Miles McBain
Code hacker, number cruncher, #rstats user, board gamer, road racer, plant eater, bass slapper.
I like big bikes and I cannot lie. #cargobike
Coming to you from AUS / BNE.
https://milesmcbain.com
- Reposted by Miles McBaininspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment
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- Reposted by Miles McBain“The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly…AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector & tech monopolists run amok.“ Read this article by @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy. Whether you agree with it all or not, it’s important.
- Reposted by Miles McBainI have attempted a tierlist of common styles of bike racks. (Just install staple racks!)
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- Reposted by Miles McBain"But even if it sometimes helps, is it worth it? Can you get a mouse out of your kitchen with a small atomic bomb? Sure. Does it work? Yes. Do you want that? Probably not. Does the rest of the world want that? Definitely not." @felienne.bsky.social in www.felienne.nl/2026-02/#eng...
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- Reposted by Miles McBain{ggview} can print plots to Viewer (Rstudio or Positron) with true scaling. Adjust plot settings and see the final proportions immediately. Save the plot once 👌 e.g.: ggplot(...) + ggview::canvas(width = 220, height = 220*2/3, units = "mm", dpi = 300) per @nrennie.bsky.social #datavis #rstats
- Now my favorite part of writing any paper: repeatedly recompiling ggplot graphs to get the text size right #rstats
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- Reposted by Miles McBainIt's so fucked up to have been a kid during the D&D is the devil freakout and the Tipper Gore dirty lyrics freakout and live to see the teen suicide machine get such a pass.
- Reposted by Miles McBaini stand by this statement every year
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- Reposted by Miles McBainSome closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
- Reposted by Miles McBainI'm R-Ladies RoCur this week - follow at @weare.rladies.org. I'll be posting about contributing to base R, the joy of R community, @rainbowr.org, Forwards, R packages (mine and my favourites), Research Software Engineering and whatever else I think of over the next few days!
- This week’s #RLadies curator is @ellakaye.co.uk 🎉
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- Kinda weird coincidence how our communications minister, her personal movements, and expenditure have been national headline fodder for 3 days running in the lead up to the U16 social media ban… A policy with bipartisan support. Almost like someone really wanted to make an example of her? 🤔
- Over time my Rprofile has become this extremely cyberpunk combination of hacks that change how other people’s packages print info, and deeply situational but highly effective debugging tools. This is why you never nuke the .Rprofile with rm(ls = ls()). Very rude. #rstats
- Reposted by Miles McBain"Why don't kids go outside anymore?!" Kids outside:
- Reposted by Miles McBainIf you missed my talk but still want some tips for writing good code for scientists, my slides are here: daxkellie.quarto.pub/a-guide-to-w... All the links and references are there too in case you want to see more! 😀🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats #quartopub
- Reposted by Miles McBainChatGPT’s signature writing style is everywhere now, and I hate it. It reminds me of when we tried mixing all the beverages at the soda fountain in middle school. We didn’t actually create the perfect drink, we just made a cloying monstrosity that lost everything good about its constituent parts.
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- Reposted by Miles McBainThe recording of my #rstats posit::conf talk ✨ practical {renv}✨ is available! 🎉 I created this talk for frustrated {renv} users 🫠 and potential {renv} users🤩 youtu.be/l01u7Ue9pIQ?... Even if {renv} isn't on your radar, you may still find this talk interesting if you are curious about🤔...
- Reposted by Miles McBain(spending 9 billion dollars to make a robot say "i have always loved you") hard times create strong men
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- Sir we are purveyors of quality hand-coded software. Typed out in the traditional way by fingers on mechanical keys. Some backlit by LEDs. Look here, look at this code. It looks clean, just like shoddy AI work, but let me draw your attention to this unexpected line break here…
- Going out on a limb here but the most exquisitely designed deeply domain specific functions in the #rstats #tidyverse are probably the tidyr::separate_ family. separate_wider_regex() is my main. The patterns arg! Beautiful. The debug mode! So sympathetic to the user’s whole process.
- You will use these like twice a year and twice a year you will feel like a data wrangling jedi.
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- One of the greatest things about my job is the things talked about vs not. A whole floor of nerds. Talked about: R, stats, fantasy leagues, coffee, cycling, running, hiking, urbanism, bargains, the competitive puzzling scene, video games. Things not talked about: Python, ever.
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- Had cause to share this classic software design talk yesterday: youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?... And wow. What a time of optimism that was compared to now. The false promise of AI doing it all has probably set the field back a decade at least.
- Reposted by Miles McBainThere's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles. Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8
- Reposted by Miles McBainTried to sneak a photo of a cute doggo and accidentally had long exposure on and I believe I have created man’s greatest expression of art
- Coming across this sitting at kid 1’s piano lesson we got to by cargo bike. 😊🚲💪 www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
