Jeremy R. Winget, PhD

A wide photo of a stag standing in a snowy field on a sunny day. In the background is the rocky mountains, with a little snow blowing off Pike's Peak

go outside

A chart of respiratory virus tests in Washington State for the flu season to date. Flu and RSV are showing extremely rapid growth, up 5x-10x in 6 weeks, while other respiratory viruses show no change.

Many friends and acquaintances are sick now in Washington State (as am I; some virus, maybe a cold)

Tracking data are not so great but here's a chart from the state that may be the best we have. Source: doh.wa.gov/sites/defaul...

See if you can eyeball the trend ...

P.S. Wear a mask!

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

It’s going to be some bullshit respectability from the center and some bullshit bleating about identity politics from the left and some bullshit religious forgiveness from the right.

I’m just going to expire from unrequited rage.

Guardrails are a scam. It's not that they could work, it's that they cannot and never will for such models. By design. 1/n

Engineer Insightful Shiny Apps with Behavioral Science (Jeremy Winget, CrossStack) | posit::conf YouTube video by Posit PBC

Happy Friday! I'm a bit late, but better than never 😅

My #PositConf2025 talk, 𝘌𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘺 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘉𝘦𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, is live on Posit’s YouTube channel. This one was especially fun to put together!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvMn...

#CognitiveEngineering #rstats #shiny

Back with a thread I've been pulling on

New post on Cognitive Engineering: Building tech for human minds, often the most neglected layer
jrwinget.com/blog/cognitive-engineering

It also kicks off plans the Cognitive Engineering Field Guide, an open resource launching early 2026

More soon!

#devx

The Zork games have been properly open sourced with the MIT license 😍 opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11...

These were some of the first computer games I ever played back on our IBM 8086 PC. So many good memories.

#rstats Please welcome Jarl, a new R linter.

Jarl is a CLI tool with extensions in VS Code, Positron, and Zed. It can check thousands of lines of R code in milliseconds.

Jarl provides several output formats, a Github Actions workflow, and more.

Blog post: www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2025-1...

{bidux} v0.3.3: Where Databases Meet Quick Decisions – The Friction Point The latest {bidux} release bridges the gap between your production data and rapid UX improvements, because sometimes the best insight is the one you can act on today.

Back from a brief hiatus with good news: {bidux} v0.3.3 dropped on CRAN! 🎉

Your production database → behavioral insights → better UX

New bid_quick_suggest() for when you need a fix before standup

More details here: www.jrwinget.com/blog/databas...

#rstats #UX #UI

Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to? There's a paper I recently came across by Mohammad Tahaei and colleagues called Privacy Champions in Sofware Teams: Understanding Their Motivations, Strategies, and Challenges. In it, they interview 1...

New open newsletter at Fight for the Human: Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to?

In it you'll find the Dev Science Office Hour I hosted with @arianamirian.bsky.social, as well as my notes on a paper about technical Champions

www.fightforthehuman.com/empirical-se...

🎉 I'm looking for an #rstats software engineer to work with me in 2026.

Remote (WFH), swiss-based (already here or willing to move here), permanent or contract.

+ Pros: work with me
- Cons: work with me...

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.

I've been on the road so I'm behind the times—but if you wanted to destroy US science, I can think of no more expedient action.

Blatant unconstitutionality aside, fuck this backwards forwards and sideways.

www.science.org/content/article/u-s-congress-considers-sweeping-ban-chinese-collaborations

Never forget that a Democratic US Attorney’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz for downloading JSTOR PDFs contributed to his suicide but AI firms’ decision to download everything ever will be a justification for hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts and legal exemptions.

Example of using `filter_out()` on the `penguins` dataset, showing how it is much easier than `filter()`, especially with `NA`s

We are looking for #rstats community feedback on 3 new dplyr functions!

We're aiming to expand the `filter()` family:

- `filter()` to keep rows
- `filter_out()` to drop rows
- `when_any()` and `when_all()` as modifiers

Read more and leave feedback here:
github.com/tidyverse/ti...

The Psychology of Technologists (Cat Hicks, Catharsis Consulting) | posit::conf(2025) YouTube video by Posit PBC

Dr. Cat Hicks (@grimalkina.bsky.social) gave one of my very favorite keynotes of all time at #positconf this year 🥹 It really made my heart glow, and now that all the conf talks are on YouTube, you can watch it even if you missed conf!! #databs #rstats #python

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-bM...

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

This is the way the normalization works. Scenes the media would've/could've chased a month ago go ignored in favor of what's new/shocking. It's not that people aren't reporting on what's happening, because they are. But the bar for what's "newsworthy" always shifts.

Tools for LLMs and Humans who use R -- Garrick Aden-Buie, Software Engineer, Posit

Full schedule is live: R+AI 2025 · Nov 12–13 · online

Sample session:
“Tools for LLMs and Humans who use R” — Garrick Aden-Buie (Posit)

How the {btw} package feeds computational context to LLMs for smoother R+AI workflows.

Register! rconsortium.github.io/RplusAI_webs...

#rstats #AI @posit.co

That means the next Developer Science Office Hour is going to be Design-a-Study with Cat!

Get your (free) spot here for our online event, space is limited for the vibes, but the enthusiasm will be unlimited: www.eventbrite.com/e/design-a-s...

This post is blowing up.

Please read the full paper 😌✨

👇👇👇👇👇👇

Guest, O., Suarez, et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Thanks so much, Cat! That means a lot coming from you. I really appreciate you reading it

Thanks, Christian! I really appreciate that! The RSS feed should be fixed now, though I still have a few things to tidy up after updating the source code last month. Lmk if you still run into any issues

When Groups Get Stuck on the Wrong Problem – Jeremy R. Winget, PhD Dissent, sharedness, and the design of collective intelligence

New blog post, in a slightly new style!

Why do groups sometimes get stuck on the wrong thing?
How do minority voices help systems stay honest?
What does design has to do with dissent?

Some thoughts, and some group science, on problems big and small

www.jrwinget.com/blog/2025-10...

bidux 0.3.2: Leaner, Quieter, More Intuitive BID Workflows – Jeremy R. Winget, PhD The {bidux} 0.3.2 release streamlines BID workflows with intuitive flat APIs, built-in telemetry presets, and a quieter, leaner experience, helping you focus on insights rather than overhead.

🚀 {bidux} 0.3.2 is out!

It's leaner, quieter, and more intuitive:
• Modern, flat API
• Telemetry sensitivity presets
• Global quiet mode functionality

Read the details 👇
www.jrwinget.com/blog/2025-10...

#rstats #ux #ui #shiny

CPD just relieved feds from this line too. Then a moment later the feds gassed the whole area, including the cops.

Federal agents shoot woman they say 'boxed in' authorities on Chicago's South Side Authorities were on patrol when they were "rammed by 10 cars," according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. One of the drivers "was armed with a semi-automatic weapon," prompting...

The Sun-Times *is reporting these were live rounds* fired at a vehicle.

There's been much confusion in the immediate aftermath of this about whether whether they were that or pepper balls, and whether person in vehicle was hit by them. This is the most current info we have *at this time.*