Francisco De La Vega

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

Surprised (but also not that surprised) that the AlphaGenome paper didn't officially cite any of the primary data used for training their model (see Fig. 1, thousands of datasets made with tremendous time and effort over >15yrs). What's up with that @nature.com ?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Aka: you work was replaced by AI and for those that remain, increase productivity with AI or else …

I wrote today about AlphaGenome, Google DeepMind's AI for DNA. It's powerful, experts told me, but it won't solve the mysteries of the genome overnight. Gift link: nyti.ms/4k5NFIl

Inside a tech company’s secretive plan to destroy millions of books Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

more details and sharp analysis from @willoremus.com and @aaronschaffer.com here is a gift link wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

some of my favorite snippets from newly released court docs in the Anthropic copyright book case. eye-opening stuff on Project Panama, their plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world" in order to train AI

😆

Yes, but is a first step

At least I hope to see the California state flag going up instead

And yet, we wants and is forming an unregulated paramilitary force, with no accountability, for use within the US: ICE

DOGE Employees Shared Social Security Data, Court Filing Shows

Not only was DOGE illegally accessing your Social Security information, but it was also illegally offering to share it with third-party political groups working to overturn elections.

This is a deep betrayal of the public trust and must be fully investigated. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/u...

Easy to be his fan when not suffering directly the consequences of his decisions: higher prices, more hate, reduced health, less research for new medicines, unregulated federal police raiding communities and shooting citizens that stand in the way, less free expression, while he becomes richer

Come for this horribly depressing graph about the state of America’s health and science agencies and stay for the heatmap from grant termination hell. Essential reading from @maxkozlov.bsky.social and colleagues

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Like what happened with China when they folded their muscle with the rare earths threat

Aka- he backed off with his tail under his legs like with China because they didn’t bent to his will.

YouTube video by DRM News FULL SPEECH: Canada’s PM Carney Says US-Led World Order Is Breaking at World Economic Forum | AC1G

"The middle powers must act together because if we‘re not at the table, we‘re on the menu".

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTvF...

His best con job

Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds New research contradicts President Trump’s claim that foreigners are footing the bill.

“Foreign exporters absorbed only 4% of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

“Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.”

www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

🚨 #ISMB2026 Proceedings submissions are due tomorrow, January 20 by 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (no exceptions).

📥 Submit here: https://www.iscb.org/ismb2026/call-for-submissions/proceedings

And the irony is the “focus” on infection diseases 😆

💯

An interesting bit of history:
In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the US. You may know of them as the US Virgin Islands. As part of this sale, the US recognized Danish authority over Greenland.

The text of the complete, ratified agreement is here: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

And Excell still can’t tell that when you open a TSV file with a column that says “genotype,” 2/1 or 1/1 are not 1-Feb or 1-Jan whereas ChatGPT easily tell when they what are they and even wether they are phased or not.

I am pontificating

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland.

They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”

I consent

Did the Supreme Court just signal the fate of Trump’s tariffs? Card players recognize the signs of a “tell,” a player’s demeanor that telegraphs intent for the next hand. Just before Christmas, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Illinois made a procedural ruling that ...

The resolution of challenges to unilateral tariffs can’t come soon enough, one way or another. www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

Best to buy a one-way ticket, because if this happens the US aviation industry will collapse and with it the rest of the economy

Deadline for proceeding papers for #ISMB26 approaching fast - send your work on sequence analysis algos and tag then for #HiTSeq @hitseq.bsky.social