Kelly Sovacool
@kelly.sova.cool
Bioinformatics Software Engineer. PhD from Schloss Lab at UMich. https://sovacool.dev 🏃🏻♀️🚴🏻♀️🧗🏻♀️ #python #rstats #nextflow #snakemake she/her My views are my own.
i started this train of thought as a joke but now i do think there's something to the idea that the way to sell the green revolution to the US public is that we're being denied Good Deals on cheap chinese cars and solar panels and there's nothing more unamerican than saying we can't have a good deal
A reminder that running the dishwasher twice is actually still superior to handwashing.
Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 2w agoI run the dishwasher all the time for basic not-living-in-squalor purposes and I will never feel bad about this
My colleagues have been far too cautious to embrace the Leopards Eating Faces Health Action movement, for reasons I cannot understand
Manual transmission is wayyy more fun to drive. But when we were looking to replace my car, the math wasn’t mathing: an Equinox EV ended up being better financially as long as we keep it for 5 years or more. And we usually keep our cars til death (catastrophic breakdown) do us part.
IndiacarlessⓋ 🇺🇦@indiacarless.bsky.social · 3w agoNOOOOO! It's all I know how to drive. Read for $0 wapo.st/4gJh1ww
Using ChatGPT as your search engine is like using a refrigerator as your air conditioner.
I am losing my mind. Chat isn’t a search engine. this isn’t normal. framing it as normative is slimy. Tone, vibes all bad.
Holden Thorp@holdenthorp.bsky.social · 3w agoHi, this is Holden emerging from my Bluesky hiatus to tell everyone that when checking the links in the piece, I used ChatGPT as my search engine (does anyone use Google anymore?). The piece was written by me and edited by humans. So all the links were checked by me and again by our copyeditors.
Let's learn a lesson from the nearly 500K of us who mobilized to comment on the OMB rules. We can leave the sidelines, take action and it can make a difference. After 15 months of inaction, our scientific societies finally woke up and mobilized members. It doesn't stop there 1/n
I‘ve resisted the urge to build a wildlife pond all spring and summer long, so as I treat I can make a mini barrel pond now, right??
The NIH is an ENORMOUS bargain for the American people. Do folk think that private industry will do the background slog work for drug discovery for 250K direct costs?
Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · last mo.Scott Atlas, the champion of herd immunity as an Fox News commenter and the Trump Advisor during COVID, weighs in with a DEEPLY MININFORMED op-ed in the WaPo. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... 1/7
When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”
Jason Rasgon@vectorgen.bsky.social · last mo.The NIH is an ENORMOUS bargain for the American people. Do folk think that private industry will do the background slog work for drug discovery for 250K direct costs?
how have so many people become entranced by this idea the chatbot can "know" anything or is even capable of "truth" or "lying"? it is an algorithm that will spit out text that statistically most likely answers your question. it has no awareness, no knowledge. it is foolish to anthropomorphize it.
Currently listening to a playlist that so far has included Herb Alpert, Tame Impala, Star Wars soundtrack (Duel of the Fates), and now Lil Nas X. Confused by the range but not upset about it!
That's what I don't understand about professionals using A.I.: Don't they have something they really want to say? Isn't that why they're writing?
For anyone else who wants a not-AI search engine:
Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more
A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives
theguardian.com
Brian Merchant@bcmerchant.bsky.social · 3mo agoCounterpoint: No I will not
The new "I do my own stunts" in the age of genAI: I make my own diagrams and presentation slides 😎
I asked my slack group of learning scientists - from @ludmilanunes.bsky.social Morehead et al. (2019) did a meta-analysis that showed a very small advantage of handnotes. link.springer.com/article/10.1... Flanigan et al. (2024) showed the same pattern link.springer.com/article/10.1...
How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) - Educational Psychology Review
Many students use laptops to take notes in classes, but does using them impact later test performance? In a high-profile investigation comparing note-taking writing on paper versus typing on a laptop ...
link.springer.com
🧬 Join us for the @openbio.bsky.social @bosc.bsky.social CollaborationFest (CoFest), focused on open source and open science — happening right after #ISMB2026 and #BOSC2026! Registration (free!) and organization details can be found at: 🌐 www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-...
CollaborationFest 2026
CollaborationFest 2026 will be a collaborative work event at which participants work together to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases. If...
open-bio.org
Finally got around to making this recipe and these cookies may be the best I’ve ever had?!?! Definitely follow Dominique’s advice of chilling the dough for 24-48 hrs before baking!
Dominique Baker@bakerdphd.bsky.social · 3mo agoAny time I want a quick, delicious bake with ingredients I keep around the house, I just make these cookies. Letting them chill for 24 to 48 hours creates such an insane caramel flavor. www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/clas...
In the absence of aggressive quality control it's just the mass production of tech debt that will inevitably collapse. I fear we'll eventually hit the finding out phase 😬
Deeply worried about deskilling in bioinformatics and software development. In parallel, also worried about low quality code being churned out rapidly by folks using these tools without doing proper quality control on the outputs 😬
Jordan Nafa@ajordannafa.com · 3mo agoThe more I use AI for development, the more concerned I am about the fact that knowing what makes an effective prompt and the appropriate, opiniated, guardrails necessary to consistently get high quality output is much harder if you don't have quite a bit of experience doing things by hand first.
Genuinely interested @vincentab.bsky.social: A lot of your (great) work has made reference to minimalism, i.e. low dependency footprint etc. How do you reconcile this approach with incorporating an LLM into your workflow? A massive dependency that can change cost / capability at any time?
I have a similar experience. I am able to get the #Rstats code I want from Claude in just a few prompts, often in just one. It's not just that Claude has improved, it's also that I started using R in 2014 (I know what to ask) and I learned how to prompt effectively (I know how to ask).
Jordan Nafa@ajordannafa.com · 3mo agoThe more I use AI for development, the more concerned I am about the fact that knowing what makes an effective prompt and the appropriate, opiniated, guardrails necessary to consistently get high quality output is much harder if you don't have quite a bit of experience doing things by hand first.
New article by @crabtails.bsky.social about his work as a fisheries biologist!
Your Neighborhood Scientist@your.neighborhoodscientist.org · 3mo agoNEW ARTICLE ALERT: “What is a fisheries biologist?” Brendan Turley, PhD, explains the science behind fisheries management, field research, and sustainable seafood and what life as a fisheries biologist is really like. neighborhoodscientist.org/posts/2026/f... #Fisheries #OceanScience #NOAA
NEW ARTICLE ALERT: “What is a fisheries biologist?” Brendan Turley, PhD, explains the science behind fisheries management, field research, and sustainable seafood and what life as a fisheries biologist is really like. neighborhoodscientist.org/posts/2026/f... #Fisheries #OceanScience #NOAA
What is a fisheries biologist? – Your Neighborhood Scientist
science news for everyone
neighborhoodscientist.org
I don’t always close 7 issues with one pull request, but when I do, it takes 210 commits over 1.5 years… and I regret it deeply 😅
i will simply incant "do NOT corrupt me. make NO mistakes" before wielding the One Ring
The discourse around "This is a tell for AI writing" really only serves the AI bros, because (they believe) it will tell them how to change the AI to make it indistinguishable from a human. We need to keep our em dashes. Our rules of three. The tell for AI is: is it hollow, does it say nothing.
Sunny Moraine@dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social · 3mo agoWhy should I stop using em dashes? Why should I stop listing things in threes? They’re the ones who suck
