Rob Patro
Rob Patro
@robp.bsky.social
Professor of CS @ University of Maryland. Proud Rust advocate! I ♥ science & compiled, statically-typed programming languages! Views are my own. Tech stack: https://github.com/rob-p/tech-stack.
4.4K followers562 following3.4K posts
Rob Patro reposted
“Professor, I’m not sure I recognize this dialect. Is it redditor?” “No, but you’re close. 21st century, yes. It’s late-web AI denialist. Like redditor, AI denialist was consumed with shibboleths and catechisms. But instead of narwhals and bacon, it’s parrots and plagiarism machines.”
People are really out here posting unhinged Zitronslop under their real names
Because the same mentality that leads you to ban all AI assisted content, regardless of what it is, leads you to ban non-english posts. This is who the people are who align with their tribe and refuse to think.
r/opensource banning non-english speakers because "we can't tell the difference between ai slop and ai translation" is... uh... yeah. a choice.
Rob Patro reposted
Rob Patro reposted
"How do we kill vibe coding and AI slop?" Vibe coding and AI slop are bad. Applying these terms dishonestly or lazily is also bad (though not in the same way). combine-lab.github.io/blog/2026/10...
Rob Patro reposted
Oh and the headline is 26-83x faster than minimap2 for transcriptome mapping (we're not doing spliced genomic mapping yet) with memory usage ~2.1G and similar accuracy (and equal or better quant so far). Feeling cute; may even eek out a little bit more before the preprint.
👀 — new fast long read transcriptome mapper, who dis? crates.io/crates/spear... Lots more details to come, but there are some docs in the meantime: combine-lab.github.io/spearfish/ Oarfish support incoming.
Dear #bioconda maintainers; I’d appreciate a merge when you have a chance! github.com/bioconda/bio...
👀 — new fast long read transcriptome mapper, who dis? crates.io/crates/spear... Lots more details to come, but there are some docs in the meantime: combine-lab.github.io/spearfish/ Oarfish support incoming.
👀 — new fast long read transcriptome mapper, who dis? crates.io/crates/spear... Lots more details to come, but there are some docs in the meantime: combine-lab.github.io/spearfish/ Oarfish support incoming.
Yes. Reviewers should stop including benchmarks with the nvidia RTX5090. For all intents and purposes, it is no longer a consumer gaming GPU and so doesn’t belong in consumer gaming benchmarks. youtu.be/ZgyL-6jLEwo?...
The Presidential postdoc program at UMD is accepting applications through Nov. 1. If you are a US citizen or permanent resident, please consider applying. If you're interested in working with my lab through this opportunity, let me know! faculty.umd.edu/presidentspo...
It turns out that the polynomial 2-OPT approximation to SCS released a few weeks ago by OpenAI can actually be made quite efficient in practice. I have an implementation here github.com/rob-p/practi.... It would be interesting to see if there's a well-known instance set to measure on.
While people are discussing the hazards of AI generated content on arXiv... arxiv.org/abs/2610.29766
Uhhhh @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, are you OK? Does this have anything to do with 4?
This article is making the rounds, and it's good to have a discussion on this topic. Number 2, in particular, seems a very tenuous and suspicious claim. I don't see why it would hold true, and it certainly doesn't seem justified.
Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be. Large language models can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill. But evidence from neuroscience suggests that intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience. | Nature www.nature.com/articles/d41...
My department (UMD Computer Science) is hiring! If you're on the market, you should apply. LMK if you have any questions not answered in the ad. umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/d...
Rob Patro reposted
Turns out the order of your scRNA-seq QC pipeline matters more than we thought: removing ambient RNA before doublet detection can reduce doublet detection performance! Our new paper from the amazing PhD student @michellemeier.bsky.social
Order Matters: Ambient RNA correction confounds doublet detection in single-cell RNA sequencing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.13.758369v1
New journal idea just dropped: "Journal *actually for* Computational Biology" Premise, we should let people actually access the articles and read them, even if they are *only* 31 years old.
A New Algorithm for DNA Sequence Assembly by Idury and Waterman is still in restricted access behind a paywall. Published in nineteen effing ninety five. Seriously is this the Journal of Computational Biology or the Journal Against Computational Biology.
Rob Patro reposted
Order Matters: Ambient RNA correction confounds doublet detection in single-cell RNA sequencing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.13.758369v1
Sony & their pro DRM nonsense represent the worst of enshittification. I hope the jailbreak community is successful in cracking open their platform, and allowing people to fully use the hardware they bought at great cost Sony blocks PSN access for unupdated PS5s share.google/rVhOp9SpxPQM...
I agree with Stephen on the main point here. I think there may even be reasons to go even further, but certainly, as a practical matter, I don't think such disclosures are long for this world. I also think they have some coherence problems from first principles.
Personal essay, weekend edition: I’m Skeptical of AI Disclosures blog.stephenturner.us/p/ai-disclos...
What’s so nice about this is that it’s like an independent, better, and more generic version of the CellRanger chemistry auto detection. This is also your semi-regular reminder that CellRanger is behind a laughably absurd and aggressive license, and obvioulsy works only on 10x chemistries.
This looks very cool! github.com/Tussl-Co/Tus...
Rob Patro reposted
💥 You asked. RAW Lab delivered. DYNAMITE-ORFs v1.1.0 🧬 ✅ Prodigal gap controls ✅ Gene-calling fixes ⚡ E. coli auto mode: 20.6 → 9.2s in our benchmark Messy genomes. Meet DYNAMITE. crates.io/crates/dynam... #Bioinformatics #Rust
This looks very cool! github.com/Tussl-Co/Tus...
Rob Patro reposted
Must-see new tool from me and Alex! I hurt my back a few weeks ago and was confined to the couch. I used my "break" to play around with webassembly and ended up vibe-coding an AMAZING interactive dotplotter. Passed my prototype to Alex to clean up and extend. Check out his release thread!
Excited to announce ModDotPlot Browser! A interactive genomic dotplot viewer that runs entirely in a web browser. Load and explore whole chromosomes in seconds! Try it here: marbl.github.io/ModDotPlot-B... User guide: github.com/marbl/ModDot... 1/4