Just published by my team member Stephanie Chen: a discussion of how to use phylogenetics in weed biocontrol research, covering different kinds of phylogenies, topological uncertainty, and different marker systems in the genomic age. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Aside, for multiple years now LLM enthusiasts have been talking about how "ordinary people will be able to make their own custom apps from scratch". Is a restaurant without cooks or a hospital without doctors a good thing? Help me here.

reminder regarding anyone promising a return to normal: normal got us here

what even is the fucking point

everyone loved the tech industry's free music and friendship machines of 20-30 years ago. it's unclear what could be causing people to feel the opposite about the industry's new racism and insanity machine

college senior understands education better than the school $70,000+/year to ask chatgpt to summarize readings, answer questions on the material, do the coding like journalists who expand trump/musk posts into paragraphs that version of the work is 100% AI replaceable, because it's not worth doing

Lots of people model nations as binary good or bad and think that the USA must be in the good box because there are still elections. But what has collapsed in the USA is the rule of law, any and all limits to what security forces are allowed to do. For a tourist, it is safer in lawful dictatorships.

Just think of all the time scientists waste writing the 90% unsuccessful grant proposals, time that they could spend doing research and teaching instead. It is extremely wasteful to turn everything into a competition with very few winners.

Since the topic came up in the whole "I run models locally so it's all fine" conversation: "Open Source AI" does not meaningfully exist. It's just openwashing proprietary shit tante.cc/2024/10/16/d...

One of the people I follow pretends to pretend that curling is a real and serious sport, and it is WILD

No way am I going to pay these propagandists any subscription money to read this, but what is the alternative to asking the rich to pay their fair share? Have the poor pay for all services and infrastructure, education and the army, pensions and health care, or just abolish complex civilisation?

This is a very reasonable post except it doesn't seem to understand the implications of its own statement about astronomical distances. Interstellar flight is not survivable because it takes at least millennia, so yes, "each pinprick of life is functionally alone in its corner of the universe".

This is the opposite of what I would do (I'd make voting compulsory, as here in Australia) but I also wonder if they thought this through. Isn't having a passport correlated with education level and cosmopolitanism, meaning that they would mostly make voting more difficult for rural conservatives?

I am puzzled why people submit manuscripts without Genbank accession numbers in the voucher list. Are they not aware that they need to have those to get the manuscript accepted? Perhaps more oddly, are they not aware that one can lodge the sequences and withhold release until a paper is published?

I only just realised that we say Ärmel in German but not Beinel. Why is language so inconsistent? It makes no sense.

That conference session will be fun: Everybody else's talks 30 min tea break My talk End of session

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

It is nice to see that the guys who go "AI will kill us all, so let's build it, whee" do have some principles, but I also take from this the implication that they are fine with individual surveillance of Americans and with weaponry using hallucinating LLMs as long as it is semi-autonomous.

Once more, you have not "deleted Uber" or "deleted Facebook". Sadly, the companies and their exploitative services still exist. You have closed your account, and maybe also uninstalled an app from your phone, that is it. Me, after I trade in my Holden Astra: "I have deleted General Motors".

Ill be clear about why I am so angry and critical about it: Im seeing a good portion of my students who have imbibed the notion that they dont have to read, think or write for themselves because ChatGPT/CoPilot will do their thinking for them, and its terrifying. It should scare all of us.

I get really annoyed at statements like "erasing $470 billion in value". Workers' skills, web servers, warehouse inventory, even brand recognition are still there, unchanged. All that has been "erased" is an imaginary, vibe-based number in a spreadsheet. No value was lost at all.

Hooray! Now if all nations of the world had only achieved this twenty years ago, the line might by now look like \ instead of -, and our grandchildren and beyond might have have had a chance. Alas.

Tried to figure out the file format for an allele-to-species mapping file until I realised that the software expects that mapping as a command line parameter. command parameter1 parameter2 -a <FIVE PAGES OF ALLELE-TO-SPECIES MAPPINGS> Maybe this analysis won't work for more than ca. five species?

Made an annotated version of "Something Big Is Coming" for all of you to enjoy. I hate this guy's writing so much www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qw6k5...

This might be like calling it a productivity gain if a scientist spams out fifty slop grant proposals in a year instead of writing three serious ones. Sure, LLMs work for coding assistance, but does humanity *need* all these new apps and websites? There seem to be too many bad ones already.

The people who say this should publicly acknowledge that there are broadly two possible outcomes if the AI hype is true: 1. Communism. 2. Neo-feudalist cyberpunk dystopia where everybody except the billionaires' enforcers is unemployed and destitute. So, which of these will Hayes fight for?

People should really go easy on starting their posts with BREAKING!!! or SCOOP!1! when reporting some utterly banal statement from a politician that twenty other people are also posting about at the same time.

"soon, anyone will be able to generate a movie/book/video game/podcast in seconds!" keeps running firmly aground on "even if there was an audience for this uhhhhh content, which there isn't, why would they buy your thing instead of just generating their own?" and it's funny EVERY time

Wait I’m sorry did Elon really FINALLY realize that we’re never colonizing Mars this century? What changed?!? Did someone teach him to read or something?

i have a beloved coworker who is genuinely very lovely as a person and in other areas i would call genuinely quite intelligent yet somehow he has managed to go from being deeply into blockchain to deeply into generative ai and not noticed any sort of pattern. fascinating guy to observe.

Oh, great, somebody has made him aware of an even less habitable area than Mars.

I love how Authenticator doesn't pop up the verification request, then I have to click "I cannot use Authenticator right now" to get to the screen where it allows me to input a one-time password FROM AUTHENTICATOR, and then seconds after I have done that, Authenticator shows the original request.

As @davekarpf.bsky.social noted for vibe coding (davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-comes...), if generative AI really works for writing novels as this person claims, then a few months from now, *nobody* will be able to earn any money by mass-producing novels with AI. Meanwhile, we drown in garbage.

Not saying this isn't good advice for maybe three people on Bluesky, but for 99.99% of scientists, what if I am invited to an all-white event by a racist billionaire is not something that will ever happen in their lifetimes. Krauss and Dawkins are not remotely representative of scientists.

I really wish people would use fewer acronyms. Much of the public understands what the problem would be with the Gulf Stream weakening or why child porn is evil, but if you post about the AMOC and CSAM, they may think "what is this nonsense letter salad?" and scroll on. Don't we want to communicate?

This flaming train wreck suggests that maybe it isn't a good idea to vibe code legal briefs and submissions. Maybe those of us who write research manuscripts should also take note, even if we are less likely to squirm in front of a judge because of AI hallucinations 🙂.

Report writing is going swimmingly.

If one pays attention to how Asimov writes about female characters, the revelations were no surprise at all. 1950s: Faceless, nameless wives and receptionists. 1980s: "Small-breasted and narrow-waisted, with hips round and full". And then that 23-year-old starts a relationship with a 52-year-old.

That language is so peculiar. If stocks are over-inflated to ridiculous multiples of a company's revenue, and then the stock price corrects, no value has been "erased". That value never existed in the first place. It was a lie. People were merely in denial about the true, much lower value.

I like the image that guy used to illustrate his post, because I saw the movie when it came out, and it was famously about how all the relationships and sexualities of its characters were healthy heterosexuality.

This has been the foundational belief of bad script kiddies for years, long before the current LLM craze. Just download ALL THE DATA, and the model will do the rest. Be it in data science, spatial analysis, biodiversity, there are so! many! who refuse to understand that garbage in = garbage out.

Happy to be able to harvest my own Sichuan pepper from a pot on our balcony and grateful to the colleague who gave me seeds. But also puzzled because we have only the one plant, and its flowers were clearly female only.

So annoying how often botanicalrealm comes up as one of the top search results for a plant species. The entire site reads as if somebody used generative AI to slop out a page for every plant species on the planet and then added a shop interface to occasionally sell potting mix. Dead internet theory.

It really gets me how bad public discourse has allowed to become with these people. Aside from all the other fallacies, how would $3T of US economic growth directly pay off debt? That would imply a 100% tax rate on that economic activity. Why wasn't everybody just rolling on the floor laughing?

As always, eugenics are strongly correlated with not understanding genetics. Mate, your genes aren't special. They are a sample of all the alleles floating around the human population. Your genes will still be there in your cousins to seventh or twentieth degree even if you don't have kids.

I really enjoy how many authors whose manuscripts I review, when faced with discordance in the data, throw out a collection of words they have heard somewhere like an octopus discharging its ink sac. "Um... hybridisation, convergence, incomplete lineage sorting, or rapid radiation" (scuttles off)

When future generations ask why we didn't do more to avoid large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable, the answer will be that we needed the money for more important stuff like keeping tax rates low, cryptocurrency speculation, and data centers used to flood Amazon with AI-generated books.

I will never quite understand why some colleagues send me Word documents at 70% zoom and others send them at 210% zoom. On any computer I have ever used, documents are comfortably readable somewhere in the 100-120% range. What is happening on their computers?