Jeffrey Barrett

The US CDC warning people not to come to Europe because of infectious disease risk is pretty rich

I was thinking maybe the 🐊 jokes were stale, but then again this is the second story on the local page of the Sydney Morning Herald

In London you mind the gap, but in Sydney you BEWARE it because of the metro crocs. 🐊

At first I just assumed this was in the lab but then I looked again at the photo, and do you have this robot arm in your house???

arnold schwarzenegger is holding a robotic arm in front of his face ALT: arnold schwarzenegger is holding a robotic arm in front of his face

Luckily we are not here yet.

😂 I definitely should’ve hyphenated “weird-ass”

Completed my decennial ritual of looking up the weird ass plug they use in Australia.🐨

He was so mad they tried to fade him out twice it was brilliant.

It was a belter of a deviation from the usual anodyne pol interview on Today!

We should use the opportunity to get rid of our bad habits (scientific innovation living in loose scripts), because codex/claudecode are way better developers than most scientists, so we can have it all, great science and good dev practices!

I’m gonna take up smoking so I have something to do while I wait for the reset

I think of these tasks when people are adamantly anti-AI in research. This task before was the academic equivalent of processing grain before the invention of the thresher. Nobody will mourn the loss of this type of work.

Plus 1000 calories worth of mayonnaise each

Illumina Constellation Becomes TruePath Genome

#AGBTGM26

🧬🖥️

omicsomics.blogspot.com/2026/02/illu...

Snippet of a chat expressing that Claude Code is a big deal

My day is summed up by this exchange with @dgmacarthur.bsky.social

Into my eyes, not around the eyes, into the eyes, and you’re under.

And personally I don't think it is healthy for democracy if all the other discourse is "only we can beat the monsters and that guy's a wally" rather than principled discussion of things that matter like foreign and drug policy, where it's perfectly possible for reasonable people to disagree.

I gave up on hard math in my undergrad degree because it didn't come naturally, and I didn't understand that working through the problem sets was the way to get better. And now it's so much harder for a student to push through that feeling, because the magic answer machine is always there.

Either way, the quoted figure is misleading. The article states that the lion’s share of the absolute number increase in “low performing” companies is due to a 70% increase in the total number of companies.

This is either a nonsense analysis or very poorly explained: in any year precisely 25% of firms are below the 25th percentile of anything. The article cites BCG analysis…could it be a report written by AI?

This article was helpful for me as I try to get my bearings about what’s been happening in AI world in the past 3 months. It called out a testable prediction from one of the xAI evangelists, which is a helpful anchor to use when evaluating vaguer statements. 80 days to go.

apod.383110846.bin

#apod 2026-02-21
Twilight with Moon and Planets
Image Credit: Tunc Tezel
Web page: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260221.html

Painting featuring a sitting tortoiseshell cat facing right against a beige wall which reflects it's shadow

Study of a Cat, c.1909 by Welsh born painter Gwen John #WomensArt

I admire your commitment to good coffee in the woods! Also one of my favorite hiking pastimes. (Though I always go straight for gas — totally allowed in my book!)

The “denying present state of affairs” is totally analogous. Anyone still shouting about “intelligent autocorrect” in 2026 is in the same camp as saying hurricanes and forest fires aren’t any more common than they used to be.

I think your point about the risks of denialism is well taken, but I’m not sure they are totally analogous. Climate change is a matter of physics, whereas it seems possible that transformers will hit a limit somewhere. (Maybe that’s just my hopium)

Was sitting by this fireplace listening to a family speaking what I thought was a very Savo-accented Finnish, but turned out to be Estonian 🇪🇪 😂 cc: @kauralasoo.bsky.social

Waterfall, Lake District, painting by Julia Borodina. Based in west Yorkshire, born in western Siberia