Fed up with your world? Visit ours. Clarkesworld robot looks to the right where the cover of issue 235 is located. It features a tall spacecraft floating over a dockyard in a pink and purple sky.
Friday is a great day to subscribe.
clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/
(Ok, so any day is good, but why wait?)
If you are coming to tokio.conf or are in the Portland area on April 22 we are having holding a DataFusion meetup at OHSU -- thanks to Mustafa Akur for helping arrange the details.
Signup here luma.com/dsp3ud82
Oh no. NSF Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program shuttered.
This one leaves me winded. A good story from 2025 by @seattletimes-rss.bsky.social offers insight into what we are losing: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
We are holding an @ApacheDataFusio meetup on Wed April 22 in Portland: luma.com/dsp3ud82
Yes, this is a day before the meetup in Seattle/Bellevue on April 23 luma.com/hxshbp0m
We heard you: ADBC is great, but you need it on mainframes.
Introducing ADBC for COBOL. The same connectors that work with Python, Rust, and Go now work with a language originally designed for punch cards.
columnar.tech/blog/adbc-co...
Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.
Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Finally, an LLM bench that makes any sense to me
What makes more sense?
Arctos Alliance (arctosalliance.org) is now officially launched!
"If your organization depends on Arrow or Parquet or you’re interested in helping sustain these critical data technologies, we would welcome a conversation about how to get involved."
This was an extremely rational take on where we're at with AI and I appreciated the take on the whole SaaS-is-dead thing: redmonk.com/sogrady/2026...
We're chuffed to announce Apache SedonaDB 0.3.0! This release features a rewritten join that supports larger-than-memory spatial/KNN joins courtesy of Kristin Cowalcijk, new functions, parameterized SQL queries, GDAL/pyogrio reads, GDAL/sf based reads in R, and the beginnings of an R DataFrame API!
Bluesky follower syncing on Puzzmo.com illustrated
The Puzzmonaut labeler
Shipping today: @puzzmo.com has integrated support for @bsky.app
The site/app have follower syncing, and a labeler so that you can spot new Puzzmo folks when browsing Bluesky posts
www.puzzmo.com/bluesky
blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2026/0...
A pink and blue graphic reading "apply for our opportunity scholarship to posit::conf(2026)."
We are covering 40 people's travel, lodging, and registration for posit::conf() this fall! If you are from a group that is underrepresented in data science or open source, please consider applying for the Opportunity Scholarship—we'd love to have you join.
posit.co/blog/apply-t...
to be here
Really excited about this new blog post from my colleagues at @columnar.tech
:) I have to be really careful with this stuff.
It seems like we don't have any meaningful metrics to measure around agentic coding so we end up with stuff like this, similar to GitHub's "activity" scoring. Amp has had a really neat looking activity card for a while now:
Roses are red, violets are blue, syntax error in line 32.
A message from your ZX Spectrum.
📖 Apache Parquet recently added native support for Geospatial. This post explains what that means and why it is important: parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...
Releasing today: 'ProggyForever': a new MIT-licensed scalable font designed to closely match ProggyClean which happily served as Dear ImGui default font for 10+ years: github.com/ocornut/prog...
The new font is now embedded by default in Dear ImGui (compressed down to ~14 KB).
Apache Arrow is 10 years old 🎉
The first git commit landed on 2016-02-05. Now Arrow has 10+ official implementations and a growing third-party ecosystem.
Read our celebratory blog post for some tidbits of Arrow history, and our outlook on the present and future.
arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/02...
Reviewing release notes for projects I work on can be a trip. The PRs have my name on them and apparently I created them but I have zero memory of having worked on them. Is that bad?
We finally did it: Apache Arrow now has a security model.
The Arrow security model doesn't cover any specific Arrow implementation, but it informs about pitfalls and guardrails when dealing with potentially untrusted data in one of the Arrow formats.
@apache.org
arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/02...
It’s a good bridge
Large television showing the boonta eve classic
They got the big game on at the bar
No worries. I'm glad you replied here.
The responses in the Discuss thread are really interesting.
I don't see any of the examples, dbc included, as "random binaries". Maybe that's why it elicits so little concern. At least for dbc, we're coming from the perspective of the Python user and trying to work backward towards the best user experience.
