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Miles McBain

@milesmcbain.bsky.social

Code hacker, number cruncher, #rstats user, board gamer, road racer, plant eater, bass slapper. I like big bikes and I cannot lie. #cargobike Coming to you from AUS / BNE. https://milesmcbain.com

2,271 Followers  |  706 Following  |  618 Posts  |  Joined: 01.11.2024
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Posts by Miles McBain (@milesmcbain.bsky.social)

But at least with ggplot2 the β€˜+’ operator establishes something unusual / magical is happening. Pipe interface strongly implies data flow to me.

28.02.2026 08:04 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah. I’ve had some success with it and would use it again, but I deeply feel the cringe in your workflow() -> fit() example. You’re not executing functions on data, you’re building a specification to do that at some later time in an unspecified way. Similar to ggplot2 in that regard.

28.02.2026 08:02 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Feeling safe as a statistician because no AI can respond to a question like we can. Show me an AI that can gently rub its temples and say β€œit depends” before taking your ass on a journey of technical details.

28.02.2026 02:01 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Data.table’s weakness is being overly focused on a particular end user experience. The rough edges show up when you want to use it at as a platform to develop your own user experience.

26.02.2026 21:42 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Yo where’s the targets zealot phase?

26.02.2026 21:36 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

That’s unexpected. In VSCode the terminal working directory is inferred from the active editor. I’ve never wished it was any other way.

25.02.2026 10:05 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
:: Miles McBain β€” Are you Data Scientists or Software Developers?! I think the best Data Scientists are both. This little exchange was a spicy first question I got after walking another state agency through some of ou...

Haven’t used positron but I do this in VSCode a bit. Quite nice if you have internal packages supporting projects.

I wrote up something about it ages ago milesmcbain.micro.blog/2022/10/18/a...

24.02.2026 21:53 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Are there any R users working for the Australian federal dept of health? I’d love to hear from you!

New gig, new people to meet :)

29.01.2026 02:01 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 2

#rstats 4.5.3 "Reassured Reassurer" scheduled for March 11. Full schedule on developer.r-project.org (or the svn if you're impatient.) This should be the wrap-up release for the 4.5 series.

23.02.2026 14:12 β€” πŸ‘ 28    πŸ” 17    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

So, what's the next #rstats flame war on the schedule? Base |> vs. magrittr %>%?

21.02.2026 22:45 β€” πŸ‘ 62    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 15    πŸ“Œ 7

Of course if you shift the goal posts enough, you can argue we already have both.

Yet the truck drivers remain as employed as software engineers.

23.02.2026 22:42 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve started referring to the idea of LLM agents that can magically build complete working software applications from vague human specifications as β€œFull-self-coding”.

I think it’s on the same time horizon as Full-self-driving. I.e. likely never.

23.02.2026 22:41 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
GitHub - MilesMcBain/breakerofchains: Break your chain at the cursor line. Run the first bit. See the output. Be free. Break your chain at the cursor line. Run the first bit. See the output. Be free. - MilesMcBain/breakerofchains

Introducing probably my most used keyboard shortcut

github.com/MilesMcBain/...

23.02.2026 22:31 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

every now and then I think folks in #rstats need to be reminded of or introduced to browser() and debug()

23.02.2026 05:52 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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this rage tweet brought to you by The Millennialsℒ️, many of whom physically wired up their teenage homes, were introduced to IP addresses with 192.168.1.1, and have this particular shade of blue burned into hippocampus

22.02.2026 21:38 β€” πŸ‘ 21    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
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Python is slipping in popularity – Tiobe The world’s most popular programming language is losing market share to more specialized languages such as R and Perl, Tiobe says.

#RStats is up baby

www.infoworld.com/article/4129...

21.02.2026 19:27 β€” πŸ‘ 62    πŸ” 10    πŸ’¬ 4    πŸ“Œ 0

It’s definitely worth it to do some base-only projects. Packages make good candidates due to discrete nature, limited scope etc.

21.02.2026 11:27 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Since things tend to blow up, you can pin them down pretty quickly with debugging tools.

On the plus side these failures can often highlight areas of fragile code, as they occur in situations that are susceptible to common edge cases.

21.02.2026 11:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

It's an unfortunate situation for sure.

However, due to the nature of the changes, things will typically totally fail, rather than introduce some subtle issue that leads to an incorrect result. And I am sure this was considered in the design of tibble.

21.02.2026 11:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

No denying that.

Though *in practice* I find they behave more in line with my expectations for this type of object.

I don’t have to remember the edge cases that feel quirky to me. Quirks that make sense in a different context, I am sure.

21.02.2026 03:23 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

*largely.

The sweat and tears I have shed in the service of data frames!

21.02.2026 02:29 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Dirk at this point I’ve been programming for nearly 30 years. 10 in R. The idea that my opinion is based lately in theory without consideration for practical issues. Wow.

21.02.2026 02:20 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

🀭🀭🀭

21.02.2026 00:50 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I mean yeah, but more reacting to the hatchet club than the original post.

21.02.2026 00:46 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

And the messages you get when things do fail *chef’s kiss*.

Nothing else even in the same league.

21.02.2026 00:17 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Also the kind of fail hard rather than β€˜muddle through’ e.g. with recycling data lengths. Catch problems early rather than propagate deeply into code. πŸ‘

21.02.2026 00:14 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I like {tibble}.

Type stability makes it a reliable building block for other tools.

Print method is not to my taste, but that’s easily fixed.
#rstats

21.02.2026 00:07 β€” πŸ‘ 22    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 6    πŸ“Œ 0
abstract procedural art in a dark blue and white palette, comprised of thousands of flowing ribbon shapes in the middle of the field against a dark blue background. it feels vaguely organic

abstract procedural art in a dark blue and white palette, comprised of thousands of flowing ribbon shapes in the middle of the field against a dark blue background. it feels vaguely organic

rising from the depths #rstats

20.02.2026 21:26 β€” πŸ‘ 25    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I have an ecosystem of packages dedicated to subverting tabular printing methods I do not care for. πŸ’ͺ

20.02.2026 23:42 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

People who say knees are evidence against intelligent design should remember that Microsoft Windows is the result of intelligent design

20.02.2026 21:05 β€” πŸ‘ 48    πŸ” 17    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0