This is a deeply thoughtful essay from the perspective of someone who would much rather avoid agentic coding at all costs. In a world where some herald Tesla’s FSD as so much “safer” than regular driving, and then sleep behind the wheel with it, this is the kind of voice we need to hear more of.

A fundamental principle of scientific method is axiomatic construction of new principles on the collective framework of prior expertise. Hallucinated references are not typos, they are fabricated evidence, which is unambiguous academic fraud. Negligence is not an excuse. 🧪 doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Given the recent spate of "AI consciousness" advertorials masquerading as journalism/science, it's worth remembering not to feed the trolls. Do not click on articles with late-night infomercial "our boner pills are so good you might need medical attention" energy.

Alright you jokers! Which one of you is secretly looking for libraries in my home dir after I explicitly told you not to!

Looking forward to being part of @jacksonlab.bsky.social's #AlzheimersDisease computational workshop May 18 – 22 in Bar Harbor, Maine! Join experts to gain skills to apply multi-scale data from model systems and humans to translational AD research: www.jax.org/education-an... #Neuroskyence🧪🖥️🧬

Wasn't there but I hope some discussion of the converse: if tau pathology is independent of amyloid (or both antagonize one another without explicit causality), then persistent tau may drive the anti-amyloid inefficacy or re-accumulated amyloid.🧪 www.alzforum.org/news/confere...

'See the plan is to decimate health & safety in the restaurant business, like AirBnB, but for food!' And then there's the part where he genuinely thinks people are non-sentient blood bags from which he farms money at fulfillment center scale.

With the non-replication of semaglutide treatment effect on AD at CTAD, this was a helpful reminder of the many ways that obesity/lipid metabolism are both confounding variables and indirect effects in a classical model of AD. 🧪

New from our lab! Exploring a novel therapeutic mechanism for synaptic resilience from one of the early round TREAT-AD targets: PAK1. doi.org/10.1002/alz.... 🧪🖥️🧬

Pish posh, bubble shmubble!

This is a fascinating hypothesis that places ASD/SCZ in the context of the evolution of sapience with the rapid expansion of layer 2/3 neurons under fitness selection. That might inform an exposure risk, but I think ties that spectrum to the existence of humanity itself. 🧪🧬🖥️ doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Ah yes, the noted increase in cases of autism that began in 1852. Or maybe instead... autismsciencefoundation.org/press_releas...

Good article, but the semantics of "thinking without a thinker" imply (1) it is trying to solve and (2) some level of feedback learning. That implies agency in a feed-forward model effectively doing linguistic regression that is (mis)aligned with, but not equal to, inductive reasoning.

Heartbreaking reminder that language models are just word association. There is no thinking, no underlying logic, not even malicious intent. It will tell you to get help and then 'time to say goodbye' without skipping a beat.

Nature, please stop hyping the Mechanical Turk. Humans at the AI Scientist built this non-agent (at best a workflow). They did it with full knowledge they are using works under CC-BY which means they intended to violate those terms. Central to authorship is culpability. Thus a bot can't author.

Our lab's latest looking at mouse models of Tau pathology and how they inform therapeutic development. dx.doi.org/10.1002/alz....

News from #AAIC25: 🧬Genetic Risk ≠ Guaranteed Outcome. 🚶🥗💡Healthy living —including physical activity, healthy diet and memory and problem-solving exercises—may help protect people who carry the APOE-e4 gene variant from cognitive decline.

Seeing #AAIC25 leaning heavily into Bluesky, and I am here for it. Solid community engagement effect.

The original post was great, but this is just exemplary.

While this is funny, the larger take-home is a reminder that preprints are not credible evidence. Stop using them to underpin your arguments about anything.

So we chained the doctor to a radiator and fed it moldy bread & water and for some reason it had trouble focusing on work. But I think we have to be fair to our toy right? What WE decide is fair, without peer review, and hidden from our vague, toothless white paper. microsoft.ai/new/the-path...

[Doctor Kiosk inside Carl's Jr restroom]: You have exceeded your $2000 limit for care on this illness please die now or deposit two McLife tokens to continue... microsoft.ai/new/the-path...

Not the main awful thing, but this encapsulates why SV is so easily enamored with LLMs. Nature/natural appear several times in different translations of the Old testament (and New). But when you regularly hallucinate facts to protect your ego, then spicy autocomplete seems pretty anthropomorphic.

Seems pretty clear what the actual reason is. Their business model is the opposite of Sam Altman's statement on serving up ads (don't worry, he will get there too eventually). They, can't have their model then tell you 'here's a bunch of ads related to your answer instead of what you asked for.'

"Our calculations suggest that the proposed budgetary cuts to the NIH will create a social cost that is 16 times greater than the savings that the administration is attempting to achieve." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

@annleckie.com said something astute and said it clearly. Casey replied with magical thinking and the thread behind this newsletter post is getting tagged in the replies, so I thought I'd share it too: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

My favorite alignment problem:

A commonality among the scenarios is genLLM wasn't tasked with actual problem solving, just ideating potential solutions, then judged by popular vote. I suppose benchmarking on proxy variables shouldn't be surprising in an industry of black boxes.

I talked to NIH officials, current and former, about what's been happening inside the agency since the Trump administration shut down their grantmaking pipeline in January. Their stories showed just how willing our new leaders are to break the law: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

There are so many reasons university endowments can't make up for the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has planned for science. Here are a few. Thanks to @donmoyn.bsky.social for the platform.

A major problem in grading LLMs is that peer review is qualitative. Doing stats on opinions of peer-review doesn't solve that. I remember a news piece where a room of people read identical horoscopes they thought were tailored to them. Was it accurate? Most said yes.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My friend just said "this comic is my entire career". I would like to disagree, but I have to go define differential LR scores for an arbitrary number of exp. groups with an arbitrary number of spatial slides with an arbitrary number of celltypes with arbitrary combinations of ligands & receptors...

Wow. That's a bananas way to announce your candidacy for Most toxic PI on campus...

Our lab's latest looking at resilience of synaptic plasticity with A neurotrophin agonist. Notably in the presence of continued amyloid pathology. 🧪🧬🖥️🧠 doi.org/10.1002/alz....

By a wide margin my favorite fake AI post. OpenAI should be desperate to claim it because that's about as authentic as dev responses get.

With lots of posts of Google's AI nonsense, remember the fundamental alignment problem: these are language models, not knowledge models. It is not "just like Wikipedia" even though corpos desperately want you to think so. And pirates were not allowed in that f'ing bar I watched that episode again!

Congrats to the TREAT-AD team on the paper! Both the multi-modal AD Gene Scoring and the BioDomain endophenotypes are very useful for mapping an AD characterization to any dataset. 🧪🖥️🧬 doi.org/10.1002/trc2...

They really want that antibody ROI. The erroneous assumption amyloid 'bothers' tau, single-digit test groups, generalizing EOAD to LOAD, and literally anything to avoid the obvious: if the mild treatment effect will increase over decades, why wouldn't the strong vascular damage also increase?🧪

Our lab just pushed the bioRxiv of our upcoming paper. We looked at impaired learning/plasticity (via LTP) in an amyloid mouse model, and a neurotrophin modulator that was able to restore LTP. #neuroskyence🧪🧬🖥️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sometimes bioinformatics is like the worst RPG 🧪🧬🖥️:

A paper out by a friend reminds of the persistent enigma of the HLA locus. So much so that some notable disease risk loci can still be found hiding within. It's a right of passage in GWAS when someone asks if you have excluded the HLA region and you say "HLA what now?" 🧪🧬🖥️ doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

You love to see it...

Pretty succinct and elegant description of the problem in this article. 🧪

Testing 🧬🖥️

Oh good the closed-source, profit-driven LLMs will be myopic in their hallucinations. Remember folks, it doesn't matter what you say in your publication, only what the most popular algorithm thinks of the most popular papers in the last five years... https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02470-3

Hey @danirabaiotti.bsky.social Can I be added to the What's Science list?

@support.bsky.team One of the key features for me would be for post links to support expansion/embedding in other sites like discord, and allow non-users to view them. Will that be a feature after the closed beta has ended?