iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Oooh I love the idea of typst but have stuck with LaTeX due to inertia/higher odds of finding a solution to any obscure problem, this may compel me to switch over more fully

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

one of those is fixable 👀 and mpls has good bike infrastructure i hear

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

ooh i have thoughts here i will come back to this in a day or two; tldr i agree it's kinda weird but there's also a lot more earnestness than equivalent shy bollywood men (immediate comparison i thought of was jab we met) + this gets combined w the usual bollywood hyperrealism

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

That and they had to montage too much, sometimes they'll do several hours of gameplay in a 30s montage. Wonder if there's anything game design side that could've helped that

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

yeah I have been on both sides of the academic "do as I say not as I do" for balance/reasonable work hours, and I'm really hoping to learn to actually change instead of just saying it'd be nice if I could change

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

yes! Also I believe coding is thinking and the extent to which coding is thinking often goes vastly underappreciated by later career researchers

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

(Also wonder if following up just fell off his radar not that he didn't like it)

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Ooh I have a Cliff Stoll Klein bottle! He gave it to me for free because he said there was a defect so would've felt bad charging for it, but I've never been able to see the defect myself

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

did you know you can just bike around a lake

Strava log of a bike ride around all of Lake Tahoe entitled America's Most Mutable Bike Ride, where the distance is 118.05km

wide shot of Lake Tahoe with trees and a house in the foreground

shot of a small creek from a bridge with trees on either side

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

...yeah it hits and I know it shouldn't. I think this speaks to the kinds of people who are motivated to go into academia

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Reposted by Aditya Sengupta

Caity Weaver @caity.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

MAJOR UPDATE: I found the best free restaurant bread in the United States www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

theatlantic.com

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

I think I missed most of the Lamat awardees! I'll have to read the list more closely

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

last year I co-led a project where we built a solar telescope and to make sure we got the size right without risking our eyes we tested it on the moon! (Green from an iron-line filter)

A picture of the moon that's green, through a telescope, with lights out of focus in the background

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

i think i just read this as well and, yeah that didn't sit well in multiple ways. A bunch of motivated reasoning

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Reposted by Aditya Sengupta

Cliff PervoSCARY @pervocracy.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

astronomy is so funny because it's this fairly niche interest for a small community of nerds and also it's 99.9999% of everything that exists

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

i once wrote a solver that only used human-parseable steps, but on some puzzles it just got stuck and I wrapped it in a recursive call of "guess, does this lead to a solution, if not make the other guess". That seemed to always work with depth=3 but also idk if I just missed some human strategies

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

I used to do sum(map(ord, "fun phrase of the day"))

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Ooh can you post these? I read latex easier than a thread

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

i think this is basically always the case in astronomy research

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

have revised this take: i think i was underrating how much intuition building happens as part of the process of writing science code. Claude can get to many subproblem answers faster than I can but I end up feeling hollow - missing a sense of satisfaction I didn't know I had till it was gone

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Also without models that are more local/without the huge environmental footprint/without being locked to the big ai companies. I hope we see democratization of LLMs so we can make narrowly scoped tools that actually work/have guardrails and the hype can end

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I think the aspiration of pro AI people is to push up the abstraction barrier so you don't have to know code specifics, in the way that many scientists now don't need to know low level computer architecture unlike a few decades prior. But you can't get there without reproducibility

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Yep fully agree; I was imagining this at the grad student+ level. I think earlier on you'll be totally lost if you don't hand write it all yourself

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

aditya-sengupta.github.io/vibescience/ I also think you will learn a lot by writing some things by hand, but I could imagine that doesn't always apply. But for research integrity I think you do always have to do your vetting by hand no matter how you got the code

aditya-sengupta.github.io

The Impending Rise of Vibe Science

LLM-based programming is tempting for science because people mostly want to spend their time thinking about the problem they’re interested in, rather than writing code. This isn’t helped by the narrat...

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

ok I have a take here: i don't inherently mind ai generated code if it moves the person's focus to writing tests/sanity checking, because that should be happening for human written code too and is arguably where the physics is. But you do have to actually do the checks, and lots of ai users don't

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I have literally said things like this to my friends and I go on walks so I can completely understand things!

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Our prospective students are flying out here today, I think the Northeast ones are just barely going to make it but who knows

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

As a grad student who's recently taught a class for first-year grads I really like the section on focusing on learning over just producing work! I think a grad costs ~as much as a postdoc, and is bound to produce less, but it's worth it for our learning - it's nice to see the field-wide view of that

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

it's basically this but you'll also get like an arrow pointing left/down saying we want to go here

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I just got done with spirit of lyot and the number of times I saw either this or the hr8799 video, people were apologizing for still doing it by the end

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

I like reading blog posts or latex docs more personally! But would ultimately read whatever format

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

The most charitable read I've got is "we had opportunities/advantages you didn't, so you should go easier on yourself" but even then it's really poorly expressed

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

My paper demonstrating second-stage wavefront control using a photonic lantern at the Shane 3m telescope at Lick Observatory has been published in the Astronomical Journal! Good start to the year! doi.org/10.3847/1538... via @ioppublishing.bsky.social

The title and author list of the linked paper, "On-sky Demonstration of Second-stage Wave-front Control with a Photonic Lantern"

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Omg literally something I said the other day thinking about how to teach/do research now. I've felt so bad that I can't resolve these conflicts so this helps

The more these scenarios come up the more I realize my position is incoherent - i know there must be a concrete opinion that broadly agrees with my gut sense of "I don't trust it but maybe that's okay for some stuff" and captures all the nuances and fully guides how we should teach and learn and invent stuff, but I'm not there yet

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

as someone who may not be a researcher if not for prof layton this is so sad but also, not clear to me if this is more like "we should let ai write the layton puzzles" or "we should write the game in cursor instead of vscode" - even when specified to genai we seem to have terminology issues

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Minute Cryptic - 25 December, 2025 "Christmas now?" (7,3) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 3 under the community par (38,328 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com?utm_source=s...

minutecryptic.com

Minute Cryptic

Solve a clue with a hidden meaning

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

holmes, columbo, poirot are all exactly this! feels like very normal for anything episodic/serialized

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Fair enough but I also don't think knowing physics is a 0/1 thing! There may be (always is) more to learn but dividing up time into small intervals and looking at whether events occur in them + knowing that that approach can describe physical phenomena does count as knowing some part of physics

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

i think this totally counts as knowing physics tbh!

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

yeah I think that's my take on the whole album lmao

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

i fully forgot this album had a song called The World's First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

look sometimes you like an album for no other reason than that it came out in your freshman year of college and that's *fine*

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

wrote some custom curses for jet lag hide and seek on bikes in Santa Cruz!

Six playing cards with curses written on them, each describing something seekers have to do in a game of hide and seek: (1) find a surfboard, wetsuit, or boat (2) walk your bike (3) lock your bike at a legitimate parking rack (4) have your gear chosen by the hider (5) visit a local chain business (6) ask a question from a street without lights

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Aditya Sengupta @adiastra.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Honestly yeah I've made the US train experience work surprisingly well but there's almost never a coffee/sandwich option within a "can go and come back in time for the next train" radius

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