Sharon Machlis
@smachlis.bsky.social
2.4K followers 290 following 1.1K posts
Author of Practical R for Mass Communication & Journalism ❤️ #RStats, writing & cities designed for walking/biking Having fun with #GenAI (Mostly) retired; former tech journalist Also #VibrantAging #Running #Photography #Crochet #ASL
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smachlis.bsky.social
And they make it easier to learn and use new packages! I still read tutorials and manuals, but LLMs do a lot of the grunt work now.

Example: I'm learning targets. I read much of the manual. But an LLM wrote me an initial pipeline, which I then edited, corrected, and IMO improved. More fun.
smachlis.bsky.social
Election results in PDF
unenthusiast.com
In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/
hammancheez.bsky.social
"The chancellor approved it"
smachlis.bsky.social
Not sure where "Retired" fits in the registration categories of Students, Academic/Non-profit, or Industry?
smachlis.bsky.social
I do tend to write my own roxygen skeletons for my functions - the advantage of being an editor who codes 😀 . But since this project isn’t a package, I also asked Claude to read all my roxygen code and create a markdown doc with documentation. I don’t *love* results, but easy to edit as I like.
smachlis.bsky.social
The Claude Code #GenAI extension works in my Positron IDE - It is happily churning away helping me write {testthat} #RStats unit tests for one of my hobby projects.
Yes, I should have been doing that myself each time I created a function! I'll try to do better. 😅
open-vsx.org/extension/An...
Open VSX Registry
open-vsx.org
smachlis.bsky.social
Daily number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 1 - Oct 10, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot.
Coded with the {bskyr} and {ggplot2} R packages.

[Posted via R script and weekly cron job. Tx for your patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats
Bar chart of daily #RStats posts. Amounts range from around 25 in September 2024 to peaking over 100 some days. Latest totals were 52 yesterday and 50 the day before.
smachlis.bsky.social
I'm pleasantly surprised the API still works. I wanted some data for a local blog post I'm working on - the {tidycensus} #RStats 📦 let me pull what I needed!
smachlis.bsky.social
And not in pre-season 😂

#NFL
smachlis.bsky.social
I'm watching this #NYGiants game and can’t believe my eyes

34-17???

#Giants #NYG #PHIvsNYG #NFL
smachlis.bsky.social
I'm guessing results would be better with a less generic prompt, though: asking the LLM what it knows about dataviz best practices first to ‘prime’ the model, telling it to ask you questions it needs answered before doing the task, giving it a little info on what you think are best practices. . .
smachlis.bsky.social
#Ageism
Fun fact: The guy who invented the World Wide Web is 70. Old enough to be a grandpa.
Un-fun fact: Stereotypes like this about older people being technically clueless do real harm to older workers in fields like IT.
smachlis.bsky.social
The {gtsummary} #RStats 📦 “summarizes data sets, regression models, and more, using sensible defaults with highly customizable capabilities. . . . [It] creates beautifully formatted, ready-to-share summary and result tables in a single line of R code!”
www.danieldsjoberg.com/gtsummary/
Presentation-Ready Data Summary and Analytic Result Tables
Creates presentation-ready tables summarizing data sets, regression models, and more. The code to create the tables is concise and highly customizable. Data frames can be summarized with any function,...
www.danieldsjoberg.com
smachlis.bsky.social
“An introduction to working with data for biologists including: data structure, data manipulation, visualization, basic programming, and databases. Designed to be used as a flipped university course and also for self-guided students.” #RStats #SQL
datacarpentry.github.io/semester-bio...
Data Carpentry for Biologists ·
datacarpentry.github.io
smachlis.bsky.social
I don't need free shipping since I'm getting the e-book, but I ordered today anyway.
smachlis.bsky.social
This is a professor at Rutgers who teaches a class on the history of anti-fascism. He also teaches about human rights. He has received multiple death threats and been doxed. He is relocating to Europe for his safety. This is where we are in the US now. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
smachlis.bsky.social
Walk down to the river this afternoon
Narrow river with autumn foliage on one side reflecting in the river, green foliage on the other side
smachlis.bsky.social
Daboll shouldn't have this job.
#NFL
smachlis.bsky.social
Daniel Jones is up 35 points and about to go 4-1. Jaxson Dart is down 12 points to the 0-4 Saints. But tell me again how Jones was the Giants' problem. 🤡🤡
How does Brian Daboll still have a job?
#Giants #NYGiants #NYG #NFL
smachlis.bsky.social
Daily number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 1 - Oct 3, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot.
Coded with the {bskyr} and {ggplot2} R packages.

[Posted via R script and weekly cron job. Tx for your patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats
Bar chart of daily #RStats posts. Amounts range from around 25 in September 2024 to peaking over 100 some days. Latest totals were 52 yesterday and 44 the day before.
Reposted by Sharon Machlis
chriskenny.bsky.social
redistio now uses @kylewalker.bsky.social's mapgl for interactive redistricting map editing!

redistio is an #rstats package that uses Shiny to draw redistricting maps locally.

Unlike other district editors, this provides access to our simulation algorithms, interactively!

Short demo:
smachlis.bsky.social
As a former privacy and security reporter, I believe everyone should understand how a mobile phone can compromise their privacy (with advertisers as well as the government). US #privacy laws are completely inadequate. Meanwhile, there are a few things you can do ⬇️⬇️⬇️
smachlis.bsky.social
Thanks!! gtools::mixedsort() is new to me
#RStats
smachlis.bsky.social
Thanks so much! I look forward to trying it out this weekend!!