Philipp Bayer

News that our landlord wants to sell the house. I can't afford to buy it, obviously. Every crisis is an opportunity but I'm sick of all those opportunities

25 years. Countless discoveries. And even bigger questions ahead. Our new Annual Insights 2025-26 report is now live. Read the full report and discover how we're helping compute Australia's future: annualreport.pawsey.org.au #HPC #Supercomputing #AustralianScience #Quantum #SovereignCompute

Just remembered I wrote exactly one (1) German Wikipedia article about an obscure Japanese movie 20 (!!!) years ago - just had a look, it's still there, still largely unchanged, mostly bot-driven changes over the years. I think the movie is too obscure for the editors to find and delete it. Yay

Their private key was the number 4???? ????????

Even *starting* with a 5 year grant is unheard of here in Australia

📢The Australian Fish Genomics Initiative, supported by @BioplatformsAus & @minderoo, seeks partnerships to generate referential molecular data to advance knowledge of Australia’s 🐟 species & support critical research-management strategies - closes 13/11 bioplatforms.com/australian-f...

Many Japanese Edo period dramas are filmed in outdoors stylised villages. You can often see recent invasive plants - I see you, very obvious Tall Goldenrod, ornamental plant from North America, introduced about 200 years after the events surrounding you

Going to invent a new git that doesn't track differences across files by rows, but by column instead. Let's call it g i t

Easy to make fun of, but the exact same mindset that for decades has been saying "we dont need to change our way of life, technological developments will fix climate change"

Bluesky is all millenialls (or at least my follows are) because I haven't seen a single 'scrib doon!!!' in my TL

Have you ever looked at a gene in IGV or a genome browser and wondered “What are all those (ATAC-seq/H3K27ac/CTCF ChIP-seq/…) peaks doing?” 🤔 I’m thrilled to share that we developed a new technology called Swap-seq to answer that exact question. Swap-seq: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

They announced the literature Nobel and for once i have read a book of theirs before

Most vertebrate diversity can be found in only a handful of #eDNA samples. Fun to see this preprint out from our work with community scientists to characterize backyard biodiversity in some local SoCal MPAs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Australia's research funder is trialling a partial lottery for their new high risk, high reward grant scheme. Details are yet to come, but it'll be interesting to see how this changes the national funding landscape. 🧪 #ecology #research

Booksale! Booksale!! Another success

Was wondering how much UWA's executive layer had grown in the last 10 years and had an LLM try to piece together the numbers - from 4 pro-chancellors to 9 PVCs in 10 years. Sporting! At the same time, rankings went up, so UWA will be Nr. 1 uni in the world at about 18 PVCs....

New Opus is out and immediately refuses to work on my repos, time to get whitelisted. Seems like security theatre

Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What if mathematics is pretty because the mathematicians only look for pretty proofs. What if the upcoming swarms of LLMs find all the ugly theorems and ugly proofs. What if mathematics is just really ugly its just nobody ever looked

This is such a joy to read; after spending all week drowning in AI slop from left and right, just wonderful to read short, honest, funny, beautiful sentenced again

I grew up being told that the world was my oyster but I've yet to see the thing open

My faculty is advertising a tenured open-call #cropscience / #plantscience professorship linked to the PhenoRob Excellence Cluster at Uni Bonn, Germany - apply until 30th Sep :) www.uni-bonn.de/de/universit...

Seeing the scienceblogs.de comment section quoted in a 'AI solves old riddle' post gives me the strangest flashbacks

Every iteration of frontier LLMs writes worse English. I see Opus sentences so random, they may as well have come from a Hidden Markov Model. Structurally sound nonsense

What if the accelerationists were right after all

For anyone not following the drama, there's been apparently a big development in ai math, along with some accusations of very bad behavior by OpenAI. But we don't have details yet. If I understand it, Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge made a big discovery on Navier-Stokes. Events go something like this:

Another week of typing things into Claude Code, then reading what it says, then accepting, then typing in more things

Another week, another "university underpays staff by millions" scandal thewest.com.au/news/educati...

Last year, I publicly complained multiple times (see e.g. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...) that the open access movement had been captured by publishers, and we are now worse off than before open access. Well people got mad at me for saying it. But I think things are still getting worse.

I'm really frustrated by the constant fear-mongering about AI-designed superviruses. Can we focus on the things that should actually worry us, such as measles? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...

I am in the process of becoming the worst version of myself. That's an accomplishment

Today I learned that the many ensembl transcripts per human gene aren't really linked to the isoforms on Uniprot - even if you translate the transcripts chances are, most won't fit a Uniprot isoform. How strange!

Outside ot the US, postdocs are regular staff. It's always interesting to see Americans justify their unusual ways to themselves

This was a difficult blog post to write, but an important one. With the impending reduction in Core Team capacity, we had to make tough decisions about what work we put down. [1/4]

This is such a delightful talk - what an energy! youtu.be/656058JxTM0?... His book on how he traced the hacks in 1986, The Cuckoo's Egg, is one of my favorite books

I have watched the German remake of IT Crowd and it's exactly like what it sounds like (never made it past the pilot)

The Carpentries Executive Director @drkariljordan.carpentries.org and Associate Director @erinstellabecker.bsky.social will step down on 1 September 2026. Dr. SherAaron Hurt will serve as Interim Executive Director for a 6-month term from 2 Sept. Full announcement: carpentries.org/blog/2026/08...

Zhang et al. generate the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved nuclear genome assembly for any Australian terrestrial orchid 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #societyjournal #genome #evolution

Now that LLMs can write decent-ish, average-ish papers and journals are getting flooded with submissions, can we finally move beyond judging researchers by research output? No? Ah, thought so

If you're a biologist, especially one in a field that has a history of eugenics and racism (which absolutely includes my own field of evolutionary biology) and you choose to remain "neutral" as race science once again crawls out from under its rock, you are not in fact neutral.

Book sale! Book sale!!!!

The newest Positron finally has in-line figures in Quarto documents!!!! No more blind describing of figures that render somewhere else Seems simple to display some figures but knowing computers, probably took a ridiculous amount of work