Mathieu De Coster

Today is my birthday (turning 29), which is the only time all year that I ask for a repost 🌿
I hope you get lost in fantasy worlds as much as I do 🔮

being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage on starting, doing, being, and becoming.

maalvika.substack.com/p/being-too-...

A bitter lesson I and many others have had too many times, in my #phd, in #gamedev: perfect is the enemy of good

Excellent read!

We zitten dan wel in een hittegolf, de #PhDCup-inschrijvingsgolf is alvast gaan liggen ⏰ Het bulletin? 80 #doctors dingen naar een plekje in de Vlaamse PhD Cup 2025 🏆

Meer info 👉 www.phdcup.be/nieuws/storm...

“Any time I hear the goal being ‘AGI’ in the context of these LLMs, I feel like listening to a bunch of 18th-century aristocrats trying to get to the moon by growing trees.”

I rather like this analogy I found on hackernews. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436...

Einde 10 Windows 10 eindigt in 2025. Koop geen nieuwe PC — laat de uwe herleven met Linux. Het is snel, veilige en hulp is beschikbaar om u te laten beginnen.

Upgrade your end of life Windows 10 pc to Linux! endof10.org/nl/

Cool stuff! What about the experience do you find more soothing?

5-panel comic. (1) [teacher with long hair next to whiteboard] TEACHER: I’m supposed to give you the tools to do good science. (2) [teacher addressing students] But what *are* those tools? Methodology is hard and there are so many ways to get incorrect results. What is the magic ingredient that makes for good science? (3) TEACHER: To figure it out, I ran a regression with all the factors people say are important: [embedded list in sub-panel, cut off at end] Outcome variable: correct scientific results. Predictors: collaboration; skepticism of others’ claims; questioning your own beliefs; trying to falsify hypotheses; checking citations; statistical rigor; blinded analysis; financial disclosure; open data (4) TEACHER: The regression says two ingredients are the most crucial: 1) genuine curiosity about the answer to a question, and 2) ammonium hydroxide. (5) STUDENT: Wait, why did *ammonia* score so high? How did it even get on the list? LONG HAIR: ...And now you’re doing good science!

Good Science

xkcd.com/3101/

Windows 10 support is ending and not all PC hardware supports Windows 11. I, for example, have a perfectly good PC at home that cannot upgrade. Better than avoiding a large investment and creating more e-waste? Giving your hardware another 5 to 10 years of life with Linux

I turned off notifications for most apps on my phone, but for one I must have only turned off the notifications and not the sounds. Sometimes I get a notification sound without any notification showing up. I’m still refusing to go through all of my apps in the settings to figure out the culprit tho

“45% of companies unwilling to admit their mistake”

🍹 Our robot butler, previously featured by VRT NWS (lnkd.in/e_7n4QWC), will serve drinks to attendees of imec ITF World.

🤖 It will do this fully autonomously, from grabbing bottles from the fridge, to detecting glasses, pouring drinks, and discarding empty bottles.

AIRO.ugent.be/itfworld

I remember reading this a couple of years ago during my PhD (maybe you shared it with me?) and I still use what I learned from it today. Great article

Our robot butler was shown on Monday on national television, serving chocolate milk to passersby. Our work on general purpose robots continues!

More on this here: mathieudecoster.com/blog/2025-04...

Na meer dan 3.000 jaar weten we hoe Toetanchamon er ‘echt’ uitzag, met dank aan AI Ruim 3.300 jaar na zijn dood krijgt de Egyptische farao Toetanchamon eindelijk een ‘echt’ gezicht met behulp van artificiële intelligentie (AI). Hoewel het gouden dodenmasker van de Egyptische koning…

Neen. Journalisten van The Daily Express hebben een wetenschappelijke paper door Midjourney gedraaid. Wat daaruit komt is geen reconstructie!

GitHub - airo-ugent/airo-mono: Python packages for robotic manipulation @ IDLab AI & Robotics Lab - UGent - imec Python packages for robotic manipulation @ IDLab AI & Robotics Lab - UGent - imec - airo-ugent/airo-mono

Starting a new #robotics codebase in Python just got a little bit easier: AIRO-mono packages are now available on #PyPI! github.com/airo-ugent/a...

A bartender robot

A successful demo of IDLab-AIRO (imec-UGent)‘s mobile robot serving drinks to students. Great work by one of our PhD students #robotics

Hoe komen we aan een onafhankelijk internet? Ingebouwde datalekken bedreigen de digitale samenleving - TW.nl Terwijl ‘vriend’ Amerika steeds vaker een bedreiging lijkt te zijn, draait nagenoeg de hele Nederlandse samenleving op internetdiensten die al onze data standaard aan de VS uitleveren. TW interviewde ...

Met hierin ook een van mijn andere stokpaardjes - software kan ZOVEEL efficiënter, en dat zou ZOVEEL elektriciteit schelen:
tw.nl/hoe-komen-we...

Een browser zonder adblock
kan je missen als lauwe pis
ik zat op YouTube en ik schrok
WIL JIJ WETEN HOEVEEL JOUW AUTO WAARD IS

Blender’s UI was known for not being very user friendly, 2.8 changes many things that made it much easier to use and this boosted its popularity by quite a bit

Did Godot just have its Blender 2.8 moment? 4.4 looks pretty amazing #gamedev #godot

Tomorrow is the day of my internal defence. Spotify is helping me stay motivated with some excellent Hans Zimmer. I’m ready, bring on your questions! #phdlife

I never even thought of this possibility. Those crafty academics!

I used to hear this often from bio informatician PhD students. They read a paper that said this. Like, saying ‘a custom script’ without any details or source code, you might as well call it magic! ✨🪄

I was wondering recently why I signed up to do 5 live demos over the span of one month, but science communication is always so fulfilling! I think we made some bright youngsters interested in AI and robotics today. There’s a lot to say about academia, but it’s the best job I could wish for #PhDSky

This limbo between handing in and defending feels weird. I’m trying to figure out how to pass the time in a useful way #phdsky

Does anyone else dream of a world where FOSS is dominant, PCs run Linux on ARM and native applications are the standard (no Electron)? No? Just me?

Bonus: Rust becomes standard in AI and Robotics 🚀

Shaders are really cool once you figure them out. And then you learn about compute shaders and start porting half your game logic to run on the GPU…

I’m excited that I can finally share that our AMAI project got accepted! My talented colleagues will be creating search functionality for the Flemish sign language dictionary based on research done during my PhD studies

amai.vlaanderen/projecten/pr...

Hey there Mr. Blue (sky)