Now let's start talking about why you might want to make crow friends. I can't begin to enumerate the reasons, but I'll try. The best one is simply that interacting with beautiful wild creatures with sublime intelligence that recognize us as individuals adds immeasurable beauty to our lives. (19/n)

I'm not trying to be pedantic here; the language matters. Children of immigrants are not some special, weird category of citizens; they owe their citizenship to the same thing that the vast majority of the rest of us do. That's the point!

you don’t have to know much world history to look at this map and immediately see why the entire western hemisphere has birthright citizenship

LLMs and other automated tools can surface reliable information about the world that already exists. In the vast majority of cases, they cannot produce it. And the people who produce that information are becoming rarer and rarer.

Just be normal. Support good policies because they're good and will help people. Don't make it sound like you're trying to triangulate everything to death.

The problem is if you use your personal GitHub for work, and your company buys a copilot license for you, there is no possibility to use copilot for personal use and all copilot settings are controlled by your company.

Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 mi of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave & Farragut N. System now serves 130 mi. The DC Metro shows that, with good planning & enough investment, the public sector can succeed & build something extraordinary.

Project Hail Mary was pretty fun and had a good alien in it. It’s sentimental, but in times like these, I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for pro-science odes to cross-cultural teamwork. It is also *long* but I was at a theater that brings alcohol straight to your seat which helped a lot

I'm certain my physical therapist endorses this message

You can tell I turned 30 recently because I’m growing native plants from seed in milk jugs in my back yard, the only reason I don’t have a bird feeder yet is I’m reading up on how to deter invasive house sparrows from using it, and I went to a city council meeting for the first time ever last week…

I once crashed my bike at low speed because my derailleur threw my chain into my casette. My helmet made a loud cracking sound when it hit the pavement, had a huge dent in it. Amazingly I didn’t have a concussion! Helmets aren‘t just to prevent deaths and not just for car collisions!

It sure feels like spring today in Michigan! A house finch family is building their nest in a tree right outside my office window again this year 😍

Tl;dr: Americans have trouble understanding there is ~nothing unique about Trump. He is part of the broad wave of far right parties/politicians since 2008 across rich democracies. Our institutions just suck more. Europeans have trouble understanding there is ~nothing unique about Trump. See above.

New (non-work) blog post! 📝 “Generative AI vegetarianism” sboots.ca/2026/03/11/g...

It is really hard to overstate how much damage has been done to this country on a purely institutional level, and we have three more years of this shit.

Time to think about submitting an abstract to #BOSC2026! The deadline for submitting talk/poster abstracts is April 9. (There is an additional late poster round that closes in May, but those late submissions won't be considered for talks.) www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-... #OpenSource #OpenScience

Lot of us got a real “gnawing on furniture” vibe and could stand to go for a walk

Real talk, the classification of H. neanderthalensis as a different species than H. sapiens *despite being able to create viable offspring,* as evidenced by the presence of their DNA in our genome, really brings into focus just how arbitrary our concept of what constitutes a species is.

This one hits hard.

The Democrats' failure to articulate and alternative vision for America is as much a part of how we got here as the Republicans' assertion of theirs. Except they didn't just fail, they worked actively to thwart anyone who tried.

Biden ran on believing science, and then he told us we could stop masking after we were vaxed, not because the science supported it, but because capitalism demanded it. So liberals stopped masking and those conservatives who had masked no longer felt the social pressure to do so.

claude is a software program that produces text

I heard y'all wanted a thread on "El Apagón"

And 2. the Biden admin approved a $400 million grant to Puerto Rico to install solar panels to improve reliability and protect 30,000 low income households from blackouts. Trump cancelled it a couple weeks ago

Now let's talk about the song!!! Finally Becky is GETTING TO THE POINT The video is amazing. It's a traditional music video but also a mini documentary about all the shit I just summarized, including reporting by independent journalist Bianca Graulau Here it is so you can listen while we ~discuss~

after using Evernote for 13 years I've finally cancelled it and switched entirely to Obsidian. Obsidian isn't perfect but it does everything I need it to do and it's great to support open source!

Those heat lamps are great though…

This is by design. By making the US market too risky for investment, they can take vaccines out of the US healthcare toolkit, without having to do the dirty work of banning them outright.

got nerd-sniped by a github actions feature I hadn't used before (using a GitHub App instead of a personal access token for authentication) docs.github.com/en/apps/crea... #GitHub #CI

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.” That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

why yes, Copilot, commenting out the failing unit tests is certainly one way to address the problem...

Here’s the deal with the FY26 NIH funding bill: One line in the 1000+ pg bill = significantly less science. The increase to ~40% of grants moving to MYF is estimated to result in a 35% decrease in the NUMBER of NIH grants funded annually—moving the paylines from 10% to around 4%. THIS IS BAD.

Has anyone figured out how to get #GitHub fine-grained tokens set up when using repos from multiple different orgs? Is the answer to set the token for each cloned repo individually, or give up and switch to ssh keys, orrrr something else?

How many game-saving throws has Caleb Williams made on 4th down in Q4 this season? Eleventy-billion?

It is Love that we're seeing from the good people in MN, and all over this sick and beleaguered nation right now, in those streets, out in the cold. There is no greater love than to love your neighbor... it's love as a verb. And one day, maybe not in our time, but if we do the work... one day...

Anyone leave voicemail for their congresscritters that start out with “Hi this is my polite professional voice” and end with “I’m LOSING my SHIT because my TAX dollars are being used to TEAR GAS INFANTS!!!!!”

General reminder that the Immigration Act of 1924 that set immigration quotas and established the Border Patrol was the crowning political achievement of the Klan

This thread is now an op-ed:

Full survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust. www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...

The onus so far is entirely on the frightened and unfunded public to organize perfectly peaceful resistance and outlast an ad hoc army of thousands of untrained bigots pulling from a well of near unlimited taxpayer finances?

I’m seeing posts from people (outside of MN) about how US citizens should carry their passports. And let me say that *inside* MN, we are calmly responding to requests with: “No, I don’t have to show you any documentation.” Because that’s how you protect everyone, regardless of immigration status.

my move is to uses vermouth because I always have some of that in the fridge for cocktails

Random reminder to call your Reps and Senators to tell them what you think about *gestures broadly* “Hi my name is <name>, I’m a constituent in <city>, and I’m calling to make my voice heard that the only morally correct position is to abolish ICE. Thanks bye!”

There are people in Minnesota who are violating the law, and it's the people who are flash-banging babies, shooting people who pose no threat, and deploying tear gas against peaceful crowds. The way to end the violence in Minnesota is for ICE to stop committing violence against Minnesotans.

Everybody thinks 'https://' stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol secure' but it actually stands for 'head to this place, sucka' followed by a colon and two laser sounds

All they can do is harm the people within their reach. But that provokes anger, and steadily MOUNTING anger, among people who are NOT within their reach. This is not a circle that can be squared, really.

The people of MN give me far more hope than the largely feckless “opposition” leaders of our country or the deeply compromised and ineffectual media both-sidesing white nationalist totalitarianism.

how about you solve the core problem of government agents beating the absolute shit out of citizens in grocery store parking lots this really isn’t that complicated

If you cannot make “these people are leaving BABIES in CARS in WINTER and then returning them to their carekeepers with BRUISES” into popular sentiment as a politician, you’re either inept or you want this to keep happening.