Eric Ma
@ericmjl.bsky.social
Senior Principal Data Scientist, Moderna. Trying to follow Jesus.
Went in as a GxP rookie, left with assumptions dismantled. Regulators state principles; companies write the procedures. AI validation = validating a measurement system. "Validation isn't an event. Validation is data." ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/9/...
A model that fails for reasons you understand can teach more than a leaderboard win. A SLAS Discovery special issue welcomes negative results and failed AI deployments. Edited by Raminderpal Singh and Srijit Seal. Due Dec 15: www.slas-discovery.org/content/call...
Team stuck going in circles on a decision? Hand out 1,000 points of funny money and let everyone bet across the options. My 70-point bet vs. a teammate's 900 showed where conviction actually lived, more than hours of arguing did. ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/9/...
#Immunology 🧪🩺
Mohamed ElTanbouly@plasmacellguy.bsky.social · 3w agoHello! I've started my lab and we're looking to hire at multiple positions: 1-Postdoc 2-Scientist (primarily Computational biologists) 2-Lab manager 3-Tech If you're interested, please reach out to my institutional email. Looking forward to discussing further.
Ask AI all day, remember nothing? That's cognitive debt. Answers aren't understanding. The fix is learning how to learn with AI as the accelerator, and one focused week is enough to acquire those skills. What would you learn first? ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/8/... #learning #ai
Meta and X have been quietly downranking external links for ages, but we're now entering a new era of open hostility toward the open web. It's a great time to build your own website, free from any billionaires demanding a tithe for things that have always been free.
Suw@suw.bsky.social · 3w agoFucking hell. Facebook is now limiting the number of links that a page or professional profile can include in a post to TWO PER MONTH, unless you pay them $7.99 a month. Fucking assholes.
What did your last AI deployment actually change? Hit rate? Cycle time? The decision made differently? A SLAS Discovery special issue asks it of real deployments in drug discovery. Edited by Raminderpal Singh and Srijit Seal. Due Dec 15: www.slas-discovery.org/content/call...
Quantum computing isn't magic, it's a sampler for spaces too big to enumerate. I mapped quantum amplitudes to Bayesian posteriors after months of 1-on-1 tutoring. Interactive diagrams included. buff.ly/SRHm9eQ
Quantum Computing for the Probabilistic Bayesian
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-08-07 | tags: quantum computing bayesian probability qubits entanglement interference superposition sampling inference amplitudes
ericmjl.github.io
What's the last thing you asked AI to explain? Could you reproduce that from memory right now? If not, you recognized it. You didn't learn it. Here's the fix. buff.ly/GhLwDKt #ai #learning
How AI turbocharges your learning
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-27 | tags: learning ai survey retrieval practice spaced repetition socratic method metacognition bloom's taxonomy
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The best AI stories in drug discovery never make it into print. A new SLAS Discovery special issue collects them: real case studies, measurable outcomes, failures welcome. Edited by Raminderpal Singh and Srijit Seal. Due Dec 15: www.slas-discovery.org/content/call...
🧪⚛️ Two terrible lab safety incidents at universities this week (HF at Hokkaido, dimethylmercury at MIT). Please be careful out there! nanoscale.blogspot.com/2026/08/lab-...
Lab safety - seriously, be careful out there
This past week was a genuinely horrific reminder of the importance of lab safety, especially in the realm of hazardous chemicals. First, a...
nanoscale.blogspot.com
Agents write the code now; understanding it is the bottleneck. Approve a PR you can't explain and you witnessed it, not reviewed it. I mapped the 2026 zeitgeist, with a playable quiz inside: buff.ly/46T6a5g
The understanding zeitgeist in AI code review
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-24 | tags: ai agents code review cognitive debt software engineering llms pull requests understanding learning micro-worlds
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New episode is out! A very practical one, where we dive into the new research by Adrian Seyboldt, Eliot Carlson and Bob Carpenter about how to make your MCMC samplers go faster -- lots of gems in there, make sure to tune in!
Pierre-Simon Laplace@learnbayesstats.bsky.social · 2mo agoHow can we make Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sample faster? In this episode, @alex-andorra.bsky.social , Adrian Seyboldt, and Eliot Carlson dive into HMC preconditioning, mass matrix adaptation, and Nutpie - including a median 4× speed-up across 114 models 🎧 learnbayesstats.com/episode/fast...
Clicking through curves to flag outliers by hand? Deleting points is statistically broken. I fit 36 plates in 4 minutes flat. How would you feel about automation instead of manual clicking? Share with your team! ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/7/... #bayesian #assays
Going Bayesian automates your manual data analysis
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-23 | tags: bayesian outliers automation hierarchy statistics reproducibility dose response data analysis
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Reading ML papers feels like drowning in jargon. Pair-coding notebooks with an agent taught me more in an evening than a week of reading. How would you feel about playing with concepts instead of fighting syntax? ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/7/... #ml #ai
Curiosity at the wheel
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-21 | tags: marimo ai agents learning machine learning notebooks curiosity eli5
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Drowning in AI PRs? Stop arguing with bots. Pick a policy. A clear AI_POLICY.md ends the slop. How would you feel about real dialogue instead of bot relay? ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/7/... #opensource #ai
Choose your own AI policy
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-20 | tags: ai open-source agents policy community collaboration scipy maintainers
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Spending weeks merging assay files? One file can hold every assay. I built a skill that auto-assembles linked data packages. One curator manages many campaigns. How would you feel about shipping instead of wrangling? ericmjl.github.io/blog/2026/7/... #xarray #bioinformatics
xarray in biology, take 2
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-19 | tags: xarray datatree python bioinformatics datascience ai agents bayesian curation data packaging lab data
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Garfield was not a cartoon. He was a PROPHET. #Caturday
What if your LLM woke in seconds, not minutes? Tested Ollama vs vLLM on Modal (Qwen3.6-27B). vLLM wins on cold starts and throughput. Post: setup, 3 snapshot bugs, CUDA graphs. How do you handle cold starts? buff.ly/e8LX5OE #llm #vllm
Ollama, vLLM, and SGLang on Modal
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-07-01 | tags: vllm ollama modal benchmarking deployment inference snapshots latency performance qwen3.6
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Exactly the type of old school data science project that I love, with the help of new school tools www.iandmacomber.com/blog/gopro-g...
Teaching LLMs Taste: How I Built an Automated Cycling Ride Recap with GoPro, Garmin, and Gemini — Ian Macomber
Or as my wife says: How I managed to turn 3 hours of boring GoPro footage into 30 seconds of boring GoPro footage
iandmacomber.com
formats evolve over decades, apps over months, intelligence is evolving every day in terms of pace layers "file over app" defines priorities: invest deeply in proven formats, and don't expect anything at the intelligence layer to last very long
Y saltó Don Gato. 😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹 And Top Cat jumped in. 😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹
Does your dog bite? No, he blesses. Original post
I wonder if this will make people reconsider their stance or become even more defensive.
Does AI widen the expert-novice gap? Live-demoed a Bayesian model with an agent. It amplified my judgment. For experts, a microscope. For novices, fast wrong answers. 'Vibe zones' and trust scaling with verification. What's your experience? #ai #datascience buff.ly/BVb49jC
Agents amplify expertise and ignorance
written by Eric J. Ma on 2026-06-17 | tags: bayesian modeling automation expertise judgment agents notebooks protein science learning
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The Norwegian team has been a delight to watch and they represent all that is positive about football.
If you're not prepared to get your kids vaccinated, don't have children.
