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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 3h

ICYMI, @sara-altman.bsky.social and I have been writing a biweekly newsletter on AI and open source data science on the @posit.co blog!

A bit about how that came to be on my #rstats blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-10...

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 17h

Oh, I see someone else suggested it first! Nice!

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 17h

Ah, was it this?? gist.github.com/sj-io/3828d6...

Claude R Tidyverse Expert

Claude R Tidyverse Expert. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 6d

🤩 My code produced when using LLMs to work on #rstats code got waaaaay better after I read this blog post by @simonpcouch.com on his Claude setup!

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-07...

How I’m using Claude Code to write R code | Simon P. Couch – Simon P. Couch

www.simonpcouch.com

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 20d

Just dropped a WHOLE BUNCH of these somewhere👀👀👀

#positconf2025

A picture of a stack of hex stickers for the stacks package. The stickers have a tan and orange peaches & cream theme rather than the usual blueberry.

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 20d

Just wrapped up a talk at #positconf2025 about LLM evaluation with R! Such a joy to hang out with #rstats folks in person and hear about what others are working on.

Resources and slides: github.com/simonpcouch/...

A chat interface showing a conversation starting with a user saying "Are there any talks about evals" and a response "Yes, Simon Couch just gave one, and he hopes you enjoyed it." There's a teddy bear mascot wearing a teal shirt and cap in the bottom right corner of the chat window.

A picture from the side of a conference session room, with myself standing in front.

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Kelly Bodwin @kellybodwin.com · 20d

The always delightful @k-bott.bsky.social shares the educational principles of Posit Academy for teaching professionals in the wild:

Practice that is:
💫 Repeated over time,
💕 relevant to their domain,
🪜 within their reach, and
👯‍♂️ conducted in a community.

#positconf2025

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Jasmine Daly @jasminedaly.bsky.social · 21d

I absolutely *love* that @simonpcouch.com mentioned using Google Sheets to easily supply input(s) and target(s) for evaluating #LLM quality {vitals} 🧸

Sometimes selecting right-sized solutions means deviating the "serious" data science techniques to get things done, creatively!

#positconf25

screenshot of Googlesheets data from Simon's Posit Conf 2025 Talk

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 26d

@sara-altman.bsky.social and I just shared the second release of the Posit AI Newsletter! In this edition, a landmark settlement on LLM training data and copyright, the emergence of agentic browsers, and more.

Read and subscribe on the Posit Blog: posit.co/blog/2025-09...

A graphic displaying, on the left, three robot icons, and on the left, a selection of LLM-related R package hex stickers.

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 27d

I hope no one is tired of seeing adorable #pawsitconf posts full of cute pets and punny talk titles, because @trevinflickinger.com helped his THREE dogs submit talks 😭 JUST LOOK AT THEM

#rstats #python #databs #positconf2025

A promotional image for a fake data science conference run by pets. The left half of the square image is blue and says Data Science in your Golden Years: How to stay involved after retirement, pawsit conf 2025. On the right side is a photo of a greying golden retriever dog up to his chest in a river or pond. At the bottom right is the dog's name, George, and company - Retired. This is all a bit of fun produced by the folks at #Posit, Libby Heeren and Rachael Dempsey, for the #rstats #python and #databs communities

A promotional image for a fake data science conference run by pets. The left half of the square image is blue and says Introducing houndR: a tool for uncovering hidden gems, pawsit conf 2025. On the right side is a photo of a black and white herding dog lounging on a grey sofa with a light pink blanket draped over it. At the bottom right is the dog's name, Clyde, and company - Emerald Analytics. This is all a bit of fun produced by the folks at #Posit, Libby Heeren and Rachael Dempsey, for the #rstats #python and #databs communities

A promotional image for a fake data science conference run by pets. The left half of the square image is blue and says My Data Journey: overcoming hurdles and keeping my eye on the ball, pawsit conf 2025. On the right side is a photo of a black dog with her tongue hanging out, sitting on a fabric-covered table next to a sign that we can only see the edge of. At the bottom right is the dog's name, Kiley, and company - Shenanigans Fly Ball Team. This is all a bit of fun produced by the folks at #Posit, Libby Heeren and Rachael Dempsey, for the #rstats #python and #databs communities

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 27d

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

ggplot2 4.0.0

A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

www.tidyverse.org

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 28d

People keep telling me they can't afford to attend #PositConf2025 next week, so I need to make a public service announcement: attending virtually is very affordable (or free!) & is amazing! Get registered & hangout with me on the Discord server!! #databs #rstats #python

Screenshot from https://posit.co/conf-pricing-2025/ showing the posit conf virtual ticket pricing. $99 for standard virtual ticket, $49 for Government and Non-profit employees, and Free for students, academics, and needs-based attendees. There are hand-drawn doodles by Libby that highlight each option and one note says "Plus, Virtual Day!"

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Jon Harmon (he/him/his) @jonthegeek.com · Sep 8

I kinda feel like the president declaring war on an American city should be an uncrossable line, but I don't know what to do at this point. www.cnn.com/2025/09/06/p...

Trump says Chicago ‘will find out why it’s called the Department of WAR’ ahead of planned crackdown | CNN Politics

It comes as Trump has ramped up his rhetoric against the country’s third most-populous city. CNN previously reported the Trump administration’s plans to conduct a major immigration enforcement operati...

www.cnn.com

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Aaron Jacobs @atheriel.bsky.social · Sep 5

There's been a big push at Posit this summer to get high-quality OpenTelemetry support out to the #rstats community (a longstanding dream of mine).

I think {mirai} is the first package release to showcase this work, and as per usual with @shikokuchuo.net, it was done in record time!

Charlie Gao @shikokuchuo.net · Sep 5

tidyverse blog: mirai 2.5.0

www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09...

This milestone release delivers enhanced observability through OpenTelemetry, reproducible parallel RNG, and key user interface improvements.

We’ve also packed in twice as many changes as usual!
#Rstats #tidyverse

mirai 2.5.0

mirai - minimalist async evaluation framework for R - brings production-grade parallel and distributed computing to the ecosystem.

www.tidyverse.org

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

kepano @stephango.com · Sep 4

somehow I just learned there's a variety of blackberries called obsidian, and of course it makes the best jam
stephango.com/quality-software

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Posit @posit.co · Sep 4

🚀 We’re excited to share the first edition of the Posit AI Newsletter!

Curated by Posit’s Sara Altman and Simon Couch, this biweekly newsletter keeps you up to speed with what’s happening in the AI world, both at Posit and beyond.

📫 Read the first issue: posit.co/blog/2025-08...

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · Sep 3

Using the crap out of this extension as I work on my #positconf2025 slides and loooving it.

Something tells me we'll be seeing some masterfully-placed images in #quarto slides at conf this year. :)

Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · Aug 20

Happy to announce ✨quarto-revealjs-editable✨

This fully supersedes the imagemover extension, as I back then didn't realize the potential. You can now also move, resize, change font size and alignment for text in your slides

github.com/EmilHvitfeld...
#quarto #slidecrafting

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Luis D. Verde Arregoitia @liomys.mx · Sep 3

Two weeks to go 😬
I'll be presenting on the fun work I've been doing on spreadsheets + R
#rstats #positconf

A square flyer with the text "I'm speaking at posit conf 2025" Atlanta

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

rainbowR @rainbowr.org · Aug 29

Sign-up for the next round of the rainbowR buddies scheme is open! Buddies will be paired/introduced on Sept 2nd 🌈👯‍♂️

If you're LGBTQ+ and code in #RStats, and want an opportunity to connect with someone else in the community (through a random pairing), then this is for you 😃

rainbowr.org/buddies

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · Aug 29

So stoked to share about the first release of the Posit AI Newsletter!

@sara-altman.bsky.social and I have been working on a pilot of this newsletter internally for a few months now—an opinionated and pragmatic snapshot of AI news released every two weeks.

First edition: posit.co/blog/2025-08...

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · Aug 29

odbc 1.6.2 is now on #rstats CRAN! A good few QOL improvements, especially for Databricks and Snowflake users: github.com/r-dbi/odbc/r...

Release odbc 1.6.2 · r-dbi/odbc

Fix hang when parsing exceptionally long database errors (#916). Fix retrieving multiple result sets from parametrized queries in cases when some parameters yield empty results (#927). Databric...

github.com

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Max kuhn @topepo.bsky.social · Aug 27

Slides from my #rstats talk “Measuring LLM Effectiveness” at #dataconfAI with @simonpcouch.com.

topepo.github.io/2025_NYR/

Video in about a month.

Great conference!

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · Aug 26

In working on an eval for an experimental tidymodels AI assistant, I realized that today's frontier LLMs know much more about #rstats tidymodels than I thought.

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-08...

A ggplot2 bar plot. On the x axis are two LLMs, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini Pro 2.5. Both bars are dodged by three configurations: Predictive, Databot, and `run_r_code()` tool. On the y axis is relative performance, ranging from 0 (baseline model) to 100 (best human modelers). The bar heights for Claude Sonnet 4 are all about the same (around 80) and, for Gemini 2.5 Pro, the height for Predictive, an app designed specifically as a tidymodels assistant, is much lower (around 20).

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · Aug 20

Does Jenny Bryan #VibeCode? 🤔

She shared on the Hangout that she's been thankful that she gets to learn #rust and #typscript in the age of #AI and these are her thoughts on #LLM use. (We really need a #RubberDuck emoji 🦆)

#rstats #databs #VibeCoding #DSHangout #python

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Reposted by Simon P. Couch

sarah @sarahjohnson.io · Aug 21

I was loving Claude Code... until I tried it with #rstats. Constant errors, wouldn't use the tidyverse even when asked, "optimized" functions were slower.

Frustrated, I started a session just to teach R to Claude and summarize what it learned into a CLAUDE.md file gist.github.com/sj-io/3828d6...

Claude R Tidyverse Expert

Claude R Tidyverse Expert. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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