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Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

accidentally opening the app formerly known as twitter

a group of star wars characters standing next to each other with a robot in the background

ALT: a group of star wars characters standing next to each other with a robot in the background

media.tenor.com

November 15, 2025 at 1:29 PM

Reposted by Randy Boyes

Dr. U

@transport-talk.bsky.social

I am giving 2 talks abt making your data analysis outputs into polished products with the power of #RStats and #Python pkgs + my pkg {brandthis}.
Talk 1: DevFest 2025. Register here: wedevfest.com
Talk 2: R+AI 2025 organized by R Consortium. Register here: rconsortium.github.io/RplusAI_webs...

October 20, 2025 at 3:43 AM

Reposted by Randy Boyes

Carlos Scheidegger

@cscheid.net

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

October 14, 2025 at 1:12 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Exploring some ideas for how to create a macro-free (or macro-light) implementation of the tidyverse in #julialang (get out the jolly roger 🏴‍☠️): www.randy.pub/posts/piracy/

You wouldn't pirate a type

www.randy.pub

October 12, 2025 at 8:34 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

I’m doing my honest best to listen to this with an open mind but hooiiioill

There are so many words said that have absolutely no bearing on the facts of the case

podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/t...

The Law, such as it is

Government Podcast · Monthly Series · An exploration of a broken, if beautiful, institution, the law, and tradition, America. Season one told the story of a case, LESSIG v. NYT. Season two begins the ...

podcasts.apple.com

September 26, 2025 at 9:41 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

I miss being able to just buy a thing and have it, I hate paying for subscriptions

erika @yeeeerika.bsky.social · Jan 13

i don't want to hear your most boomer complaint. what's your most millennial complaint?

September 19, 2025 at 2:12 AM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Am I the only one who thinks Liquid Glass actually looks kinda good

September 18, 2025 at 10:23 PM

Reposted by Randy Boyes

Nicola Rennie

@nrennie.bsky.social

I really enjoyed giving a brief introduction to Julia for statisticians yesterday - thanks to Jake Grainger and Charles Dufour for organising such a great session!

Slides: nrennie.rbind.io/talks/rss-in...

#RStats #JuliaLang #ggplot2 #RSS2025Conf @tidierjl.bsky.social

Screenshot of slides comparing R and Julia code for visualisation

September 3, 2025 at 1:01 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

No wonder they were having a blast

August 21, 2025 at 4:17 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Nutrition research continues to fill the library’s hexagonal galleries

Health Nerd @gidmk.bsky.social · Aug 5

Someone just sent me this study, and all I can say is that I don't understand why anyone would bother investigating this question. 1/n

August 6, 2025 at 9:27 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Another #juliacon in the books! Check out my talk on TidierPlots.jl here: www.youtube.com/live/HMdBi9L... and the State of Tidier.jl (by Daniel Rizk) here: www.youtube.com/live/_Uf2KQX... to see what's been going on with @tidierjl.bsky.social in #julialang

JuliaCon Global 2025 | Else Room | Day 2

YouTube video by The Julia Programming Language

www.youtube.com

July 26, 2025 at 7:22 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

These values are required to do science - acting like this is a problem is like saying that CEOs valuing “professionalism” or “punctuality” more than the average person means they aren’t value-aligned with the average person

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · Jul 17

There’s a big gap on *values* (not facts) between scientific experts and the mass public, which is driving a lot of the crisis of confidence in institutions and expertise.

www.slowboring.com/p/the-crisis...

July 20, 2025 at 12:32 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Easily GOTY so far, and it’s hard to imagine anything knocking it out of that spot

Skill Up @skillup.bsky.social · Jun 21

After 2 months of work, the Clair Obscur Expedition 33 video is here. I interviewed most of the game's senior leadership team asking one simple question: how did you do this? Their answers were inspiring and moving, and it's no surprise that COE33 is as remarkable as it is: youtu.be/mXLOLgC2V2Q?...

The impossible (true) stories behind the making of Clair Obscur Expedition 33

YouTube video by Skill Up

youtu.be

June 22, 2025 at 11:24 AM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Oxygen not included
AoE 2
SSBM

Sophia_Nyx 🏳️‍⚧️ @sophianyx.bsky.social · Jun 20

Name 3 Videogames you've played for 200 hours.

June 20, 2025 at 9:40 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

The spectrum between “guy who occasionally plays an hour or two of video games with his kids” and “guy who still plays WoW 8 hours/night” is so vast here that it’s essentially two different ideas

Marcello Graziano 🇺🇦 @marcellograz.bsky.social · Jun 17

If playing video games drives away neonazi antivaxxers women like Third-Wheeler, than I am going to increase my playing time.

June 17, 2025 at 12:35 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Not dead, but:
- no growth in the last 3 years
- almost half of all users are students (summer user decline), and they’re not staying after grad - at least not in enough numbers to increase overall use

Counterpoint: Positron use may be growing? I personally switched and don’t use RStudio anymore

Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · Jun 10

Is #rstats dead? I don’t think so.

Line chart titled ‘Weekly Runs of RStudio IDE’ showing usage data from 2023 to 2025. The y-axis ranges from 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 weekly runs. The chart displays a cyclical pattern with regular peaks around 5,000,000-6,000,000 runs and dramatic drops to approximately 2,000,000 runs that occur periodically during holiday periods.

June 11, 2025 at 10:47 AM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Trying out some old Vizz Buzz challenges in TidierPlots - is there any way in #makie to easily add small images? The original version had flags as labels...

Code to recreate a data visualization showing the medal progress at the 2018 olympics, reproduced below:

using TidierPlots, TidierFiles, TidierData, DataFrames, Dates

wo = read_csv("data/bump (1).csv")

wo_plot = @chain wo begin
@mutate total = gold + silver + bronze
transform(:date => ByRow(x -> 1 + (x-Date("2018-02-10")).value) => :day)
@group_by date
@mutate rank = 1:n()
@ungroup
end

top5 = @chain wo_plot begin
@filter country in ["NED", "GER", "CAN", "USA", "NOR"]
end

final = @chain top5 begin
@filter day == 16
end

ggplot(wo_plot) +
geom_point(@aes(x = day, y = rank, group = country), alpha = .4, size = 15, color = :lightgrey) +
geom_line(@aes(x = day, y = rank, group = country), alpha = .4, linewidth = 6, color = :lightgrey) +
geom_point(data = top5, @aes(x = day, y = rank, color = country), size = 15, alpha = 0.5) +
geom_line(data = top5, @aes(x = day, y = rank, color = country), linewidth = 6, alpha = 0.5) +
geom_point(data = top5, @aes(x = day, y = rank), color = :white, size = 5) +
scale_y_reverse() +
lims(y = c(0.5, 10.5), x = c(0, 18)) +
labs(title = "Pyongchang 2018 Olympic Winter Games",
subtitle = "Countries ranked by overall medals after each competition day",
x = "Competition Days with Medals", y = "Rank") +
scale_color_manual(values = c(:red, :black, :orange, :green, :blue)) +
guides(color = :none) +
theme_minimal() +
theme(
xgridstyle = :solid,
xgridcolor = :lightgray,
xgridvisible = true,
xticks = 1:16,
yticks = 1:10,
leftspinevisible = false,
bottomspinevisible = false,
titlealign = :left,
titlesize = 24,
subtitlesize = 16
)

June 4, 2025 at 11:08 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Accidentally installed monokai pro, I’ll pay for winzip before I pay for your hexcodes bro

May 22, 2025 at 10:32 PM

Reposted by Randy Boyes

Frank Hull

@frankiethull.bsky.social

Participating in #TidyTuesday with Julia has never been easier!

#Tidier
#TidierTuesday

@tidierjl.bsky.social
@jonthegeek.com

Screenshot of Positron IDE, displays a quarto document using TidierPlots and TidyTuesday.jl to download and plot pokemon data. A scatterplot of attack vs HP, color coded by type appears next to the document

April 23, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

The one piece of good news in the portfolio today

April 10, 2025 at 8:56 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

If we can’t right-assign, we should just use =

Blas M. Benito @blasbenito.com · Apr 8

please_dont_do() -> this
#rstats

April 9, 2025 at 10:38 PM

Randy Boyes

@randy.pub

Because this is a little annoying to set up, here's a simple example in the form of a blog post: www.randy.pub/posts/multif...

March 31, 2025 at 2:20 PM

Reposted by Randy Boyes

Tidier.jl

@tidierjl.bsky.social

Tidier.jl brings modern data science workflows into #julialang. Batteries included.

✅ Logging data transformations
✅ Unnesting database tables with SQL
✅ Same syntax for dataframes and databases (supporting 12 flavors of SQL)
✅ Customizable grammar of graphics for plotting

…and many more features.