Jürgen Habermas, the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, has died at the age of 96. www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

Man, one of the most depressing aspects of modern scholarship is finding a great article and then looking up the scholar to see what else they’ve done and just catching a glimpse of an abbreviated career hopping between visiting positions and publishing great pieces before disappearing from academia

Having touched a bit on this in my last position, shark and fish genomic is endlessly fascinating. If you've been around practically forever you develop every possible solution to a problem

We all lose – and future generations will lose even harder – when governments cut investments in research & researchers. Or fail to increase them to the levels actually needed. 😡

I've been using agents more and more for bioinformatics-y work and their failure mode in quarto is so interesting: will write decent code, then not run it, but still confidently hallucinate a wrong interpretation (blindly) of the correct analysis below the code output. Beware

New paper showing that much of the apparent success of protein language models in predicting mutational effects is a mirage: These models mostly memorize sites. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What a harebrained idea. I guess their parents are rich

'HPC Carpentry will launch as a full lesson program on 1 September 2026.' carpentries.org/blog/2026/02... Interesting focus on Snakemake/Maestro! I assume eventually they'll have a Nextflow too

Really glad the noise people have been making about the lack of NHMRC funding is making its way into the media! (WIsh there'd be equal noise about the even-more-dire situation of the ARC which has no squirreled-away pot of money) www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Haven't fun isn't hard /// When you have a library card

There's an interesting point in this on not using LLMs because you care about the product. Personally I've skirted burn-out a few times because I cared too much in systems that didn't care about me or our outputs. Perhaps I like LLMs because they protect me from caring too much

looks like TIDAL is getting more and more AI slop that TIDAL then auto-assigns to known artists :( it sounds like a hotel lobby

🧬📸 Calling all eDNA enthusiasts, researchers, students & practitioners! We want to see eDNA through your lens 👀 The #eDNAinFocus Photo Competition celebrates the creativity, diversity & real-world impact of environmental DNA research across Australia, New Zealand & beyond 🌏 🧵👇

The entire millennial identity is being prepared and groomed for a version of the world that stopped existing by the time we reached it we slammed into a horizon painted on a brick wall like fucking looney tunes

"Premature optimisation is the enemy of progress!" I shout as I submit yet another half-baked vibe coded PR

Pretty wild Ai result, that will probably get less press than the latest Ai boyfriend article: arxiv.org/abs/2602.21201 A benchmark was created with professional mathematicians, using problems naturally encountered in their research and not publicly released. Aletheia solved 6/10 autonomously.

We (PYC Therapeutics) are hiring two biostatisticians, one senior, one junior www.seek.com.au/job/90561321... and www.seek.com.au/job/90560959... We need people who can give us confidence in rare disease diagnostics with small n! #biostatistics

Outcomes for full apps won’t arrive until “15 Jan – 15 April” next year according to ARC’s new schedule – that’s up to 16 months since the EOIs were submitted 🤯
 ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/funding-rese...

#ERGAReads | 🐚 🌊 🧬 Ocean Genomes: reference genome resources for marine vertebrates rdcu.be/e25OP

OpenAI is a menace. Two recent stories make that clearer than ever. One day you have Sam Altman denigrating humanity to defend AI. The next, WSJ reveals OpenAI could have alerted Canadian police of a potential mass shooter, but refused pressure from employees. That person went on to kill 8 people.

As a teenager I was obsessed with conspiracy theories, I now think because in conspiracies, the people running the show are good at what they do. But these days I'm learning that the power in the shadows is as garbage as everyone else

My phone knows my age because it just auto-replaced "instagram" by "installation"

There's an image of people, of ourselves as a species, behind this statement that I find disgusting to my core. He thinks humans are purely automatons to extract value from, and I'm sure that's the majority view of his social class.

Annotating genomes at increased scale and resolution www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An agentic system for rare disease diagnosis with traceable reasoning www.nature.com/articles/d41... Surprisingly accurate!! I guess there's a long tail of information, especially in rare diseases, where the literature exists but physicians are unlikely to have encountered the papers

❤️said NO to yet another thing I was doing forever and nobody was paying me for ❤️

I'm finally on level D salary and with three dependents I might as well be back on my phd scholarship. Always one unexpected cost away from scrounging to pay rent. "Real wages have gone backwards. Even earning $100,000 isn’t what it used to be" theconversation.com/real-wages-h...

BarleyGVDB: A Comprehensive Barley Variome Database for Population Evolution and Molecular Breeding Research in Barley onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Trying to sign up my 7 year old for soccer - they want $971 per season. How am I supposed to afford that

'To run your locally installed version of Prettier, prefix the command with npx , yarn exec , pnpm exec , or bunx' they have played us for absolute fools

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

Most unimpressive/boring thing about the international far-right is how much they copy each others' homework. Not a single new idea, not a single invented concept. The dumbest people run the show.

The AI-generated code review is criticising the AI-generated pull request

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

when the README on github looks like this you KNOW the pipeline hasn't been updated in >2 years

the most annoying (of many) things of this AI/copilot integration in Positron is when the AI integration is faster than the file-system integration, so you get an AI-hallucinated file path (always wrong) far faster than the real file on your filesystem

we invented literate programming so you don't write English text around your code blocks

Love having this kind of brain-brokenness where I spend 20 minutes looking for my phone, not remembering where I put it, only remembering thinking "haha what an unusual place to put the phone" (It was on top of the children's clothes drawer)

They know when I'm getting too relaxed. That's why they send these at 6:33pm

Haven't seen a plant pangenome in Science for a while! www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1... Eleven T2T genomes + 1720 accessions sequenced

Recently finished reading Capek's War With The Newts; funniest and smartest book I've read in ages. www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Now reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory and it's just unfair how good it is. Every sentence beautiful, takes time to savour, all while being hilarious #booksky

I'm not slacking off, my agent is stuck in a deep, deep rabbit hole and I have to slavishly watch it

You couldn't write London Calling these days, nobody can afford to live by the river

This is an especially good article about why the Epstein files matter so much.

While the Summer Olympics are your normal sports, running and whatnot, the Winter Olympics are drunken bets, professionalised

I used to love computer it was my friend. Now I have hate in my heart

New paper! From Sam Snodgrass and @genomeofforrest.bsky.social, w/ @druncie.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social, and a collaboration with Andres Moreno and @santiagogmm.bsky.social. Can we quantify the impact of humans on maize dispersal? Plant yourself in a comfy chair and lend me your ear: 1/10

so glad I got rid of a whole bunch of 'geek arrogance' from my life. Use excel for your work? sure, go for it. Powerpoint? ok! Python? Also good. whatever gets the job done there have been 0 LaTeX-caused overful vboxes in my life these past years and I'm a better person for it

I remember when I was young, supposedly 'negative' hobbies were sold as to be good down the track. Harry Potter obsessed will bring back literature once they move on! World of Warcraft addicts will become great managers! Loosk like neither happened

Blog post on the new OpenAI Codex app doi.org/10.59350/b6e... #Rstats