@niccrane.bsky.social
Independent R consultant. Apache Arrow PMC Member & #rstats 📦 maintainer.
@simonpcouch.comReposted by @niccrane.bsky.socialIn case you weren't able to make it, @sara-altman.bsky.social and I wrote up the talk for the @posit.co OSS blog. We talked about the rise of "vibe analysis," the pitfalls of human-in-the-loop, and some new software from Posit. opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-10...
@niccrane.bsky.socialCool things I've come across today:
1. Women of Open Source - community for women & NB people across different projects & experience levels: womenofopensource.org
2. Foss Backstage - conf about the non-coding aspects of open source which may be going on my list for next year: 26.foss-backstage.de
@niccrane.bsky.social"No one is forcing you to read it" - so true, but IMO many maintainers have internalised their interpretation of open source social contract, and if they felt obliged to give *all* contributions a good effort review, it takes a while to update those beliefs. Seeing this on Arrow especially.
@zeileis.orgReposted by @niccrane.bsky.social
@rconsortium.bsky.socialReposted by @niccrane.bsky.socialNEXT WEEK! Register now!
"Sustaining R: Investing in the People, Infrastructure, and Community Behind R"
R Core / R Foundation panel discussion
Oct 6
Simon Urbanek, Kurt Hornik, Heather Turner. Hosted by R Consortium.
@lisadiedrich.bsky.socialReposted by @niccrane.bsky.social"This is not models going rogue. This is gross incompetence & negligence by a particular company, which actually they could be held criminally liable for." @timnitgebru.blacksky.app cuts to the AI chase.
@libbyheeren.bsky.socialReposted by @niccrane.bsky.socialNic ( @niccrane.bsky.social) taught us all about FREAKING PARQUET FILES on the #DSLab, which are wayyyyy cooler than I realized.
Parquet files:
Preserve data types
Are fast & small
Are column-oriented so you can read just 1 col if wanted!
& Positron displays'em out-the-box!
@cpsievert.bsky.socialReposted by @niccrane.bsky.social
@niccrane.bsky.socialSuper excited for the Openscapes Community Call today: "Open Communities in the age of AI".
I have so many questions right now on how we bring new people in while protecting maintainer energy, & I can't think of a better speaker lineup to help answer that!
Details: openscapes.org/events/2026-...
@niccrane.bsky.socialLove this blog post by @jonkeane.bsky.social about language and interacting with AI; something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the more time I spend my day talking with human-simulating outputs and less time talking with humans.
@niccrane.bsky.socialYup. I'm now refusing to read AI-generated issues - if a human didn't write it, a human ain't reading it either.
@niccrane.bsky.socialI also love Cory Doctorow's equivalent - the "reverse centaur" - i.e. a centaur is a human assisted by AI, super powered, but a reverse centaur akin to a meat proxy - AI assisted by a human, with a delightfully illustrative book cover
@niccrane.bsky.socialI built two CLI tools in Go without writing a line of Go. Inspired by Wes McKinney's posit::conf keynote, I let Claude run with auto-accept, roborev reviewing every commit, and only paused for design decisions. It...just worked. Lessons for OSS maintenance too:
@niccrane.bsky.socialI've published my rapid learning skill that I use when I don't want AI to just do all the work for me - I use it to learn new codebases & it's saved me, like, a gazillion hours when working on ellmer recently! 🎉
Repo: github.com/thisisnic/ra...
Blog post: niccrane.com/posts/rapid-...
@niccrane.bsky.socialellmer 0.5.0 is now on CRAN! #rstats 🎉 New in this release: citations from web search, new ways to upload files, token counting before you send, streaming structured output, and AWS Bedrock Mantle support. Read all about it on the Posit Open Source blog: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-09...
@niccrane.bsky.socialSame! Lovely to meet you at Conf btw. I have left feeling sooo excited about so many ideas and wanting to do all of them, right now!
@niccrane.bsky.socialThis feels like an *entirely* different domain of task to open source library maintenance where I review the code I and others produce and my main challenges right now are managing cognitive load and decision fatigue.
@niccrane.bsky.socialMost likely helped a lot by pointing it at github.com/kenn-io so I could benefit from the design decisions made in the tools there. But, genuinely astounded by how productive I could be in a language I've never worked in before.
@niccrane.bsky.socialInspired by @wesmckinney.com's keynote at #positconf26 + enjoying using tools like roborev, I was curious to see if I could get Claude to create a Go tui with minimal input from me while I watched conference talks today...it worked confusingly well!
@jonthegeek.comReposted by @niccrane.bsky.socialSee ya at #PositConf2027, back in Seattle! #PositConf2026
