u/mhuzzell

I've been using the tidyverse for years, but I'm not very good about keeping R or packages updated. I finally got around to updating R a few months ago (now 4.6.0, with tidyverse 2.0.0), and am currently baffled by the behaviour of left_join.

For very brief context: I have two dfs that share the same column names. Most of the info in them is the same, but they each contain a pair of numerical columns whose contents were generated by different methods, and I want to compare those methods. They each also have a handful of character columns that were generated from the results of the numerical columns (separately in each method), so may or many not differ in their contents.

I tried combining the two dfs with left_join, as I've done plenty before with other dfs. I expected the columns to multiply wherever the contents differed, so that I could easily compare them within a single df. Instead, the second df was simply subsumed into the first?

I checked this behaviour with reprex and it seems to be a general outcome. Here's that reprex:

library(dplyr)

# A simplified df1 with 5 columns
df1 <- tibble::tibble(
  id = as.character(1:6),
  fruit = c("apple", "banana", "cherry", "apple", "banana", "cherry"),
  count = c(3, 6, 2, 8, 4, 10)
) %>%
  mutate(
    less_than_2 = ifelse(count < 2, "yes", "no"),
    less_than_5 = ifelse(count < 5, "yes", "no")
  )

# A simplified df2 -- only cols 3 and 5 differ from df1
df2 <- tibble::tibble(
  id = as.character(1:6),
  fruit = c("apple", "banana", "cherry", "apple", "banana", "cherry"),
  count = c(7, 2, 9, 3, 6, 4)
) %>%
  mutate(
    less_than_2 = ifelse(count < 2, "yes", "no"),
    less_than_5 = ifelse(count < 5, "yes", "no")
  )

# df3 combines them with left_join()
df3 <- left_join(df1, df2)

Expected outcome: a df3 with 7 columns: "id", "fruit", "count.x", "count.y", "less_than_2", "less_than_5.x", "less_than_5.y"

Actual outcome: df3 is identical to df1.

What the heck?

(Also yes, I'm aware I can rename my columns before combining -- but my actual dfs have 70 columns apiece, and also I'm mostly trying to understand what's happening here, since this behaviour is so different from what I've been used to!)

Having little pop-ups that guess the actual code I'm about to type is pretty helpful, frequently actually correct, and great for avoiding typos.

Having shadow-text that predicts the real-world context I'm adding in comments is distracting, usually wildly incorrect, and deeply annoying.

Is there a way to keep the former without the latter? Or, at the very least, a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle suggestions on/off that I can use when moving between different parts of a script?

Thank you for your help.

>*** Service Announcement***
The Govan-Partick Bridge will be closed to pedestrian/cycle traffic from 17:30 - 18:15 on Thursday 16th July 2026. Please plan your journeys accordingly.

A sign on the bridge says that you can get information on closures like that announced above by visiting:

https://www.facebook.com/govanbridge [TRUE]

https://x.com/govanbridge [TRUE]

https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/govanbridge [FALSE]

The council website (last updated 22 August 2025) apparently can't give up-to-date information because the bridge is operated by Mirren Marine, not by the council. This leaves bridge users diverted exclusively to two social media websites to get information on closures – there's not even signage about planned closures at the bridge itself, despite them being announced on said social media well in advance.

This, to me, is not an acceptable means of communication for the operation of a public asset. Social media announcements should be add-ons to an official channel, not a replacement for them.

Meanwhile, if they are going to use social media, they have made a poor choice of which and how. Users of the Renfrew bridge can join a WhatsApp announcement channel, which means that they can passively receive notifications about closures, rather than having to proactively navigate to a social media site in order to check for themselves.

I have written to info@mirrenmarine.com to request that they make a WhatsApp announcements channel for the Govan–Partick bridge, as from a technical point of view, it would be very easy to fold this into their existing social media announcements structure. I think this request is more likely to be granted if it is repeated by more people, which is why I am posting here. However, I also think that as a matter of principle, they should be finding a way to make these announcements that does not rely on social media at all.

And is there a way to change that behaviour? (Or a reason I should not?)

This seems to be common to both Mac and Windows operating systems:

- I download the large zipped folder Directory_1.ZIP, 1.3 GB
Total storage: 1.3 GB

- I unzip it in order to access the contents. The unzipped folder is 5.9 GB. So you'd think I would now have
Directory_1, 5.9 GB
Total storage: 5.9 GB

Instead I have:
Directory_1, 5.9 GB
Directory_1.ZIP, 1.3 GB
Total storage: 7.2 GB

This is obviously less of an issue with smaller folders (though I imagine that across whole operating systems, it does add up!), but I don't understand why it's happening. When I interact with zipped folders in Linux I just use gunzip and then they stay unduplicated, and if I want to compress something back again I juts gzip it and it's fine -- but I only use Linux on a remote cluster, not through a UI, so maybe there's duplication happening there too that I'm just not aware of.

I'm a PhD student in Zoology, with an undergraduate degree in the same. I'm very interested in phylogeny and speciation, so I've found myself reading a good number of species descriptions -- and every time, come across what are obviously well-defined, specialised anatomical terms, but that I don't know and don't even know how or where to look up. I'm talking about things like the names for all of the individual bones and their processes and apertures, and equivalently detailed parts of the soft tissues. I got some of this terminology through my undergrad or from picking things up through use, but those were all just individually defined, so I'm left with a lot of gaps. The information I can find online is mostly either not very detailed or is human-specific.

Since palaeontological descriptions are so standardised, I'm assuming that learning this terminology is part of your standard training, so thought I'd ask you folks: Are there any recommended textbooks/glossaries/reference guides that I can use for looking these things up/learning them generally? I'm guessing there will be different ones across different taxa -- I'm primarily interested in vertebrates (herps especially), though if you have specific recommendations for learning the anatomy of other phyla (or other kingdoms!) I'd also love to hear them. Thank you for any help/advice you have here!

Is there an app that I can use to bulk-select and compress images on my phone? Ideally one where I could select which images to compress, though one that just auto-compresses everything in a folder would also be useful.

My phone seems to default to taking photos with enormous pixel density and huge file sizes (weirdly, because the photo quality itself is still terrible). Very occasionally this is useful, but mostly I would prefer smaller photos. I can change the settings but often forget.

A few days ago, Zotero showed me a pop-up suggesting I upgrade to its 64-bit version, from the current 32-bit. I was in the middle of writing so closed the pop-up, but I did notice that the citation pop-ups in the Word plug-in seemed to be a bit laggier than they used to be. I'm wondering whether doing the upgrade is worth the time it might take to reconfigure things, if other people wouldn't mind sharing their experience?

My use case:

I run Zotero on two computers (Mac M2 desktop in office, Windows 10 on my laptop), and store pdfs in a cloud account. I had used Zotfile to set up the cloud storage, which actually broke like two updates ago so for the last year Zotero has just been quietly saving all my pdfs into local storage on either computer -- but because I don't annotate the pdfs and mostly navigate to online versions when I re-read papers, I didn't notice until recently.

I downloaded the ZotMoov plugin and fixed the cloud storage situation. I just did this like 2 weeks ago, which is one reason I'm hesitant about rocking the boat again.

I also have a synced Notion board (currently just on the Mac), which I'm a little concerned about breaking because that sync was also a bit of a pain to set up.

Edit to add, in case it's relevant: I don't use Zotero on mobile, ever. I do occasionally visit the above-mentioned cloud storage folder on mobile, which is yet another reason to want to keep it extant and not break ZotMoov.