John Paul Helveston

You **really** would hate working in academics 😅

Unlikely diet related and almost certainly how you're moving. Improving your diet is good for all sorts of other reasons, but back pain is almost always related to how you are moving your body. It's mechanical, and also very fixable.

Let me tell you as someone who deals with the rather extreme end of back pain (i.e. near total numbness in my whole leg), get the Back Mechanic book by Stuart McGill and read the whole thing multiple times. Knowing how to move is crucial to fixing things before they get worse.

www.backfitpro.com

Seems bad

Expand your productivity with espanso – jhelvy.com Custom text snippets with espanso: a text expander written in Rust

Even with just a MacBook, karabiner elements is pretty amazing. It's what I use to remap my MacBook keyboard. You can do so so many things with it. Also, check out espanso - another amazing productivity tool:

www.jhelvy.com/blog/2021-05...

In search of keyboard nirvana – jhelvy.com My journey to find a more ergonomic (and useful) keyboard

Are you sure you want to go down this road? There's no going back.

www.jhelvy.com/blog/2021-07...

We have the paid version for free through our university. But yeah for a lot of things I just use Claude directly or Claude code.

Okay I just turned on copilot in RStudio and it's great. Wow, can't believe I haven't been using this.

Oh nice! I never knew

Yeah I set up a keyboard shortcut to restart the repl which is a very nice feature if you just want to quickly wipe it clear and run a fresh start.

GitHub copilot for autocomplete mostly. Otherwise I use Claude in a browser for larger tasks.

Oh also just how easy it is to restart R sessions. Very quick and easy in Positron, and you don't have to restart the whole IDE if something goes sideways.

Mostly just the AI plugins for better auto complete. It's nonexistent for RStudio. I prefer RStudio as an IDE for R, but it's so close that Positron wins for AI integrations.

A fascist

Whole lotta tiki torch energy from this one

GitHub - jhelvy/cv: My CV, generated using R, Quarto, and a Googlesheet My CV, generated using R, Quarto, and a Googlesheet - jhelvy/cv

Sweet. I did something similar using Quarto via TeX. It pulls from a Google sheet that has all the CV data, which I also use for my research page on my website.

github.com/jhelvy/cv

If cheating on your wife is cause for being sacked as CEO, then why in hell is Musk still CEO of Tesla? Cheating is bad, but single-handedly destroying a humanitarian agency that will lead to the deaths of millions of children seems...worse. Make it make sense.

Hard to get something this clean with either.

Did you build it with quarto?

breakerofchains or similar for Positron One of my all-time favorite R packages is Miles McBain's breakerofchains. You can put your cursor anywhere in a piped command, run a keyboard shortcut, and RStudio will run everything up to the curre...

If you use #tidyverse / dplyr, breakerofchains by @milesmcbain.bsky.social is one of my favorite productivity #rstats 📦

Very excited to learn that it works in #positron too! One more reason to keep using this IDE, absolutely loving it

forum.posit.co/t/breakerofc...

YouTube video by Y Combinator Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

This is a very good talk by @karpathy.bsky.social on where we're at with LLMs for software development

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEm...

And of course, institutions that rely more on international students are even more vulnerable. With the budget ICE now has, coming to the US for education is now a much more dangerous proposition.

Research funding is only half the issue. Enrollments are the other. Private schools that typically offer big discounts may not be able to do so. I'm predicting a lot more students are going to opt for more affordable state schools, with private institutions getting hit harder.

YouTube video by surveydown Intro to sdstudio

Video showcase of the studio: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p00i...

Introducing sdstudio: A companion GUI for surveydown – surveydown.org A brief walkthrough of the sdstudio R Package, a companion GUI for surveydown.

Excited to announce the release of our latest #surveydown project: {sdstudio}

A GUI studio that runs as a local #rshiny app for building, previewing, and managing surveydown surveys. Check out our latest post!

📣 Should out to @pingfanhu.bsky.social who built it!

surveydown.org/blog/2025-06...

One person came up with this idea for programmatically adding survey questions, but your package might be usable for a cleaner syntax

surveydown.org/docs/tips#pr...

– surveydown.org

So this is quite interesting, because for the very specific use case of making surveys with our {surveydown} package, this could be a way to auto-generate page breaks and all sorts of other structural content in surveys. We built it right on top of #quarto.

surveydown.org

The bill that just passed is devastating, esp for rural America. Millions will lose healthcare access entirely. Hundreds of rural hospitals will close. Electricity prices will rise, grid stability will worsen. ICE's budget is now larger than FBI & DEA combined. Masked kidnappings are just the start.

I'm following 2.6k people? I thought that was kind of a lot to get a more diverse and interesting feed, but it's still not really near as good as old twitter. For some specific communities it's good, like data folks (#rstats for example)

I don't know about the left or not, but I'll say engagement feels like it's declined here in recent months. I mostly just get served political posts now from a single perspective. The algorithm doesn't feel right. X is of course a 🗑️🔥 tho so not better there.

Organize whole project into folders: code, data, figs. In code folder, multiple R scripts based on scope of work in each script (e.g. data prep, modeling, analysis, figs, etc). Also one setup.R script that is sourced at the top of each R script for all packages, settings, etc.