This is *chef's kiss* www.jampa.dev/p/lessons-le...

People have been screaming from the rooftops for decades that the incentives in academia are all wrong - a career to make your publication number go up - AI overreliance is the latest symptom of a broken evaluation system those in charge cannot be bothered to fix

I have social media so I can needlessly feel like garbage about events completely outside my sphere of influence

In a world of darkness, a bright light shines

🎯 Marine sites wanted! Join eDNA Expeditions, an OBIS-led project mobilizing environmental DNA to support local marine biodiversity monitoring and increase global ocean knowledge. ☑️ Kits, training & support provided ✅ Don't miss the opportunity! ➡️ ednaexpeditions.org

Which country, outside of a China, has seen this as an opportunity to bolster their own scientific work-force? It looks like only China has taken up the opportunity (at scale) of becoming the new scientific leader. Other countries just crickets

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

My time in @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's group is ending, but I’m staying in Korea to build a lab at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine. If you or someone you know is interested in molecular machine learning and open-source bioinformatics, please reach out. I am hiring! mirdita.org

1,000 PacBio genomes in a prospectively designed clinical utility study. This was the biggest and most important study that made us go live in diagnostics. Long-read genomes as a genetic first tier test across many rare diseases! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Spent the entire afternoon getting a company-internal Quarto theme to work. It's just a regular Quarto extension, loaded via the yaml. But Quarto render completely ignores the header. tried every possible thing. I think I'm going insane

It has finally happened: qs was removed from CRAN. I only realised because I tried to build my fancy-pants targets pipeline from start (the solution is to use qs2, but it seems like targets does not yet support qs2?) #rstats

Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

We mourn the passing of Peer Bork, EMBO Member since 2000: https://www.embl.org/news/embl-announcements/in-remembrance-of-peer-bork/

But whyyyyyyy

Belated Christmas miracle in my house: the can of WD40 was where it was supposed to be! I thought by now the WD40 gremlins had whisked it away, never to be found again

Found a weird way of working with ML: - have LLM write image processing Python that calls on classic, local CNNs via preprocessing - upload the preprocessed images and the boundary box images to the LLM - have LLM adjust the Python for the CNN - repeat until results good

This year will be my tenth anniversary since finishing my PhD. In that time I've worked in academia, then non-profit, now for-profit.... what's left? Government? Consulting on my own?

LLMs were invented so I don't have to learn awk

⁉️The ARC has delayed outcomes of ALL grants 1–4 months & increased scheduled outcome windows from 2 weeks to 3 months! This reverses 4 years of progress in providing greater certainty & ability to plan for researchers, their families & unis. Their excuse? Security checks under new ARC legislation👇

Individuals whose phenotype deviates from genetic expectation defined by common variation are enriched for rare damaging variants in genes that cause rare disease www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

"It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it" I think I agree with this - we humans come up with the how and why, the LLM implements

I was studying Kanji and was wondering whether every single Kanji has the reading kou/コウ?? So I made a figure. Turns out, yes, kou/コウ is the most common reading in the Joyo kanji! but not by much Pictured are how often the top 15 most common onyomi readings appear in the Joyo kanji.

A machine cannot undergo psychoanalysis because a machine has no psyche. Please do better

Now published in Nature Biotechnology: go.nature.com/44P7nSm If you missed it, the TL;DR is in my April thread below

it's OK to bully robots

Learned a wonderful word tonight: 皮肉, ひにく, hiniku. The first kanji means "skin", the second one means "meat". You'd think it's some kind of culinary term then, right? nope it means "irony"

Going to the library for ❤️self-care❤️

Starting a new job tomorrow so now I have to choose a specific 'adult person' mask to wear and as we all know, a hard decision because I'll have to wear that one for years

Just landed back in Australia! I wonder what I missed while I was offline! Oh. Oh

Hi, I'm having a seizure and breaking my spine while walking down the street in Bruges, Belgium, never to be repeated

Some things I want to do in 2026: Personally, run more, play piano (get through SimplyPiano at least), learn Kanji (get to wanikani level 40ish - currently 5). Professionally, say 'no' more often. Transition from a hands-on tech person to tech & people leadership, I think I'm ready.

Happy new year from Japan!

What we can leave in 2025: journalists printing interviews with LLMs. Sentences starting with "I asked ChatGPT and...". Opinion pieces on how LLMs will revolutionise science, its just around the corner, just one more corner bro

It's great when you can spend your holidays not worrying about random upcoming grant deadlines. Highly recommend it

Scrolling through this year's CCC fahrplan and Cory Doctorow's talk on a post-American internet looks very interesting - need to watch the recording in 2 days fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/202...

Small cultural victory for Australia - found a Bluey gacha!

Still don't have my luggage back but my 7-year old fought a humongous sumo ringer in a play fight (and play-won). Don't need my stuff when my kids can make core memories

I'm in Japan! They lost my luggage! Good start!

1/ We’re hiring PIs in AI × Biology The @astar-gis.bsky.social Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) is expanding its AI & Computation domain and recruiting junior & senior PIs.

About 12 hours until I fly to Japan to be reunited with wife and kids. This "garden leave" was surprisingly busy, could use another week or so...

Zero-shot deep learning for the annotation of unknown eDNA sequences using co-occurrences and phylogenetic embeddings https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41417866/

Unraveling multipredator impacts in salmon-bearing rivers using quantitative DNA metabarcoding. A wonderful collaboration with @jwinkfish.bsky.social. @uwsafs.bsky.social @uwenvironment.bsky.social @uwfreshwater.bsky.social 👇 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Three decades of biodiversity data, published one decade after we started the project! Our new paper in @NatureComms shows how airborne eDNA from archived aerosol filters can track ecosystem changes across the tree of life—2700+ genera, weekly resolution, 34 years. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

Let me put of this prison of my own construction

Posted this and then a distant relative died. I got the message

Love it when im about to hop on a plane in two days, they cancel one of the return legs that would take me out of the country. I need that leaving flight for the tourist visum on Sunday.....

Last day officially being employed! Back to being employed 5th January...

My Word finally pastes without the source's formatting... which should have been the.default twenty years ago. I guess it took too many people getting dragged for directly copy-pasting from chatGPT for this change to happen

What a year this has been. It got worse, then it got worse, then things got worse. I'd say "2026 can only get better" but that's what I said about 2025 and see what that got us all