In the age of AI, LLMs and code assistants what does it mean to be an open-source project that is welcoming to newcomers? As a newcomer, is it enough to use AI to solve a good first issue and submit it as a PR? As a maintainer, what should you do with PRs like that?

📄 A reminder that we are seeking writers (£600) and reviewers (£210) to support the development of new guides on: - AI in research software - Green Computing - EDI in research software Application deadline: Friday 3 October 2025 Find out more at www.software.ac.uk/news/writers...

Paracetamol remains an important option to treat pain or fever in pregnant women. Following rigorous assessment of the available scientific data, we find no evidence that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism in children. Read more 👉 www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/use-...

As our Executive team @drkariljordan.bsky.social @erinstellabecker.bsky.social states, our decision to withdraw was grounded in our commitment to The Carpentries' core values, which explicitly promote diversity, equity and inclusion in programming. "[DEI programming is] baked into everything we do.”

The Carpentries is again in the news, this time in @science.org. Our decision to withdraw from the National Science Foundation's POSE grant funding is discussed in this article criticising how Trump directives are undermining the NSF's 75-year history of independence: www.science.org/content/arti...

Come join me on the organising committee for next year's #RSECon. It's a great way to give back and get to know the community, plus we'll cover the cost of your registration at the conference!

1/ Bioinformatics moves fast. If you rely only on recipes from books, you’ll soon find they’re obsolete. Let me show you why. 🧵

Just asked Claude to code me some simple Entrez stuff that pulls down taxonomy IDs for NCBI mitochondrial accessions - the code works and returns a table of taxonomy IDs from the API in a nice table, *but the taxonomy IDs are all wrong*. I hadn't that before: normally AI-written code just crashes

If you write software as part of your research then the RSE Society want to hear from you! They want to hear from members and especially non-members about why they joined the Society (or not!). Closing date is the 26th Sept!

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

On the train to #RSECon25 after a lovely weekend catching up with family. Looking forward to the conference, especially the keynote from @ixek.bsky.social and the Training Community Day on Friday 🎉

Hot take 🔥 Reproducibility isn’t just about data and methods. It’s about scientific software. If your code can’t be run, your science can’t be trusted. Let’s fix that together. 💜 #OpenScience

AAAAAAAAAHHHH

#code_plagiarism is REAL & #AI is negatively affecting the #integrity of code/software. Dan Katz, @scedmunds.bsky.social & I discuss involved issues & their impacts on #research_integrity & #publication_ethics in a @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social post: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/28/g...

The 5yo has decided he wants to be an engineer, though he occasionally forgets the word ("Daddy, what do you call the person who builds machines again?"). Delighted to report that I have been promised a robot, "to carry you when you can't walk anymore."

Professor @carlbergstrom.com Theoretical and evolutionary biologist, critic of low-quality or misleading scientific research, and co-author of Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. C4R coLAB, developing educational units for the C4R curriculum. RSVP at c4r.io/conference

"It looked like America." kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

Today I finished the instructor training workshop from The Carpentries @carpentries.carpentries.org which was educational! I’m not a certified instructor yet, but soon I will be able to teach the Data Carpentries’ exceptionally useful Genomics curriculum! Lmk if you’d like to co-host a workshop!

3. To get through the AI revolution intact (not to mention other crises such as the GOP's all-out war on science, knowledge, and expertise) we need to be able to view science from outside and reflect on how it is changing and how we might wish to engineer rather than passively accept those changes.

This is a great opportunity to develop your own professional practice, connect with the amazing community of @softwaresaved.bsky.social fellows and help research software better! Open to UK and international applicants. @ukiedh.bsky.social @dariahie.bsky.social

This includes you fellow humanities people! If you do anything with data and/or code do consider applying for an SSI Fellowship. The community is a rich resource for ideas and inspiration. And as a Fellow myself, I'd be very happy to offer advice on applying.

Do you attend RSECon? Are you a member of the RSE slack? Are you aware of either? Then please complete the @society-rse.org Community Survey: society-rse.org/society-of-r...

I'm really grateful to @jdrakephd.bsky.social for shining a light on @carpentries.carpentries.org's decision to stand by our core values in the face of escalating pressure to jettison DEI. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr... If you're so inclined - help us keep going - www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...

If you're also a fan of spreadsheets (they're magical), here are some tips for using them for scientists, and everyone. (Btw the PDF download had the full content).

My latest post on @carpentries.carpentries.org blog is a call to action for the community to engage in curriculum development for workshops about genAI. How can we help our target audience make more informed choices about when and how to use it? carpentries.org/blog/2025/08...

Today's blog post is a call for @carpentries.carpentries.org Instructors to try out a new lesson that I hope will become official Software Carpentry curriculum in the near future: Building Better Research Software. Please teach it and provide feedback to the authors 💙 carpentries.org/blog/2025/08...

Some personal reflections on this post. 1. I expect some @carpentries.carpentries.org community members will not like the idea of workshops teaching the use of genAI. To them, teaching any usage of megacorp LLMs at all is equivalent to endorsement. This is not far from how I felt until recently.

My latest post on @carpentries.carpentries.org blog is a call to action for the community to engage in curriculum development for workshops about genAI. How can we help our target audience make more informed choices about when and how to use it? carpentries.org/blog/2025/08...

They need a reason to believe that they are worth more as thinking people than as products and button-pushers. If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this, it’s that the case for the humanities is about to get far more obvious and urgent.

The idea that the papers you write in graduate school are the aim, rather than forming the person who has something worth saying and worth learning from, is among other things a crisis of confidence and imagination. We used to worry about impostor syndrome - this is just impostor manufacture.

It is summer 2025. The sun rises and sets, Thursday follows Wednesday and, somewhere in England, the ball is hitting the middle of Shubman Gill's bat. #ENGvsIND

COMMON BIRD CALLS: mourning dove: coo-OO-oo American robin: peek! peek! tut-tut-tut tufted titmouse: tsee-day-day-day starling: NEW_chapter2-revision_FINAL.docx

The Carpentries Gratitude of the Month is to Aman Goel, Research Software Engineer @uomresearchit.bsky.social and Fellow at @softwaresaved.bsky.social. Aman is leading the organisation of a Training Community Day to follow the Research Software Engineering Conference #RSECon25 in September!

I have so many fond memories of various visits to Birmingham. Foremost among are floating through the city centre in a canal boat, playing indoor cricket at Edgbaston on my stag do, and attending a Soundgarden reunion tour show at the Academy. Great town!

important context for headlines like this: Altman also runs a company (Worldcoin) that he claims will solve this problem he also created

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Pay for my cool new service where I guarantee to remove 100% of plagiarised content from any document you upload.

this is such a perfect illustration of the fundamental disconnect between what LLMs are and how they are sold and how people interact with them it’s not a person, it does not “know” things, it does not remember and learn from things the way a person does it is predicting what someone might say

Preprint alert! Want to hear more about the coolest new society on the block? You should check out our new preprint discussing @globias.bsky.social ! Hop into 🧵 for a couple quick highlights (1/x):

Thanks to #ResBazQLD for inviting me to the beautiful University of the Sunshine Coast Moreton Bay campus this week to talk about @carpentries.carpentries.org commitment to Equity and Inclusivity.

Meet the Team - Dr Jannetta Steyn Jannetta is a Senior RSE, @softwaresaved.bsky.social‬ Fellow and a @carpentries.carpentries.org‬ board member. Follow her: @jannettas.bsky.social‬ Check out her profile on the team's website: rse.ncldata.dev/team/jannett...

The HPC Carpentry project is having elections for its steering committee, open through July 1, 2025. The link is on the #hpc-carpentry channel on the Carpentries Slack, if you're in the HPC Carpentry or Carpentries world, you should check it out!

After a long silence on X (for obvious reasons), the Zeller Lab is now on Bluesky! We’ll post updates soon on what’s been happening in the lab over the past few months. For the future, we promise to share our News in a more timely manner here on this channel. #Microbiome #Bioinformatics #ZellerLab

You know how in RPG's there's always a comedy worst dialogue/action choice that you're not meant to pick? Badenoch clicks it. Every time.

I’m going to shout slightly. Disagreeing well is most welcome. 1/N

We did not take this decision lightly, and given the sustainability this would have provided our organisation and whole community, devastating doesn't really begin to cover it. However, we *very* much appreciate all the kind words and support. It means a lot! 💙 #NoKings

Many thanks to everyone who maintains a Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and/or Software Carpentry lesson! It is fantastic to welcome a record number of new Maintainers to the community this year and I am looking forward to working with all of them 🙌

🟥 We're delighted to have received 360 Eols for the RSMF. This reflects the remarkable level of creativity, ambition, and engagement from across the community. However, it also means we need to make some changes to how we review them. Find out more at www.software.ac.uk/news/researc...