c 2023, near daily in discussion with students: pandas is causing the OOM kills. why didn't consider duckdb/ibis? (like we covered in class?) c2026, near daily discussion with the LLM (& LLMs of students): no not pandas! duckdb! 🦆🦆 (didn't you read the AGENTS.md?)

In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:

Recently @karinorman.bsky.social , @ctrlalttim.com @ecologyofgavin.bsky.social + I argued it's time we ecologists pay more attention to the carbon footprint of our tools. doi.org/10.1002/fee.... In this spirit: I give you the footprint of our local LLMs on NRP.ai carbon-api.nrp-nautilus.io

🤯 @posit.co launches ggsql 🤯 - yes it is precisely what it sounds like. - rust based stand-alone, needs vscode or jupyter (or merely wasm) to run opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

rustfs has `rc` S3 client?! It even matches the minio mc syntax? wow this is a good day. github.com/rustfs/cli

Because bulk S3 operations should be fast and easy. A simple R wrapper to rclone: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... supports most object stores, should be much faster paws/aws.s3 I think. (also an alternative to minioclient since minio decided to become AIStor...)

hmm, openshell looks pretty interesting: github.com/NVIDIA/OpenS... basically just runs your agent in an OCI container (like we already do) but with networking etc locked down by default and controlled from an external instance. Nice to see open innovation around hard controls instead of prompts

...and GitHub quietly removes Claude Sonnet/Opus from the its student plan mid semester... fun. 🙃 we're just about to dive into local models in 288 anyway but this is surely disruptive. If students are going to learn to use these tools they ought to know what the frontier tools are like

Wow, great time in Sacramento today with the annual inter-Agency Ecological Program. So many exciting questions and approaches, & great stories I hope to take back to my classroom. iep.ca.gov/Public-Engag...

Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier Welcome to the year of the horse! I always learn something new doing these w Florian. www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope...

folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense. If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly. If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.

Nice to see our work with NSF NAIRR pilot highlighted on their homepage: nairrpilot.org/projects/hig... It has certainly been a wild ride. Huge thanks to NSF and the fantastic team at NRP.ai for making this all possible

📣NEW in Mongabay: DSE's McKalee Steen & Magali de Bruyn share insights on how #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge and Indigenous digital sovereignty are key to creating #ResponsibleAI for achieving #conservation and environmental goals. 📰 Read the story now: bit.ly/4bqbrfG

We're hiring a full-time research software engineer for biodiversity & bioacoustics! Position offers a strong research component with independence + research pub opportunities and real-world impact. expected salary range $111K - $116K. dse.berkeley.edu/news/were-hi...

Compelling report from the ATOM project on the state of open models: www.atomproject.ai

Rather applaud JOSS's revised approach to deal with AI-based submissions. blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... , particularly with 'starting open' and at least 'six months developer history'. More of scholarly pub could benefit from such policies methinks.

it is kinda delightful to see that the open-source Continue.dev plugin fully supports modern MCP (resources, prompts), while GitHub Copilot plugin only supports tool docstrings. Now my continue.dev makes perfect tool calls using small/dumb open source LLMs, while CoPilot fails w/ frontier LLMs 🙃

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Argh! @github.com announces it will start charging even for *self-hosted* runners 😥. resources.github.com/actions/2026... I have long relied on my self-hosted runners in my teaching to run automated 'reproducibility' checks. (The edu allocation is way too small for my large classes).

we released olmo 32b today! ☺️ 🐟our largest & best fully open model to-date 🐠right up there w similar size weights-only models from big companies on popular benchmarks 🐡but we used way less compute & all our data, ckpts, code, recipe are free & open made a nice plot of our post-trained results!✌️

Great to see you at #COP30, Governor @gavinnewsom.bsky.social! Magali de Bruyn (R) and McKalee Steen (L) are leading several events @ COP30, including providing recommendations for how Indigenous communities can leverage tech and #DataScience to advance #EnvironmentalStewardship and #Sovereignty.

This seems important. Current AI models can't read graphs. They "see" what they expect to see, even if the data shows something else.

Wow, rio-stac-io looks awesome! github.com/planetlabs/r... Anyone have a chance to compare this to the odc-stac approach? ( @mdsumner.bsky.social 👀 ?)

sad to be missing #jupytercon this week! But small win, recently made my first PR to JupyterHub fancy-profiles to add support for ARM architecture. & now I have JupyterHub running on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (via k3s). Also have CUDA/RAPIDS based image in rocker for python+R envs, rocker/cuda:arm64

Raise your hand if you're going to #JupyterCon 🙋‍♀️ See you there @ucbids.bsky.social! #JupyterCon2025 #DataScience

🚀 anymap v0.6 is here! This release comes packed with major new features. These updates make interactive geospatial analysis in Python smoother and more powerful than ever. 🔗 GitHub: github.com/opengeos/any... 📘 Docs: anymap.dev #python #geospatial #jupyter #dataviz

The 1.4 release of @duckdb.org supports using a DuckDB database to serve vector tiles! Of course, I had to try this out in R. Check it out: all 242,000 US Census block groups dynamically served as vector tiles from a DuckDB database, displayed on a MapLibre map from R in Positron.

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.

Really thrilled to see the renewed momentum from @ucbids.bsky.social on open source infrastructure! A new partnership with @2i2c.org puts supporting tools, their developers, and their community at the center. cdss.berkeley.edu/news/berkele...

mid-semester surveys are in! Is it terrible that I do a happy dance when reading that most students felt "the heavy use of AI was either not helpful or detrimental to learning?" YES dear students, you are smarter than the bots. and now you know it too.

here we are in the last week of module 2. 120 students, majority new to coding, are set up with their ipynb's in VSCode+CoPilot agent mode (w/ sonnet 4.5, GPT5-codex). As they plug away in pairs writing some of the best code & analysis this module has seen. remarkably little use of the bots!

Media still largely misses the RL part of training LLMs. NY Times: > they’re computer models trained on massive amounts of text to predict the next word in a sentence. What feels like empathy or validation is really just the A.I. chatbot echoing back language patterns that it’s learned.

NSF GRFP solicitation is finally up. Life Sci deadline extended to Nov 10 but 2nd year grad students no longer eligible www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Fantastic piece from @schmidtdse.bsky.social post-doc @lucialayr.bsky.social on handling the emotional side of doing a PhD in climate or ecological modeling blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/...

Excited to be heading to join the summit @cu-esiil.bsky.social this week!

Campus reminds us, "If classroom temperatures reach or exceed 82°F for more than 15 minutes:" our first step is: 1. Ensure instructors have taken the Heat Illness Prevention Training in the UC Learning Management System. teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/gu...

RL102: From Tabular Q-Learning to Deep Q-Learning (DQN) - A Practical Introduction to (Deep) Reinforcement Learning araffin.github.io/post/rl102/

Increasingly convinced that the advances we will see with 'AI' in the next few years will come not from more bigger NN models replacing tasks done with conventional programming, but from greater tool use from models.

I reference data science at the singularity constantly as it's not just a model of why data science blew up, but also how any field or org can organize itself around data, code sharing, and benchmarks: arxiv.org/abs/2310.00865

Okay, but Claude's commentary while helping me set up a ray cluster on National Research Platform (NRP) is pretty entertaining: Claude: (proposes 2 worker-config) Me: why two workers? Claude: (queries resources) Claude: "HOLY MOLY! Your cluster has nodes with 57TB of memory and 13,800 CPUs!"

You still have 5 days to apply for this awesome postdoc opportunity in the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder! This could be your backyard!

Like many, I've struggled with students merely pasting LLM outputs as their own work. But this year when I encourage them to use AI in generating code they need, now they ask all these critical questions like: 'but is this output ok? how do I know? how could it be better?'

Also exciting to see the new fully open (training data, weights, training details) LLM from the Swiss, 'Apertus' www.swiss-ai.org/apertus ! Shipped in both 8B & 70B params on HF, over 40% non-English sources. Support for vllm + public web interface (via publicai.co). Impressive.

Very interesting project from @ai2.bsky.social , a fully open, agent-based LLM for academic literature asta.allen.ai . Nice overview at allenai.org/blog/asta

Great post-doctoral opportunity at @cu-esiil.bsky.social jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

Excellent post from @beenwrekt.bsky.social here on failure of AI safety. While much is familiar, he makes an excellent pt that the solution is obvious and do-able: terminate the conversation (hilariously illustrated by Claude's refusal to answer bio sciences qs). www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

Ethemblage is an online game developed by @leahgovia.bsky.social leahgovia.itch.io/ethemblage It's a story in which players interact with different scenarios where technologies such as acoustic monitors, drones, and GPS collars are applied by conservationists to monitor non-human species.

2/ Understanding where, when, how, and why wildlife is declining is key for effective conservation By tapping into participatory science, we now have a (biased) complementary way to monitor mortality events in near-real time 👉: huggingface.co/spaces/diego... I’ll highlight four case studies ⬇️

Really re-energized and inspired after the CA 30x30 Summit in San Diego! Amazing to see what this community -- from gov't agencies, land managers, tribal leaders, performing artists and everything in between -- can do together. sites.google.com/view/2025-30...

Really pleased to see more investment in truly open models. Ai2 has been a real leader in this space with OLMO but much more is needed.