📝 "Explore #TidyTuesday literary prizes with Positron’s Data Explorer"

👤 Julia Silge (@juliasilge.com)

🔗 https://juliasilge.com/blog/literary-prizes/

#rladies #rstats

ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.

I am excited beyond description to lift the veil on what we have been working on in 2026:

Please meet ggsql! A new extension of the SQL language for creating visualisations using the grammar of graphics. Read all about it in the blog post or visit the website at ggsql.org

Horizontal bar chart comparing agentic coding reliability across three groups. Frontier models (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Pro 3.1, GPT 4.1) score 80-100% correct. Four-months-ago's local models (Qwen 3 14B, GPT OSS 20B, Mistral 3.1 24B) all score 0%. Today's local models (Gemma 4 26B-A4B, Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B) both score 90%.

A few months ago, any LLM that I could run on my Macbook scored 0% on an agentic coding eval I put together. This month's Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 4 releases both scored 90%.

On my blog: simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-04...

Existential crisis! Is my degree worthless? YouTube video by Davis Vaughan

I had the pleasure of speaking to students at both Duke University and Wake Forest University about the existential crisis that many of them are feeling right now:

In the age of AI, is my degree worthless?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kTx...

Positron plus JupyterHub logo, with the Posit logo in the corner.

We are thrilled to announce that Positron Server is now available for academic use via JupyterHub!

This gives students a robust #RStats & #Python data science IDE without needing a local install or new infrastructure.

Learn more: positron.posit.co/blog/posts/2...

Alright, Positron's data viewer has me sold—this is legitimately better than RStudio. The nice continuous/ordinal histograms and missing value percentages are actually quite helpful and have already replaced a lot of ... |> pull() |> hist() type workflows I used to use

#RStats

Screenshot of Positron in macOS opened inside a Linux-based Docker container, with a rendered Quarto HTML file that says it was built on Linux

I got native dev containers working in Positron! Blog post forthcoming, but for now, here's a minimal repo showing how it works: it uses Quarto and Typst and Docker to make a little PDF report github.com/andrewheiss/...

(Positron documentation: positron.posit.co/dev-containe...) #rstats

How we chose Positron’s Python type checker – Positron We tested four open-source Python type checkers to find the best default for Positron. Here’s how Pyrefly, ty, Basedpyright, and Zuban compare on features, correctness, performance, and development ve...

When it comes to #Python type checkers and LSPs, we had a lot of options for what to bundle in Positron, our data science IDE! 🤯

Read through how we evaluated Pyrefly, ty, Basedpyright, and Zuban, and what we ended up deciding to use by default:

positron.posit.co/blog/posts/2...

2026-03-27 AI Newsletter A brief history of data science agents at Posit: from Shiny Assistant and Databot to Posit Assistan.

Our latest @posit.co AI Newsletter swaps the usual roundup for something different. @sara-altman.bsky.social and I traced the (brief) history of agents for data science at Posit, from Shiny Assistant to Databot to Positron Assistant to our latest release, Posit Assistant.

posit.co/blog/2026-03...

protesting in this outfit is a real “heads I win, tails you lose” moment when it comes to the optics

Kermit the frog screaming with excitement

We have summer internships y'all! Come work at Posit on the PyData, tidymodels, shiny, or Connect teams: grnh.se/tigz810a3us. You will have an awesome time, learn a ton, and help advance our open source and pro tools 🧰 #rstats #pydata

GitHub - posit-dev/great-docs: Great Docs lets you easily build a Python package docs site Great Docs lets you easily build a Python package docs site - posit-dev/great-docs

Anyone else spoiled by R's pkgdown and find python's mkdocs or sphinx a bit tedious and config-heavy. Check out @richmeister.bsky.social 's awesome new {great-docs} as a batteries-included alternative to spin up an effective docs site in <15 min!

1/n 🧵

github.com/posit-dev/gr...

A sharp pointy shape and a round blobby shape

ggplot defaults are bouba, matplotlib defaults are kiki

Wondering why Astral joined OpenAI?

We recently hosted Charlie Marsh from Astral on The Test Set, where he discussed how AI agents were already reshaping Astral’s roadmap.

If you want to hear where his head was at before the news broke, check out the episode here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noxo...

Deploying boosted tree models with Orbital - Posit Orbital 0.5.0 translates tidymodels workflows into SQL, featuring new tuning tools to balance predictive accuracy with database performance.

Our latest blog post shows we can deploy boosted tree models, such as xgboost, lightgbm, or catboost, directly into the database itself!

Running predictionsfrom an xgboost model on 2.1 million observations in less than 10 seconds!

posit.co/blog/deployi...
#rstats #tidymodels #mlops

Thank you so much for making the trip!

I am so happy for this announcement!! Heather is such an incredible community partner and deeply knowledgeable of base R. This is great news for R core and the broader R community. 🎉❤️🙌🤩 #rstats

Networking and social gathering, Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:00 PM | Meetup Our March meetup will be an in-person gathering for local SLC area folks! We will meet at Bruges Belgian Bistro in Sugarhouse to spend time networking, having waffles and/o

If you are a local SLC-area #rstats person, join us this coming Friday afternoon for an IRL networking gathering to chat all things data science! I shall be eating a fancy waffle 🧇

www.meetup.com/slc-rug/even...

That's a great topic, Matan! Thanks for raising that, and I do think it's interesting to think through when or why people might work in an IDE vs. in a terminal.

RStudio now has next edit suggestions! I wrote a bit about how they work and have open-sourced the eval we used to engineer the system's prompt: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-03...

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

Outgrowing your laptop with R and Positron – Positron R-Ladies Abuja has posted a recording of a recent talk on Positron, and you can find it here!

The #Positron team has a new blog! ✨

Check out the first post, about a talk I recently gave for R-Ladies Abuja, and subscribe via email or RSS feed to stay up to date:

positron.posit.co/blog/posts/2...

A screenshot of an RStudio window. On the left-hand side is a new pain called Posit Assistant. The Posit Assistant had recently run code making a lat-lon plot of Washington state, colored by whether the point had been marked as forested or not.

Today we're releasing AI for RStudio. It's really, really good—I'd encourage you to point it at the messiest data sources you have and see what it can do.

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-03...

btw for trans women to offer this kind of practical warning and sympathy is a serious mitzvah and we cis women really owe it to them (and to ourselves!) to step up our solidarity in kind

#rainbowR conf is todayyyyy! And tomorrow. If you're registered, join @damiepak.bsky.social and I for a short trivia game in about an hour-ish! And then, a quick social 🥳 #rstats #rainbowrconf

"Working with agents is a lot more productive, but a lot less fun." Charlie Marsh on the weird world of building software right now. Full conversation on The Test Set.

New feature in the Positron Notebook Editor: Inline data-explorer view. Whenever you print a pandas or polars dataframe you get an inline interactive view powered by Positron's data explorer. This allows you to view and sort massive dataframes.

Join us now!

Developing Rust-Based R Packages Using the Roxido Framework, Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 12:00 PM | Meetup Our February Meetup will be a remote gathering; the Zoom link will be posted the week before the event. Rust is a modern systems language that combines C-class performance

Next Tuesday (Feb 17), join the SLC RUG to hear from David B. Dahl about using Rust in #rstats packages! 🦀

www.meetup.com/slc-rug/even...

Commenting on PRs is broken. Time to just merge PRs.