_Wintermute

> which defines the symbols and methods exported by the package

Which are all dumped into the one single global namespace regardless if you want everything or not.

I can't remember the exact number, but tidyverse package imports literally thousands of things into your global namespace on package load, coupled with any other dependencies and you have a hell of a time figuring out where any function or constant came from.

I think a lot of the problem is that R does everything it can to prevent people from writing modular code.

It doesn't have modules or namespaces, and the current fashion is for packages to use non-standard evaluation which adds friction to user's writing their own functions.

Strangely enough wasm might get support for 64 bit ints, but their native R code won't.

For Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine very much is our business.

I don't understand why base R silently converting integers into characters is seen as a positive? Especially coupled with the comment "In R there's rarely any uncertainty when loading genomic data", surely this just increases uncertainty?

This is a regional thing. In the UK they're all brackets.

Brackets, square brackets, curly brackets.

Nim?

Only a small fraction of the covid test and trace costs were on software, the overwhelming majority was on lab tests and PCR kits.

The R syntax is not kind on the eyes. I know that's a shallow dismissal, but I think it would really start to irritate me if I had to read that all day.

Posit (Rstudio) have been carrying out layoffs for the last few months, judging by the twitter posts of well known R developers looking for work, but the actual numbers seem to be a well held secret.

I can't tell if they're struggling or this is part of their wider shift away from an R focus towards datascience in general?

I work in scientific computing and I'm a huge fan of nim. I started writing a few tools at work in nim and was quite quickly asked to stop by the software development team. In their eyes, they are responsible for the long term maintenance of projects (it's debatable how much they actually carry out this role), and they didn't want the potential burden of a codebase in a language none of them are familiar with.

It's sad, as I feel nim would be easier to maintain compared to a typical c or R codebase written by a biologist, but that's what's expected.

In my experience getting a PhD doesn't require above average intelligence, it does require a lot of perseverance and a good amount of organisation though.

I honestly think most skilled tradespeople are more intelligent than me and my PhD holding colleagues.

I didn't enjoy the puzzles as much as previous years. My guess was they were structured in a way to make them non-trivial to solve with chat-GPT as the leaderboard is taken seriously by many.

I don't see how that logic differs from using `=` as an assignment operator.

"Assign X with value equal to 5"

This makes sense, but then why the use of `=` for function arguments?

Probably because it's full of inconsistencies and gotchas, largely caused by backwards compatibility with S.

I really didn't enjoy Catch-22 because it felt like a short story dragged out to 200 plus pages, just repeating the same observation about war again and again each chapter.

Car ownership is correlated with income in London. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...

Instead we got Tensorflow for ... Swift, which nobody asked for.

The number of times I witnessed tourist's suitcases being swiped from the RER B as the doors were closing was just depressing.

If they remained in people's backyards then it wouldn't be an issue, however they're used and often stored in public spaces. So I think it is valid for other people to have an opinion about these things.

I've heard "some people use their 2 ton car as a rain jacket" and thought it was urbanist hyperbole, but here you are.

They're making the CS7 Tooting even worse in the near future, allowing more left turns across the cycle lane, and introducing more parking bays.

Running maybe not, but if you get too into cycling or swimming (or I guess any low-impact endurance sport), it can sometimes be a chore to shovel enough food into you.

Strong disagree, there's a reason RStudio/Posit are spending so much time trying to develop 3rd party alternatives to install.packages() and CRAN.

Try installing an older version of a package without it pulling in the most recent incompatible dependencies, it's a whole adventure.

They have more an issue if they ever try and claim something on their insurance. Insurance companies are definitely motivated to find reasons not to pay out, and undeclared modifications are a pretty easy way to void your insurance.

I regularly lie awake as some idiot is racing round residential London streets in the distance, in densely populated areas it must be in the thousands of people that are being disrupted by a single person.

That's what controls are for, you're always comparing against the DMSO control. I also don't think anyone who's doing small molecule screens thinks DMSO is inert.

I worked at a pharma company who disabled internet access for most people. Many downloaded things on their phone's 4G and transferred them to their computer with a USB cable, it was pretty pointless.

That said, I'm sure Google's IT are far more competent than that horror-show.

Wind turbines kill such a small number of birds compared to cats, cars, windows, powerlines etc.