Ready for R (2025-10-29): Guilt is not a good motivator
Welcome to the Weekly Ready for R mailing list! If you need Ready for R course info, it's here. Past newsletters are available here.
Hi Everybody,
Life has kept me busy as of late, and I've been questioning whether I have anything to contribute without adding to the noise. I tend to feel guilty about not writing newsletters, which sends me into a downward spiral. It clearly isn't a good motivator, so I'm trying something new.
Instead of worrying about perfection, I will just try to write something and not worry too much about whether it's good or not.
PositConf Highlights
PositConf happened in September, and here I am still getting my thoughts together on it. There's a reason that I keep coming back to PositConf. The new tech is really cool, but the reason I keep coming back is the people. It is a conference where I get to see old data science friends and meet new friends.
I gave a talk, which was about using WebR/Pyodide for teaching called Degrees of Freedom. The talk was about integrating WebR/Pyodide into your teaching effectively, and showing different ways of using it for different exercises: lowering cognitive load, for active learning, and for social learning. It was great meeting everyone afterwards. It really helps inspire me.
Cool Tech at PositConf: Databot
Joe Cheng and Hadley Wickham showed off Databot during a keynote, Posit's AI agent that helps you in exploratory data analysis (this was preceded by Hadley talking about how AIs make a lot of bs).
They were careful to mention that Databot works best when you collaborate with it, that is, you use Databot to help explore the data. It does badly if you don't engage with it. They mention that using Databot is iterative, and most helpful when using a WEAR loop:
- Write code – Databot writes Python or R code to answer the question or carry out the task. This code is displayed to the user.
- Execute – The code is automatically executed in the current R or Python session. The output (including console output, plots, and tables) is visible both to the user and to Databot.
- Analyze – Databot makes observations and draws conclusions from the output. This might include answering the user’s question, or noting any surprising results, or calling out ideas for further investigation. After this step, Databot may choose to loop if there are really obvious next steps.
- Regroup – Databot proposes around three to five next steps for the user to choose from. This may include continuing the current line of inquiry, going on a side quest to explain some unexpected feature of the data, or asking an entirely new question.
It should be noted that Databot does not execute code by itself - the user is required to actually run the code.
Unlike Positron assistant, Databot is not installed by default. Here are the installation instructions, and you'll need an Anthropic API key (it uses Claude underneath).
Thanks for Reading
That's it for this week. I need to start up again slowly.
Best, Ted