Ken Youens-Clark

Please spread the word:

We invite applications to a two-week Computational Biology workshop in Singapore, June 14-27.

This NSF-funded workshop brings together 16-20 US grad students with international peers.
Apply by March 21: compbioasia.net
🧵 Details below:

I've been thinking about making friends with a neighborhood corvid. Maybe hold out some peanuts in my hand and see what happens.

None more black

Whenever I wear my belt with the big brass buckle, I think that's a pretty good weapon if I swing it.

Looking at used bicycles on Craigslist just to feel something.

TBI fixed my anxiety.

Shout out to Fishbone, who was singing to my white-college-boy ass back in the early 90s about fascism. Not something I ever thought about growing up, and they were trying to get me to see it.

My ride share car smells like air freshener and pot. Reminds me of the summer I lived in a house with six band mates and there was a cinnamon air freshener in the bathroom and the keyboard player came out and said “Mmm cinnamon dump!

I was hanging out with my middle child and they said "I forgot my cardigan. It's OK. I have my backup cardigan." and produced it from their bag. I love that.

I'd add cardigans to that list.

I've release a new user interface for mdrepo.org, an open repository of molecular dynamic simulations for proteins, written in Elm (specifically Elm Land). The original version used React/JS and was slow and failed with exceptions. The Elm version should have zero runtime exceptions. #elm-lang

The reward for good work is more work.

Tried to call my step-dad and got his voice mail with the message recorded by my mom, who died in June.

Anyway, release the Epstein files.

He begs "Don't empty my mind! Please, I beg you! My mind is all I have! I've spent my whole life trying to fill it!" And this is what I think about my decades-long effort to fill my mind with useful knowledge and why would I want to let a shitty word prediction algorithm replace my brain?

One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. I recall the scene where Dr Zarkov is going to be reprogrammed. He's told "We're going to empty your memory as we might empty your pockets."

YouTube video by Machine Learning Street Talk Intelligent Humans vs. Smart AI: The Ultimate Showdown

And for me I keep failing to understand why we'd want to damage ourselves and our work output by relying on generative AI. Cf David Krakauer talking about this at minute 42: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXa8...

For scraping the insides of a banana peel and smoking it in an effort to get high (Zappa hated drugs), and he throws in "You can't even speak your own f*cking language anymore. You can't write it."

The previous quote reminds me of an aside that Frank Zappa makes on "Tinseltown Rebellion" after an audience member sends a note up on stage that he reads aloud. The note has a misspelling of the word "wearing" that he criticizes and later in a song he's talking about how stupid people are, e.g.,

"[T]he last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate."

I esp love: "[S]ome people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate 'the ease of programming' with the ease of making undetected mistakes." (I'm looking at you #python).

A friend shared a lovely Dijkstra essay. It's short enough to read in a few minutes, and is damning of the current attempt to replace our brains with AI generated writing and vibe coding.
www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcr...

Further, use of agentic coding requires environmental harm and encourages laziness--and not the good kind that Larry Wall describes in the iconic Programming Perl (camel) book that O'Reilly published.

I know this gives off "old man yells at cloud" vibes, and to be sure, I'm old. I've got almost 30 years of coding experience. I believe the agents that O'Reilly is promoting are predicated on the theft of IP.

I've become increasingly disappointed my publisher, @oreilly.bsky.social, leaning so heavily into vibe coding. They canceled my Rust course in which I attempt to methodically teach how to learn Rust by writing it oneself. They fired the really good acquisition editors who brought me on board.

So, yes, I have to keep asking my wife to make out in the middle of the day even though she consistently says no.

A friend would ride with his mom to drop his sister off for piano lessons. Every time, his mom asked him if he'd like to take lessons, too. Every time, he said no. One day, he decided he would say yes the next time his mom asked. She never did, and he never studied the piano.

Bacronym

I don't understand the government taking 10% of Intel profits. Like, isn't that what taxes are supposed to be?

My one food service experience was 27 years ago at a Cracker Barrel in Lewisville, TX, my last semester in college after my folks kicked me off the payroll after a huge fight over my girlfriend.