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jonathankitt.bsky.social
Jonathan Kitt
@jonathankitt.bsky.social
150 followers 180 following 160 posts
🧬 Wheat genomics
📊 Data analysis & visualisation
🖥️ Computational biology
https://jonathankitt.netlify.app/blog
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jonathankitt.bsky.social
The latest #Rweekly issue is out !
rweekly.org
#Rstats #news
Home
Learn R, R tutorials, R resources, blog posts and the latest updates about the statistical programming R language.
rweekly.org
November 10, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
andrew.heiss.phd
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class. I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you. It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents. NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning. In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work. I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this: (a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder) At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map. Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.” That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!) Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already. It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it. I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here. I’m concerned that it’s not real data. It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal. None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.
November 2, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
stephenturner.us
What's new this week in AI, data science, bioinfo: LLMs for learning to code, #Rstats updates (R Data Scientist, R Weekly), RAG, layoffs & AI, DuckDB for data science, Anthropic+Iceland, AI in science, AI in drug discovery, Nextflow & pathogen surveillance doi.org/10.59350/28g...
Weekly Recap (Nov 7, 2025)
LLMs for learning to code, R updates (R Data Scientist, R Weekly), RAG, layoffs & AI, DuckDB for data science, Anthropic+Iceland, AI in science, AI in drug discovery, Nextflow & pathogen surveillance
doi.org
November 7, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
gilesthomas.com
Part 1: "What AI chatbots are actually doing under the hood".

www.gilesthomas.com/2025/08/what...
What AI chatbots are actually doing under the hood
How AI chatbots like ChatGPT work under the hood -- the post I wish I’d found before starting 'Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)'.
www.gilesthomas.com
August 29, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
tjukanov.bsky.social
It’s happening again in November. 30 days and 30 themes for maps. Take part, learn something new and have fun. That’s what #30DayMapChallenge is about 🌎
October 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
solarus.ultrawaves.fr
Le monde de l'infiniment petit.
September 25, 2025 at 11:55 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
I'm in the middle of preparing slides for an "Introduction to R" course. Thought I'd use a figure to explain element recycling in vectorized operations.
#RStats #course #learn
September 26, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social
I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up

There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily

slidecrafting-book.com
#quarto
Screenshot of first page of slidecrafting-book.com website
September 24, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
The latest issue of @rweekly is now live!

https://rweekly.org/2025-W39.html

This week's highlights:
✏️ All the Ways to Programmatically Edit or Parse R Markdown / Quarto Documents by @rOpenSci
🈂️ I Vibe Coded an R Package by @jonocarroll
☑️ Quality Control for Scanned Multiple-Choice Exams by […]
Original post on fosstodon.org
fosstodon.org
September 22, 2025 at 12:17 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
Rweekly issue #38 is out.
This week's highlights include: R6 interfaces (@jakub-sobolewski.bsky.social) and ggplot2 (@nrennie.bsky.social)
#Rstats #code #reading
rweekly.org
Home
Learn R, R tutorials, R resources, blog posts and the latest updates about the statistical programming R language.
rweekly.org
September 15, 2025 at 7:48 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
Great video with @tanyashapiro.bsky.social and @cedricscherer.com walking us though using {ggiraph}. Plus, there's a plot with some #DrWho data :-)
#data #Rstats #code
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnDj...
Plot Twist: Adding Interactivity to the Elegance of ggplot2 with ggiraph
YouTube video by useR! Conference
www.youtube.com
August 28, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
posit.co
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Table Contest and Plotnine Contests! These events celebrate great visual displays of information by way of tables and plots, all made possible by open-source software.

We can't wait to see what you create! #RStats #Python

Learn more: posit.co/blog/announc...
2025 Table and Plotnine Contests on a background of multicolored cubes.
August 21, 2025 at 5:59 PM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
Great video by @minecr.bsky.social.
I finally gave Positron a try!
#RStats @posit.co #IDE #code
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndq2...
Exploratory Data Analysis with R in Positron
YouTube video by Posit PBC
www.youtube.com
August 22, 2025 at 7:05 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
rpodcast.bsky.social
Episode 208 of R Weekly Highlights is out! serve.podhome.fm/episodepage/...

✨ Positron Assistant for creating R packages @stephenturner.us
📰 LLM-powered guide to Posit Conf 2025 agenda @ivelasq3.bsky.social & Sam Parmar

h/t @mike-thomas.bsky.social & @jonmcalder.bsky.social 🙏

#RStats #DataScience
Issue 2025-W30 Highlights
In episode 208 of R Weekly Highlights, the LLM train keeps moving along in the data science community: First impressions of the new Positron Assistant for…
serve.podhome.fm
July 31, 2025 at 1:16 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
New video by @3blue1brown.com!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv-5...
#AI #DeepLearning #Video
But how do AI videos actually work? | Guest video by @WelchLabsVideo
YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown
www.youtube.com
July 25, 2025 at 2:50 PM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
Insighful article by @nrennie.bsky.social, still thinking about switching from RStudio to Positron. I'd be happy to have your thoughts about Positron! I'm currently coding mostly in #RStats, but I've been using more #Python lately.
#RStudio #Positron #IDE #coding
July 24, 2025 at 8:35 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
Wow ... I'd never come across this use of with(), which allows combining the pipe and computing a correlation coefficient. Thanks to @mansthulin.bsky.social for explaining this in his fantastic book www.modernstatisticswithr.com!
#Rstats #code #neverknew
July 22, 2025 at 12:22 PM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
This post by @tanyashapiro.bsky.social reminds me I have to update the datardis package. Maybe a #tidytuesday around this year's #DoctorWho day (late November).
tanyashapiro.bsky.social Tanya Shapiro @tanyashapiro.bsky.social · Jul 21
ggplot + ggiraph in action ⚡

I teamed up with @cedricscherer.com to put together a fun ggiraph talk for useR conf this year. Of course I had to show an example inspired by him!

Stay tuned for behind the scenes how-tos, tricks, and code. Excited to share more info when the talk is live!
July 21, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
ikashnitsky.phd
{ralger} #rstats package looks like an absolute game changer in the task of web scraping for people with very occasional need in this rather nerdy task 🤩
Instead of drilling manually through cached HTML, one can use intuitively named functions that just do it ✨
🔗 feddelegrand7.github.io/ralger/
July 12, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
matterofstats.bsky.social
ROFL = Real Outliers Fatally Lanced
TLDR = Too Lazy; Didn't Research
SMH = So Many Hypotheses
BRB = Bayes ... Really, Bayes?
IMHO = Is My Hypothesis Obvious?
DND = Distribution Not Defined
FAFO = Fanciful Analysis of Four Observations
JC = Jointly Comical
NFI = Never Forget Independence
July 14, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
datavisfriendly.bsky.social
📊Looking to re-decorate your #dataviz office? Y
ou need Boxplot Shelves!
A set of three wall shelf sets, in the form of boxplots
June 21, 2025 at 7:56 PM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
The latest issue of #Rweekly is out ! Curated by @rpodcast.bsky.social
rweekly.org/2025-W24.html
#RStats #reading #coding
R Weekly 2025-W24 Containerizing Shiny, ggplot2 explorer, quickr package
Weekly news in the R Community
rweekly.org
June 10, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Kitt
jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Issue 2025-W23 of @rweekly is now live!

Highlights this week:
🤖 Computer vision with LLMs in R by @Posit
🧰 Easy tool calls with ellmer and chatlas by @Posit
🎨 Porting my favorite RStudio color theme to Positron by @ivelasq3

As always, keep sending your pull requests of new #rstats :rstats […]
Original post on fosstodon.org
fosstodon.org
June 2, 2025 at 8:29 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
The latest R Weekly issue is out!
rweekly.org
#rstats #newsletter
Home
Learn R, R tutorials, R resources, blog posts and the latest updates about the statistical programming R language.
rweekly.org
May 27, 2025 at 7:27 AM
jonathankitt.bsky.social
A {ggplot2} course with two dataviz wizards 🧙? To say I'm excited about this would be an understatement. 🎉🎉🎉
#rstats #dataviz #course #learning
cedricscherer.com Cédric Scherer @cedricscherer.com · May 13
Our ggplot2 [un]charted course is live! 🎉

Lesson 1, “Why R and ggplot2?”, is free to explore — short, thoughtful & a bit different.

Get the early-supporter price!
👉 ggplot2-uncharted.com

Follow along as new content drops and learn while running your code in the browser 👩‍💻
Screenshot of the first lesson called"Why R and ggplot2?". The header text reads: Course Foundations of ggplot2 Why R and ggplot? Why R and ggplot2? This lesson shows why programming is so powerful for data visualization. It covers what sets R and ggplot2 apart, highlighting their strengths, trade-offs, and how they compare to other tools. Let's get a clear sense of when and why to use ggplot2! ... and the first paragraphs: 🌍 A World of Visualization Tools Data visualizations are everywhere— on web pages, in reports, and at the heart of dashboards. What used to be a time-consuming, manual process is now much faster, thanks to powerful tools that turn raw data into clear, engaging graphics. But with so many options out there, choosing the right tool can be tough 😔. There are 5 main categories of visualization tools. Some are quick-and-easy chart makers, while others are flexible, code-driven libraries. The right choice depends on factors like data complexity, custom design, and the need for reproducibility. Explore the categories below to find the best fit for your needs! Another screenshot of the lesson, showing the three main reasons to use coding to work with data and create visualizations: 1. reproducibility 2. Customization 3. Automation It also shows a gallery of some of data visualizations such as the circular astronauts plot and the stream graph about appearances of the main X-Men characters.
May 14, 2025 at 7:23 PM