Willi

arXiv is not going to survive the wave of slop heading its way

Are you a professional software developer that uses AI coding tools?

I’d love to interview you briefly for an article I am writing for Ars Technica

Looking for all perspectives! DM me with your thoughts

Now in Digital Discovery: Context-aware computer vision for chemical reaction state detection.

🔗 pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...
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From Good Code to Reliable Software: A Practical Guide to Production-Ready Python Packages Most of us have written Python that worked beautifully — right up until someone else tried to install it, run it on a different machine or…

This topic follows me for a while, so I thought I write down a few things: "From good code to reliable software: A practical guide to production-ready Python packages" willigottstein.medium.com/from-good-co...

Feedback is more than welcome!

#SoftwareDevelopment #Python

#JOB OPPORTUNITY: We're hiring an Associate Director of Marketing and Communications (TERM). If you're a creative who feels passionately about making science accessible to a wide audience, apply now!

jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

AI4X–Accelerate Conference 2026 abstracts have been extended until February 9 (final extension).

Join us in Singapore, June 15–19, 2026.

Submit: ai4x.cc/call-for-sub...

AI can write infrastructure code that looks right.
Battle-tested patterns that actually survive production? Not so much.
Anton Babenko's Claude skill bridges that gap.

What it covers:

🤖 The Engine:
Strict engineering loop (init, validate, plan) with automated formatting.

Germany increased its research and innovation spending by 4.9% in 2024, exceeding inflation (3.1%). The strongest growth came from services, highlighting the ongoing structural transformation of the German economy.

New preprint: Materealize — a multi-agent deliberation system for end-to-end material design and synthesis.

🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2601.15743
🖥️ Demo: huggingface.co/spaces/SNU-M...

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It made a starter pack. Lack of inclusion is not a judgment against you and is only an indicator doll's mental ram ran out of room. It can add you on request.

go.bsky.app/L71zwey

Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiomes Socializing at a young age helps to develop greater diversity in their microbiota, according to an analysis of baby-to-baby transmission of gut bacteria.

A few months at nursery gives a roughly 1-year-old baby more new microbes for its gut microbiome than it has acquired in its WHOLE LIFE up until that point from its family. 🤯

🧪 #microbiome #science

My latest for @nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Assembly of the infant gut microbiome and resistome are linked to bacterial strains in mother’s milk - Nature Communications Here, with metagenomic analyses on longitudinal samples collected from 195 mother-infant pairs, the authors show that the breast milk microbiome contributes to infant gut assembly through bacterial st...

Breast milk isn't just nutrition – it delivers live bacterial strains that colonize the infant gut and persist for months.

Happy to share our new paper, where we used metagenomics to track bacterial strains between 195 mother-infant pairs over the first 6 months of life:

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

How a cell regulates its size Metabolism, far from being just a housekeeping function, underlies all changes in cell size and function

For many years, the assumption has been that cell size and function are regulated by genes and associated signaling pathways. But a new study reveals that cell size in fact hinges on metabolism—in particular, the fate of a metabolite called pyruvate. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪

Chemical industry to bet on agentic AI Industry insiders expect rise in the adoption of virtual lab assistants

Agentic artificial intelligence, a form of AI capable of making autonomous decisions, is gaining traction in the laboratory and on the factory floor. The chemical industry will increasingly adopt it in 2026. cen.acs.org/physical-che... #chemsky 🧪

A foundational representation for an orchestrated lab Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) promise accelerated scientific discovery and product development by closing the loop between robotic execution and AI/ML-driven decision making. In practice, however, ...

"A foundational representation for an orchestrated lab" | ChemRxiv - doi.org/10.26434/che... This paper tackles workflow representation for #SelfDrivingLabs. We @accelerationc.bsky.social look for feedback from the community to further improve the manuscript, so please reach out with comments.

The more I use these agents (that now do write code that is pretty good, but ofc I need to verify and keep them in check), the more I feel we're going to see the "Microsoft Frontpage" moment in tech:

Frontpage DID make every and all web devs redundant from 2007. As we all know.

The Neo4j GraphRAG for Python package includes a Knowledge Graph Builder to help you convert your unstructured and structured data.

The result: Organized representations of real-world entities and relationships that power better #AI applications.

https://bit.ly/4pRh6iK

Philosophy What we didn't build pi is opinionated about what it won't do. These are intentional design decisions to minimize context bloat and avoid anti-patterns. No MCP. Build CLI tools with READMEs (see Skills). The agent reads them on demand. Would you like to know more? If you must, use mcporter. No sub-agents. Spawn pi instances via tmux, or build your own sub-agent extension. Observability and steerability for you and the agent. No permission popups. Security theater. Run in a container or build your own with Extensions. No plan mode. Gather context in one session, write plans to file, start fresh for implementation. No built-in to-dos. They confuse models. Use a TODO.md file, or build your own with extensions. No background bash. Use tmux. Full observability, direct interaction. Read the blog post for the full rationale.

this looks great actually

check out pi - shittycodingagent.ai

I summarized in a "blog post" (.md on github) my best tips for using agentic coding with Opus in Copilot! It covers:
* How to write agents.md to trigger progressive disclosure
* How to prompt well (if you haven't tried it before)
* An adaptation of the Iterative Adversarial Coding by @dollspace.gay

I replaced Windows with Linux and everything’s going great What, like it’s hard?

I replaced Windows with Linux and everything’s going great

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults in France This cohort study uses the data from all adults aged 18 to 59 years living in France on November 1, 2021, to evaluate whether there is an association of receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine with long-t...

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World Uruguay built a power grid that runs 99% on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. Here’s how its bold energy overhaul became a global model.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

Any chemist friends here? I have a gaseous question:

If you had sulfuric acid in the clouds of a planet, as well as scant water vapor, would the process of dissociation create hydrogen sulfide and thus would it smell like farts?

Just doing some fact checking.

I recently learned this trick for getting images out of a Google Doc, so I wanted to share in case it's useful.

File -> Download -> Web Page. Then unzip, and you've got a nice folder of images!

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, co-founded its behavioural science practice, uncovering “unseen opportunities” in consumer behaviour - often small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make. A former copywriter and creative director, he’s a bestselli Rory Sutherland - Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

Proof is overrated.

This is a brilliant talk by Rory Sutherland: [youtu.be/lhlS-Wds02M...] where he makes two essential points. First, it's a huge problem when "rational" people get veto power over creative, innovative, "irrational" people.
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VSCode IDE forks expose users to "recommended extension" attacks Popular AI-powered integrated development environment solutions, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae, recommend extensions that are non-existent in the OpenVSX registry, allowing th...

If you're using cursor, windsurf, or another VSCode fork with its own LLM… don’t. 😁 www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/securit...

A Dutch worker went viral after explaining to their American boss that they have a life outside work.

Riemannian denoising model for molecular structure optimization with chemical accuracy - Nature Computational Science A denoising model on a Riemannian manifold is developed to better capture molecular energy changes and enable more accurate and robust molecular structure optimization, outperforming conventional Eucl...

📢Out now! Woo Youn Kim and colleagues develop a denoising model for capturing molecular energy changes, enabling more accurate and robust molecular structure optimization. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #chemsky

🔓 rdcu.be/eXG5d