"We often blame bureaucrats or red tape for the country’s paralysis. But the fault lies less in the rules than in who has the resources to weaponize them." open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

I went all out optimizing proseg this week, and after many rounds of profiling and tinkering, the new release is as much as 1.5-4x faster and reduces memory usage by around 10%. More importantly, I discovered and fixed a subtle bug that reduced segmentation accuracy for large gene panels!

tfw the guy who made this chart is going to be in charge of the fed

Feel like pure shit just want her back en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Ne...

I'm somehow just discovering that there's pretty compelling deep learning framework being built in rust burn.dev/books/burn/m...

Congratulations to Seattle's Sound Transit, America's fastest-growing train network, which is opening an 8-mile, 3-station extension to Federal Way today! This is the system's 4th new segment opened in less than 2 years, continually pushing ridership up to new record highs!

Pew's main findings: - Newer multifamily is safer than older multifamily - Newer multifamily is safer than newer single-family - Single-stair multifamily buildings are as safe as buildings with two stairwells www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/12/03/1...

I'm never going to be able to afford memory again. Might just pivot all my work towards probabilistic data structures and online stats. www.reuters.com/business/mic...

Lingonberry cruffins. Going full Scandinavia mode lately.

Seen our Transit Tracker project on social media? You can learn how to build your own here: transit-tracker.eastsideurbanism.org

Got my copy of the inaugural issue of Seattle-centric baking magazine Crumb. It's good! www.readcrumb.co

The last five months with Claude Code have completely changed how we work. matsen.group/agentic.html details: • How agents work (& why it matters) • Git Flow with agents • Using agents for science • The human-agent interface Questions? What has your experience been?

seattle's political geography is as wild as (and presumably at some level is reflective of) its physical geopraphy

Cosign this. I was frustrated on election night when no seemed to be able to say what exactly the range likely outcomes was. Fortunately @elections.kingcounty.gov provides a lot of historical data. I had fun digging into it with @ronpdavis.bsky.social and learning it's actually fairly predictable!

Like many of us, I've been waiting with baited breath for the Mayoral results for a week. Putting together the Wilson PAC & raising the majority of its funds made me even more invested & amped up the roller coaster. Despite my emotional journey, the result was predictable, (though not certain).

Really wasn't a sure thing a few drops ago (it could have followed one of these shallower historical trajectories and missed the mark), but it's certainly nearly a sure thing now.

Katie Wilson leads by 1346 votes!

Updating my plot on Katie Wilson's latest numbers compared to previous races. Progressive vote share sometimes drops a little in the last few percent, but it's extremely unlikely that it's enough to reverse her lead at this point.

They're calling him the Nate Silver of Seattle. (Except I learned stats and epistemology from books, not internet poker, and I haven't cooked my brain with twitter addiction.)

Incredible. Progressive challenger Katie Wilson now has a 91-vote lead in Seattle’s race for mayor. She had been steadily gaining on incumbent Bruce Harrell. There are about 8,000 ballots left to count.

Last big drop of ballots hits this afternoon, so we'll see if I'm right, but I think Katie Wilson is going to win (by a narrow margin). As shown here, she needs to as well or better in the last 17% of the ballots as she did on Friday's drop. The good news is that this is pretty likely.

Turns out the ongoing debate about the dangers of increased surveillance in the city was not entirely hypothetical.

Last big drop of ballots hits this afternoon, so we'll see if I'm right, but I think Katie Wilson is going to win (by a narrow margin). As shown here, she needs to as well or better in the last 17% of the ballots as she did on Friday's drop. The good news is that this is pretty likely.

Continuing to look at the late leftward swing in Seattle elections. Here's Katie Wilson's trajectory compared to every off-year election since 2017 (where there was a clear left candidate). Historically the swing usually surpasses what she needs to win (black line).

Thanks to @dcjones.bsky.social, I have key info! The progressive percentage of the Friday vote count is typically much higher on Friday than Thursday. Moon's was 9% higher on Friday than Thursday. Gonzales' was 5% Wilson primary was 14%. Thursday to Monday they were 12%, 4.5%, and 12%.

Updating my plot of historical counting trends in Seattle mayor elections. We are back to pretty a pretty standard trajectory (which is promising for Katie Wilson).

My take? @wilsonforseattle.bsky.social is still the favorite. Until we have Thursday drop data (assuming it is election day dropbox data), we have no good reason to think otherwise, even if we do have reason to FEEL nervous. rondezvouswa.com/p/katie-wils...

Day 1 of over-analyzing Seattle mayor election: here's how the margin has changed in this and previous elections. (Grey line is what Wilson has to hit to win)

holy shit i flew over it as it happened!

The three AI outcomes - we all become one with the machine god and shuffle off our mortal coils to live as a hive mind of cyborg superbeings - we all die horribly and painfully in an alien world that has no use for human emotion, creativity, or intellect - 1.5% TFP growth for seven years

Now that I'm settled in at @umasschan.bsky.social, I'm hiring at all levels: grad students, post-docs, and software engineers/bioinformaticians! The goal of my lab is to understand the regulatory role of every nucleotide in our genomes and how this changes across every cell in our bodies.

Excellent photo choice from Reuters

Congrats to Mary Brunkow of #seattle for #immunology discoveries leading to shared #Nobel ... Congrats to Institute for Systems Biology. #research #science www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/h...

ai2 is pretty consistently the most serious about open sourcing things that are useful for research imho

Good start. Next move should be moving the corporate HQ back to Seattle.

Working on a die shrink at the croissant fab. The goal is to get to 2 nanometers and take on TSMC.

Aimé Césaire stays undefeated: "colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism..."

Fighting an irrational urge to learn Uiua www.uiua.org

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll..... 13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

Just released Proseg 3, which has some major performance improvements, support for Visium HD, and can output directly zarr formatted spatialdata objects. crates.io/crates/proseg

Just released Proseg 3, which has some major performance improvements, support for Visium HD, and can output directly zarr formatted spatialdata objects. crates.io/crates/proseg

Interesting attempt to infer a phylogenetic tree of llms www.dbreunig.com/2025/05/30/u...

Americans' brains got absolutely cooked in 2001

Holiday weekend lamination session

Happy if-let-chain stabilization day to all those who celebrate!

🚨 Our GW paper is out in Nature Methods!🥲 GW is a fast genomics browser (up to 100x faster!) github.com/kcleal/gw Also, just released a Python interface for GW github.com/kcleal/gwplot 📝 nature.com/articles/s4159…#Genomicsc#Bioinformaticscs

I yearn for the day when our foreign policy is no longer dictated by this guy

Industry friends, now is the time for MUCH more speaking out on behalf of academic colleagues under duress. Here are core open source methods that many of your products doubtlessly depend on either directly or indirectly (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMMER) being abruptly defunded. Make noise.

New political compass just dropped

For a quick summary, read the Research Briefing on this work, here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...