rewritten in Python to deploy." No more. With the {dagsterpipes} R package, you can run R code in Dagster with full observability. #rstats joekirincic.com/posts/use-r-...

There is a class of LLM critique I find impossible to take seriously. It goes like this: If left unchecked, a car will drive straight into anything in front of it. No shit, Sherlock. Let's do better at critique.