My conclusion after trying coding agents for a month: I think the speedup in getting things done is a direct tradeoff for learning you'd otherwise be doing. That's ok though, this would've been time spent learning skills I don't care about.

woag tailscale is coil

So far "flawless grammar and free of typos" was a hint for "probably LLM-generated". Yesterday, ChatGPT replied to me, "...syntax is only valid *iff* [sic]..." (It even put the emphasis on its typo. Just now Claude replies, "a Scene is only valid iff: [sic] every member..." What is going on??

Idk there's something about Codex that makes me use it much more than any of the competitors, despite my dislike for OpenAI. I guess there's more to it than benchmarks. ... oh right it's called a "free trial"

What started as a joke has turned into me unironically saying "Le-Le-Lame"

Just finally realized that Valve Engineering and Aperture Science are the same thing

How many physicists does it take to augment a sphere into a cow?

Here's a prophecy: The great thing about AI companies will be that their names already almost have "Ad" in them when their maximally enshittified products demand a customer-driven rebranding

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

> I love the internet sometimes *goes back to making software for hiding from the internet*

it's more of a comment than a ques

Sadly, I had to miss the Big Techday this year (again 😤 they're doing this intentionally) due to a date clash with the CZI Open Science meeting. Thankfully the talks are finally available online in time for the holidays 😍

But maybe social clique formation is also a form of phase separation

ilastik 1.4.2b5 is out, and I'm really excited about this one. The release highlights (www.ilastik.org/download#beta) should hopefully read as huge as this update already is in its very first beta release. Physical pixel size metadata, label explorer, up to 10x raw data viewing speedups 😱❤️‍🔥

Lol that soon™️ turned unto 6 months 😶 oh well, onwards! To Zurich!

Day 2 of #Zidas2025 is happening! After a lecture from @ahklemm.bsky.social, it's now time for hands on with @ilastik-team.bsky.social by @benediktbest.bsky.social from Anna Kreshuk's lab and some tracking in the afternoon with #Trackmate from @jytinevez.bsky.social !

Protip for Python on Windows: "Copy as path" from Windows Explorer has the issue that it copies "C:\Users\me\path" with single backslashes, which you cannot directly paste as a string in Python. Unless you make it a raw string: path = r"C:\Users\me\example.png" # yay, copy-paste works

Oh boy, big feature finally finished from my side (ok well e2e test still tbd but eh...). Time for review & release soon™️, I guesstimate another month. New beta already after stable 1.4.1 only just went out 🤣

If you have talented students in your team looking for a coding-heavy summer project, let them know that ilastik is participating in Google Summer of Code 2025! We are a sub-org under the Python Software Foundation. Come code with us as a (paid!) open source internship: github.com/btbest/gsoc-...

Miniforge giving me so much pain these last few days... And it seems all because I insisted that "conda now uses the mamba solver, so there's no reason to use mamba anymore". I don't know why, but `conda install plotly` in my env consistently failed to solve, while `mamba` worked first try.

When an entire new feature just needs a few changes in one function