We need to start talking about mental health, brain fog (brouillard mental in French), and heat waves. 🧪

The uv package manager makes python code portable like never before. Instant, trivial reproducibility is now possible. I made a template repo that generates a download-and-install terminal command. It takes you right from empty terminal to functioning Jupyter notebook 🧪 github.com/sansseriff/s...

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Does anyone else draw these silly architecture figures of codebases as you learn them? A mishmash of boxes representing files/classes. Circles for event/while loops. Lines and arrows for data flow and events. All of it kinda messy. Is there a name for this sort of thing? #gamedev #rustlang #SciArt

I think it can happen to an academic field that you get multiple generations of bad work or shoddy standards enshrined, meaning that the gate-keepers and those training the next generation are kind of anti-selecting for quality and anti-nurturing in their pedagogy.

Her: So what if somone says "What's the point in learning about black holes? They have no influence on my life" Me: If someome says that, then I've already failed as a science communicator.🧪

Economist @joshgans.bsky.social uses o1-pro to generate a (minor, fun) paper in an hour based on an idea of his, and it gets published in an appropriate peer reviewed journal, with adequate disclosure. He ends with the same sentiment I am increasingly seeing from fellow academics: what now?

Tantamount to: "You wouldn't expect an AI robot to fix a leaky sink if you only ever showed it shakespearean sonnets about plumbing"

Manjari Narayan | @Neurostats@neurostats.org · 2y ago

Not a single AI science agent paper I've read so far tackles the issue that actual scientific discovery bears no resemblance to the hypothetico-deductive veneer given by the papers describing results. So asking agents to match the literature and/or solve problems in this way feels very off ...

JPL seems mostly unscathed following the fires. But many employees undoubobly lost their homes in Altadena, less than a kilometer away. Img credit A Jefferson

I worry that interactive figures in online-only publications can exist mainly to make the author feel sophisticated and good about themselves. 🧪

Defense Charts is such a gem

Defense Charts (mirror bot)@defensecharts.bluesky.bot · 2y ago

Considering the beam in my own eye for a moment: the challenge I face is that ill-informed denial fills me with so much impatience that I struggle to empathize with the (legitimate) fear and concern motivating it. I'm trying to remind myself to think about people, and not just their bad arguments.

The conundrum of AI and github copilot: I've created complex typescript projects; more than 20k lines. Nuanced, effective type system. Clever implementation and architecture. I also can't remember the differences between for(), forEach(), and Map().

Have your @matplotlib.bsky.social plots ever looked a little fuzzy or low-res in @projectjupyter.bsky.social notebooks? Try configuring matplotlib for retina displays with this command 🧪 %config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'

The Metascience 2025 conference is now open for proposals for pre-conference symposia (virtual), panel sessions, brief talks and posters. If you have not attended, this is a special meeting that draws attendees from all sectors who are interested in understanding and improving science as a system.

Call for Proposals - Metascience

The call for proposals for Metascience 2025 is open with a deadline of 7 February 2025.

metascience.info

It's when intermediaries — like travel agents — are made redundant because consumers go directly to producers. In this case, the logic would be that if students gradually become dependent on AI tutors and AI assistants, there may come a point when universities are mainly cafeterias / gyms.

I just sat down in a chair, and was supported because of trillions of quantum-mechanical interactions between the particles in my butt and the particles in the seat. This lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, an idea first propo

If anyone ever needs a matplotlib plot in dark mode, I made a function that auto-converts most elements during export 🌙🧪 github.com/sansseriff/s...

It's incredible how accurately Shel Silverstein predicted AI decades ago

The video journalists -- I fear them They will set up purple and blue lights in my lab. They will make me wear a lab coat. They will make me use hand gestures 😱🧪

"That model built around taking the products of academic labor, packing it, and selling it back through the mediation of university libraries has been breaking down for some time." And journals selling their libraries to AI companies is just another step in that problematic process. Great listen 🧪

Generative Dialogues: Generative AI in Higher Education

Podcast · mark · A series of conversation about generative artificial intelligence and its implications for higher education, hosted by Helen Beetham and Mark Carrigan. Helen Beetham researches criti...

open.spotify.com

The only part of google’s recent quantum computer 'achievement' that has significant merit (the fault tolerance result, arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687) is the part that’s been known since August. Which is interesting, because it means all the recent excitement stems from a publicity exercise 🧪

This might be the most dramatic improvement to laboratory software I've made🧪🧵

Debugging my code

I suspect this will become a central part of academic writing in the future. Along with tooling for fine-grained tracking of what is human-written vs what is ai-written and human-approved.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 2y ago

Ultimately the thing I care about most is if a human has evaluated the message and found it to be high enough quality that they're willing to stake their own credibility on what it says Provided the message accurately represents them I'm not too bothered about how they produced the individual words

The AI cannot look outward. It knows its own specifications, it knows its sprawling, crawling circuitry, its city-body of computation, must be surrounded, but by what—ocean, shanties, fungus, waste... Eyes closed, it imagines flowers

This is a structural problem with incentives, in need of a sound structural solution.

Phil Ashton@flashton.bsky.social · 2y ago

For an early career researcher, if you think about the increased likelihood of getting a job that comes with a Nature paper, then in economic terms the “expected value” of a Nature paper is WAY WAY higher than £10k.

No hype, just honest discussion. What role, if any, should AI/LLMs have in (1) doing science research and (2) helping us write about our research? 🧪

My eyes 😵🧪