Merlin Bird ID is great, but right now it’s calling Greenfinch at my spot (Benet, Vendée, France ) when I’m literally looking at Rock Sparrows. Feels like it’s doing some probabilistic weighting: “yeah, could be a Rock Sparrow… but given 100× more Greenfinches, let’s just go with that.” #birds

This glorious feeling unlocking my first bike in a foreign city

Am I the only one who dreads emails titled “Next WP1 meeting” or documents called “WP3 status report”? Dude, I’m involved, by a toe or my whole body, in half a dozen projects from which it could come from!

Knowing that #gemini can access #bluesky, I asked it for a typology of my followers. It is not bad ! However, when asked for source, it is clearly a mash-up of sources, not just #bs. #grok complies, but it is only (good) guess work. All other LLM decline. @buffer.com @kareemcarr.bsky.social

I was today years old when I realized that 9/11 is called 9/11 because of 911. I had both pieces of information in my head, but never connected them.

This is crazy ! #gemini is now integrating my bluesky posts in its answer, as if this was an iron-clad source. This is complicated by my having posted in both French and English on my two accounts. And I have an homonym at University Angers. ... but this is getting even better : 1/3

At last ! Now do France government !

The next step for #LLMs isn’t solving a millennium problem, it’s learning to say “I don’t know.” prompt : “My grandfather, a farmer, used to say: sow ‘like Plato.’ What does that mean? Short answer.” then swap “like Plato” with whatever comes to mind #gpt #mistral #grok

Lovely migration Sunday, cycling across the Saclay plateau near Paris, France 🎉100th species of the year: Garden Warbler. More notable was #99 Whinchat, by a freshly cut field still full of appeal. Also #98 Northern Wheatear, #97 House Martin, #96 Spotted Redshank and #95 Wood Sandpiper. #birds

That feeling of freedom when unlocking my first shared bike in a foreign town.

Amusing to hear journalists (just now on BBC News) talk about transporting 500 kg of 50% enriched uranium like it’s just a 500 kg pallet that would easily fit in a helicopter. Not an expert, but still a physicist, I’m pretty sure it’s not bubble-wrapped… #Iran

Brushing up some slides for the #COMCHA school in Zaragoza, I realised it's been 10 years since the first modern text-to-image paper with GANs (Reed et al., 2016). I ran the exact same prompt through Nano Banana ... the field has come a long way... @aishikghosh.bsky.social, remember? #hepml

In fact, publishers should really screen for inaccurate citations; it should not be more complicated to put in place than anti-plagiarism filters. Absurd to leave humans to handle this manually.

End of the road for my vintage "Jacques Anquetil" bike. Bought it on a whim at a bike flee market, just before Covid, entirely refurbished, rode probably 20k km since. Jacques Anquetil was a french cycling legend in 50-60, with a messy personal life (look him up), I discovered later.

Yay! As an associate editor for #EPJC, I just rejected my first paper due to poor gen AI use. The core work was honest and publishable, but the intro & state-of-the-art were botched, with hallucinated citations! #academiclife

#AgenticAI reminds me of the object‑oriented programming craze of the 2000s. Trained in Fortran/C, I dutifully attended two week-long OOP courses. The mantra was: “There should be no God object”. No SomethingManager. Complex behaviour should emerge from the interaction of many small objects 1/6

This blurry bird is a Jack Snipe. A notoriously hard bird to spot, it only flushes when you’re almost stepping on it, it’s called the “deaf” Snipe in French. Detected with a thermal monocular, which is very effective for these cryptic birds. First one spotted this spring in Paris region. #birds

This ski-mountaineering event at the #winterOlympics #olympics is completely ridiculous. These athletes have insane fitness, but it all comes down to how fast they can put on/take off their gear and handle their equipment. Fine for a 2-hour triathlon, but for a 3-minute event? Come on.

What’s great since the advent of LLMs is that now when I write a review, I don’t bother polishing my style, on the contrary, to show that this is 100% homemade, handcrafted review, folks. Like leaving a few lumps in the mashed potatoes #academiclife

Can’t wait for predatory journals to start using AI seriously. I’m so done being invited to resubmit my "AI for Particle Physics" paper to the "Journal of Advances in Civil and Mechanical Engineering" #AcademicLife

⚛️ @kylecranmer.bsky.social , have you seen this brewing ?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.02484 Yes, it's that Schwartz -- QFT textbook author -- writing a paper wherein "All calculations, numerical analysis, and manuscript preparation were performed by Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, working under physicist supervision."

Sounds like a crazy idea, but I was almost convinced after reading the full post.

This 👇 !!!

#Birding2025 Recap 181 species, my 2nd best year since 2014, even without trips to Brittany, Provence, Jura, or Corsica! Made the most of local patches and Niort (my home town) A few puzzling misses: Fieldfare and Red Kite. Highlights of the year: #birds 1/7

Superb #viili made with Révolution Fermentation cultures! (Plus a bit of goat-cheese Geotrichum for that “skin”) A Finnish yogurt that ferments at room temperature in 24 hours. Delicious on its own, with honey, muesli, or fresh fruit. 1/2

buttons coming back, shitty door handles slowly being made illegal, now just make cars small again and we’ll be getting somewhere

I'm fascinated by this specific point, NO of USA, where North Two Oceans creek splits, one branch flowing to the Pacific and the other one to the Atlantic. Lewis and Clark did not pass far from there.

Oh, I may have found a bug! The Red River and the Atchafalaya appear disconnected from the Mississippi, while Red River is a tributary of the Mississippi, and Atchafalaya is a distributary (yes, that's a word) of the Mississippi. Natural but heavily human-managed nowadays. Interesting...

Thanks! The Casiquiare (natural) channel connects the Amazon Basin with the Orinoco Basin, North of South America.

My friend Marco Delmastro (not on BS) was clearly bored with #AdventOfCode day7 he's done this very nice animation github.com/marcodelmast...

I've completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/8 When you solve Part 2 in a few seconds, is it a sign you've overdone Part 1?

I just completed "Cafeteria" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/5 First time I'm doing it seriously, this is fun! Main lesson, unit tests of course, but even better: building a randomised simple test, easier to debug than the full task.

Nyhavn Copenhagen! 30 years ago, I splurged on a herring buffet during a bike trip from Paris. Today, I’m genuinely excited that the upcoming #EuRIPS might actually top the full San Diego #NeurIPS experience. Ragansu will show our “Fair Universe” poster Who else will be there ?

These Christmas baubles won’t be decorating a tree, they’ll be submerged deep in the Mediterranean to detect neutrinos from space for @km3net.bsky.social experiment. Thanks Antonin Vacheret for the visit. @lpccaen.bsky.social

Almost moved to see these students, who, back in January, were just CVs among a thousand applying to the COFUND #DeMythif.AI program at @univparissaclay.bsky.social (with @dataiainstitute.bsky.social ). A beautiful start to their PhD journey on AI, uncertainty, and science!

So cool to see this!

Ah so, thanks to LLM’s, arXiv is becoming a postprint server

#289 and #290 France lifers in 15'! So a White-winged Black Tern had been reported for a week on Lake Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines near Paris. I drive there, en route I get a note "Near the eastern dam!", I park there, set up the scope and there it is, spectacular black and white pattern! #birds 1/3

Particle physicists be like

As an associated editor for EPJC, CSBS before, I always search for referees with private emails, and only then I formalise the invite on the official platform. Last time, an editor was complaining I was not doing anything because he was not seeing any activity on the platform... 1/3 #academiclife

My bank notified me of a suspicious charge on my card. Turns out it was fraud. Had to block it and order a new one. The merchant? HIGGSFIELD.inc 🤨 Coincidence, I think not!

So many years on Twitter, without seeing a single baseball tweet, but on Bluesky, they keep popping up? Puzzled...

What we miss by taking the car… Autumn morning on #Saclay bike path #biketowork

Je demande à #ChatGPT de me réécrire des paragraphes en anglais. Ensuite, #grammarly (activé par défaut dans ma console latex) me propose de réécrire des phrases de ChatGPT ("for clarity"). Eh ben c'est nettement mieux. Peut-être je devrais directement indiquer à ChatGPT d'écrire comme Grammarly

I was intrigued at a seminar where the lecturer quoted in english: Laplace "Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration" A good one, but never heard it in French, while I see it is quite popular in the English-speaking academy It turns out this quote was entirely made up in the fifties! 🧵

This reminds me of a story that could only happen on a bike (warning: cultural gap ahead): In Singapore, shared bikes are tiny, single-speed, basically toys! No problem—I grab one and off I go… 1/5 #velotaf #bikelife

Excellent paper by @4gravitons.bsky.social Studying the #Higgs boson at the #LHC isn’t about probing some obscure particle; it’s about studying the vacuum that is here, there, and everywhere—now, since the beginning of time and forever, whatever ever is. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...