Kai Blin

Yeah, the reason to have a 3d printer at home is so that you can iterate on new designs faster. Many of the things I print are replacement parts that I’m unable to buy. It’s hard to get these right on the first try. If I ever needed something I designed and tested 50 times, I’d outsource.

I am truly grateful.

That’s my reading of it as well

Marnix Medema appointed chair of Bioinformatics at WUR Marnix Medema has been appointed Chair of the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University & Research as of 1 February. He aims to further strengthen bioinformatics as a connecting discipline within ...

I am delighted and feel honored to be appointed as chair of Bioinformatics at @w-u-r.bsky.social .
I look forward to working with the team and with our collaborators worldwide on keeping bioinformatics science and education flourishing at WUR and beyond.

www.wur.nl/en/news/marn...

I mean the “can only copy, not innovate”

The last conference I was at in China convinced me that this hasn’t been true in many years

Had the exact same thought process

Oh wow. Overleaf is now pushing an AI assistant on their platform as well. It just gave me a "grammar/style suggestion" that changed the order of magnitude of a number. 1024 is not 10,024, thank you very much.

Which obviously a lot of smart people have pointed out before, but I’m 8 hours into a 6 hour train trip and to hangry to look up a proper quote.

Which is also why everybody is convinced that every job can be done by AI, just not your own

Thanks, autocorrect. I was too annoyed to notice. I'm more coherent in the alt text

A screenshot from the Deutsche Bahn app showing a connection with a negative 56 minute changeover time between two trains. The first train is delayed and can’t reach its intended connections.

Ok, who of you jokers wrote this app that thinks -56 minutes is a transfer time that OSS fine not to spite alternative connections for?

You're welcome. "Looks like an octopus" was legit the first thing my brain settled on when I saw the picture.

And of course it already looks like I’ll miss my connection. That was the clear bonus going to Cologne. Only one changeover to screw up😉

Feels funny to sit in a train from Stuttgart to Cologne again after over a decade. I’ve been doing that every Monday morning for over a year as a postdoc. Sprinting to catch my connection from Tübingen was on brand, too. I’ll just go on to our MAGIC-Molfun conference in Belgium this time around.

I also think octopuses are cool, but I didn't manage to do a cosplay yet.

Got to lean into your talents, I guess.

I've never stabbed myself with a zipper, but I did handle the one I was just closing up way more carefully than I was when opening it yesterday.

I can only admire the dedication.

Anybody can hurt themselves with something dangerous. Real pros...*checks notes*... stab themselves with a laundry bag zipper?!?

If I had a dollar for every time I got a review invite on Friday evening, just to get a follow up on Sunday, I’d have quite a bunch of dollars. Not sure I’d call that a polite knock.

Seeing how that work is basically not counted for any of the career success criteria I’m supposed to hit, it’s hard to justify the time.

Last year, I burnt out on doing reviews on a surprise 80 page manuscript that had a lot of good things going for it, but even more places where it vastly overhyped how novel or good it was compared to existing tools. Getting that one done between all of the other work was rough.

As a theatre nerd, I think this is an excellent way to spend time. And teaching always is such a great way to have real impact beyond what some IF bean counter would be tracking.

I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the Microsoft CEO called open source software a cancer and wrongful claimed that projects I am involved in violated MS IP rights. You can bet that not all of my data lives on OneDrive.

He said "well-respected", though.

I'm working in Denmark. I think a lot of us have gotten pretty anxious about relying on US-based cloud infrastructure that could go away on a whim.

Having said that, I will use this piece when talking to students about their data management plans.

Probably something like “I’ll have a Nature publication with doi and all”

I wrote this in another comment, but when I was a PhD student prior to student-affordable laptops, people would carry manuscripts around on usb thumb drives. Those failed all the time, and people did lose progress. But you wouldn’t go and broadcast your bad data handling in public.

While I was a PhD student I helped a number of fellow students recover data from usb thumb drives that had failed, but contained their only copy of a manuscript or thesis. I feel like every one of those students would have been too embarrassed to write about this in public.