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Brandon Hacha

@brandonhacha.bsky.social
294 followers 183 following 2.2K posts

(HACK-uh) Posts are my thoughts, which means at least half of them are about The Boss. Postdoc at UW-Madison studying topological photonics I’m essentially a physicist with the fun and charisma of a chemist. And an ego obviously of a physicist.

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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
AI on social media has a weird voice that uses a lot of words for very little content. “Those bots are weird! Good thing they repeated themselves or they’d sound like real people!”
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Kinda disrespectful to steal that from Sam Hinkie’s 76ers
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Donna Strickland’s situation was quite different though, because she hadn’t applied for the promotion to full professor.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
And, like, I’m sure the worst-case scenario is quite mundane for basic things like using it as fancy Google, but I don’t want to have high-level “conversations” with a tool marketed as someday replacing me!
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I agree with this completely. I think if AI was less “knowledgeable” but only trained from (legally) publicly accessible data then I would feel much better about tinkering around with exploring them for my own work. But there’s just a very large “shady tech company” barrier.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I’m becoming increasingly conflicted by my personal views of AI. I don’t use them right now because I feel like they’re marketed as human-replacing mental-atrophy tools, but I also increasingly think that there are good use cases for me that can make my life easier. Maybe I’m just an AI elitist.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I’m looking for optics/photonics postdoc positions and whenever I see a cool paper I can’t help but think that we’re getting our lunch eaten by China
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The first time, I never got my wallet back but somebody returned all of the contents about a year later. This most recent time, somebody returned the wallet to a bar and I got everything except the cash back. Idk what to make of this. Keep cash as an incentive?
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I’ve lost my wallet twice in my 7+ years in Madison, both times on the bus. The first time was ~3 months after I moved here and the second time is ~3 months before I leave. How strange.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
(They’re saying the same thing)
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(I actually think it’s stupid, but I do support ensuring that TSA officers understand that the president is not on their side)
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is cruel and hostile to TSA officers, which is why I support it.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I agree with the bottom line here (“vaping is bad for children and governments should do more to regulate it”) but I don’t buy the implied argument that the vaping is the cause of the mental issues as opposed to the other way around.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Full disclosure: I started skimming this after the intro and missed the part where Henry Dyson at UMich was also suspicious of the lack of Wikipedia pages.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I can’t imaging going through the “press release” part of the process before the “what is this organization” part.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Tbh, I’m baffled by people who don’t do cursory Wikipedia searches for organizations like this. None of the three societies in the first paragraph have a Wikipedia article.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
After I defended, my advisor’s toast mentioned the sheer amount of literature I’m able to stay atop of. The secret is just RSS feeds. They’re great and I’m trying to involve them more in my news habits too.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I’m wearing a black turtleneck today and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about Elizabeth Holmes (SFW). I think it’s important to distinguish “this isn’t possible yet” from “this isn’t possible” and I, perhaps naïvely, believe the former.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
If you are going to get into python for scientific applications, use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and miniconda. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. You can probably save 2-3 hours per year using a different tool, but it’s also probably not worth the risk of needing to migrate later.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I know that for Python programming everyone loves UV now, but as a scientific programmer I find it sort of annoying how many people hate on miniconda/micromamba. You only think UV is a competitor because you haven’t used all the conda features (i.e. non-Python dependencies)
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Reposted by Brandon Hacha
David S. Bernstein @dbernstein.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
To stop the scourge of homecoming vandalism, police will now implement toilet paper buyback programs
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Damn, now I have to compete against this guy for a postdoc position?? Leave me alone, RFK Jr!
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
It’s very funny to me that we’re doing horseshoe theory about “effective altruism”
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
My personal opinion is that a rogue AI will kill many people in the next few years in somewhat indirect ways like via malware in critical infrastructure or bypassing safeguards in industrial control software. I think it would be better if we came up with some regulations before that happens.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I am always an advocate of skepticism, especially about wild claims of AI capabilities. That said, I think it’s probably beneficial if people believe that AI is an *imminent* threat that needs to be addressed. Lord knows we won’t do anything about long-term threats (see: global warming)
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I think there’s a great amount of regulation-addressable space between “the self-aware computer systems will kill us all” and the current situation with AI, which I view as akin to someone testing bombs in their cul-de-sac or throwing toxic waste in the river.
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Andre the Chemist @andrechemist.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Other delusions notwithstanding, big second-year grad student energy here: "I had five reactions that worked this week! At this rate I'll have enough for a paper by the end of the month and be able to defend in a year, year and a half tops."
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Karsten Konrad 🇪🇺 @zabong69.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
As a former researcher on automated reasoning systems and NLP machine learning algorithms, I am very grateful to the Bsky community for clarifying my various misunderstandings about reasoning and the capabilities of NLP machine learning algorithms.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
In other hot takes: I have no opinion about the “true” result of the Michigan-Michigan State game and think this is a great example of the power behind survey-based rankings in sports.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
If your response to the idea of AI threats is “just unplug it”, I think you should probably spend a day paying attention to all of the computer systems you access
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I consider myself a rather strong anti-AI person but some people on here sound absolutely clueless about the capabilities (positive and negative) yet have very confident opinions.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Richard Ebright is hiring a postdoc in case anybody feels like they’re surrounded by too many sane people in their academic work
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Wow the internet still loves that Harvard Dialect survey from 25+ years ago
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Because let me tell you, that 1A lawsuit would bring this story to a whole new level
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
“No graduate students were authorized to speak to journalists, but C&EN saw that chemists were back to work in the building on Aug. 31.” I have to assume that we’d know a lot more about this incident if it happened at a public university.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
With absolutely no additional information than what’s in this article, I kinda feel like the last one is a strong possibility. “I spilled this mixture, could it have made dimethylmercury?” followed by a panic spiral about the almost-assured death it would imply.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Yeah, Derek questions “why they seem to have thought that they needed to synthesize dimethylmercury” but even that’s an assumption. It could easily be a “I was working with a mercury and got scared that I made dimethylmercury by accident”. The “accidental exposure” panic is a strong feeling.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
You can even scroll through the @democrats.org profile to find 0 Hasan Piker attacks and several ICE ones.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
There are 250+ nationally relevant Democratic politicians and, no, I don’t think 5-10 of their social media posting topics is a reliable metric for the focus of the party. If you believe that, it’s because you’re spending too much time online and it’s rotting your brain.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This is all self-sustaining nonsense and it’s exhausting. Hasan has campaigned with Democrats, so when he says something controversial they post tweets saying “we don’t agree with this guy” and then everyone keeps the issue alive by complaining about it
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Nature Comms has fixed this now and I fully endorse the idea. The papers are comfortably readable and that’s all I cared about.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I don’t have a real solution, but one thing I’ve learned from Republicans is that the material effects of opposition are way less important than the self-reinforcing belief that the opposition is productive. If more people believe it, it becomes more powerful, like a political Santa Claus.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
If Democrats were willing to abandon SNAP/WIC recipients (which they absolutely shouldn’t), they could mount a much stronger oppositional role. But taking hostages by shutting down the government *hurts people* and the lopsided media apparatus would never let that fly for Democrats
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Democrats+ don’t want to become a party of throwing people under the bus and lying to them about it, which is good, but that locks out the entire GOP playbook (which is just taking legislation hostage and stopping everything from happening).
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Many, many people on the left fall for the illusion that the GOP is filled with legislative geniuses who would be doing something differently if the roles were reversed. That’s not true! They just have Fox News!
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
And yet Obama was never impeached. “Making noise” is no different than writing letters.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Part of my contrarianism about “data centers” is that the arguments against them sound extremely similar to the ones I keep hearing about solar on farmland from people in my hometown
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
FWIW, the old ACS logo is still slated for use in awards and “ceremonial” roles and I can’t imagine anything more ceremonially important than Prof. Molenium’s lab coat
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
I give Beshear a pass because he at least has to pretend that he’s concerned about Kentuckians having less representation in the Senate. Everyone else though? I think you’re just mad at perceived Democrat inaction for the sake of being mad.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
FYI: while Beshear and (bizarrely) Democratic voters keep talking about replacing Mitch McConnell, his absence is already helping Democrats. There’s no rush!
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