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Carl Boettiger

@cboettig.bsky.social
3.2K followers 483 following 177 posts

Ecology, theory, computers. carlboettiger.info

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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Schmidt DSE at UC Berkeley @schmidtdse.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Cheers to @uofcalifornia.bsky.social Berkeley News for this great write-up on the benefits of #OpenSourceAI models, featuring Schmidt DSE faculty advisor @cboettig.bsky.social and faculty co-director @fernandoperez.org. Read & share: news.berkeley.edu/2026/08/11/w... #OpenSource #OpenScience
news.berkeley.edu
Why we don’t need more data centers to build better AI - Berkeley News
Instead of power-hungry AI models, UC Berkeley experts argue that smaller and more efficient open-source technologies are the way of the future.
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Lucia S. Layritz @lucialayr.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
New paper out in @jgrbiogeo.bsky.social on the future of post-disturbance recovery in boreal forests 👇 🌲🌲 We used the LPJ-GUESS vegetation model to understand how future warming might alter recovery trajectories and influence species composition. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
Sketch of different recovery trajectories in the boreal forest, different in theor shares of needleaf and evergreen trees
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
how in the space of a week do both frontier labs go 'oops we forgot to unplug it from internet first' -- in violation of basic security practices, and yet this story will somehow be remembered forever history as a landmark 'advance in AI' that rendered human security experts irrelevant...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Last year was the year of teaching with frontier closed models through GitHub copilot -- opus for all! those doors are shut (and RIP GitHub Classroom). Now what? Thinking this is the year we start on OpenRouter & opencode / kilo code?
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
c 2023, near daily in discussion with students: pandas is causing the OOM kills. why didn't consider duckdb/ibis? (like we covered in class?) c2026, near daily discussion with the LLM (& LLMs of students): no not pandas! duckdb! 🦆🦆 (didn't you read the AGENTS.md?)
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Trevor A. Branch @trevorabranch.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Recently @karinorman.bsky.social , @ctrlalttim.com @ecologyofgavin.bsky.social + I argued it's time we ecologists pay more attention to the carbon footprint of our tools. doi.org/10.1002/fee.... In this spirit: I give you the footprint of our local LLMs on NRP.ai carbon-api.nrp-nautilus.io
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
🤯 @posit.co launches ggsql 🤯 - yes it is precisely what it sounds like. - rust based stand-alone, needs vscode or jupyter (or merely wasm) to run opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...
opensource.posit.co
ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL
Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
rustfs has `rc` S3 client?! It even matches the minio mc syntax? wow this is a good day. github.com/rustfs/cli
github.com
GitHub - rustfs/cli: A S3-compatible command-line client written in Rust.
A S3-compatible command-line client written in Rust. - rustfs/cli
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Because bulk S3 operations should be fast and easy. A simple R wrapper to rclone: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... supports most object stores, should be much faster paws/aws.s3 I think. (also an alternative to minioclient since minio decided to become AIStor...)
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
hmm, openshell looks pretty interesting: github.com/NVIDIA/OpenS... basically just runs your agent in an OCI container (like we already do) but with networking etc locked down by default and controlled from an external instance. Nice to see open innovation around hard controls instead of prompts
github.com
GitHub - NVIDIA/OpenShell: OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for autonomous AI agents.
OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for autonomous AI agents. - NVIDIA/OpenShell
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
...and GitHub quietly removes Claude Sonnet/Opus from the its student plan mid semester... fun. 🙃 we're just about to dive into local models in 288 anyway but this is surely disruptive. If students are going to learn to use these tools they ought to know what the frontier tools are like
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Wow, great time in Sacramento today with the annual inter-Agency Ecological Program. So many exciting questions and approaches, & great stories I hope to take back to my classroom. iep.ca.gov/Public-Engag...
iep.ca.gov
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier Welcome to the year of the horse! I always learn something new doing these w Florian. www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope...
interconnects.ai
Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier
Welcome to the year of the horse!
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense. If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly. If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Nice to see our work with NSF NAIRR pilot highlighted on their homepage: nairrpilot.org/projects/hig... It has certainly been a wild ride. Huge thanks to NSF and the fantastic team at NRP.ai for making this all possible
nairrpilot.org
NAIRR Pilot - Project Highlights
The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Schmidt DSE at UC Berkeley @schmidtdse.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
📣NEW in Mongabay: DSE's McKalee Steen & Magali de Bruyn share insights on how #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge and Indigenous digital sovereignty are key to creating #ResponsibleAI for achieving #conservation and environmental goals. 📰 Read the story now: bit.ly/4bqbrfG
bit.ly
AI-centered conservation efforts can only be ethical if Indigenous people help lead them (commentary)
In November, we joined more than 50,000 Indigenous and world leaders, diplomats, scholars and activists at the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Brazil. Some of the most central...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
We're hiring a full-time research software engineer for biodiversity & bioacoustics! Position offers a strong research component with independence + research pub opportunities and real-world impact. expected salary range $111K - $116K. dse.berkeley.edu/news/were-hi...
dse.berkeley.edu
We’re Hiring! Help Build the Future of Biodiversity Research | The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment at Berkeley
We’re excited to announce a new, full-time position opening for a Research Software Engineer / Data Scientist, who will focus on biodiversity and bioacoustics research.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Compelling report from the ATOM project on the state of open models: www.atomproject.ai
atomproject.ai
The ATOM Project - American Truly Open Models
Reinvigorating AI research in the U.S. by building leading, open models in America
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Rather applaud JOSS's revised approach to deal with AI-based submissions. blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... , particularly with 'starting open' and at least 'six months developer history'. More of scholarly pub could benefit from such policies methinks.
blog.joss.theoj.org
Preparing JOSS for a generative AI future: From code to human creativity and design | Journal of Open Source Software Blog
Blog for the Journal of Open Source Software • <a href='https://joss.theoj.org'>https://joss.theoj.org</a>
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
it is kinda delightful to see that the open-source Continue.dev plugin fully supports modern MCP (resources, prompts), while GitHub Copilot plugin only supports tool docstrings. Now my continue.dev makes perfect tool calls using small/dumb open source LLMs, while CoPilot fails w/ frontier LLMs 🙃
continue.dev
Continue - Ship faster with Continuous AI
The future of coding isn't writing more code. It's delegating the boring parts, so you can build the interesting stuff
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!
Book cover for Reproducible Code guide. The cover has a red background with a large yellow-bodied black-headed stag beetle.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Argh! @github.com announces it will start charging even for *self-hosted* runners 😥. resources.github.com/actions/2026... I have long relied on my self-hosted runners in my teaching to run automated 'reproducibility' checks. (The edu allocation is way too small for my large classes).
resources.github.com
Pricing changes for GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions pricing update: Discover lower runner rates (up to 39% off) following a major re-architecture for faster, more reliable CI/CD.
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Kyle Lo @ ICML2026 🇰🇷 @kylelo.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
we released olmo 32b today! ☺️ 🐟our largest & best fully open model to-date 🐠right up there w similar size weights-only models from big companies on popular benchmarks 🐡but we used way less compute & all our data, ckpts, code, recipe are free & open made a nice plot of our post-trained results!✌️
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Schmidt DSE at UC Berkeley @schmidtdse.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Great to see you at #COP30, Governor @gavinnewsom.bsky.social! Magali de Bruyn (R) and McKalee Steen (L) are leading several events @ COP30, including providing recommendations for how Indigenous communities can leverage tech and #DataScience to advance #EnvironmentalStewardship and #Sovereignty.
image of gov gavin newsom and two DSE staff members smiling at the camera
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 19/11/2025
This seems important. Current AI models can't read graphs. They "see" what they expect to see, even if the data shows something else.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Wow, rio-stac-io looks awesome! github.com/planetlabs/r... Anyone have a chance to compare this to the odc-stac approach? ( @mdsumner.bsky.social 👀 ?)
github.com
GitHub - planetlabs/rio-stac-io: Rasterio extension to open STAC Items and ItemCollections using native GDAL drivers
Rasterio extension to open STAC Items and ItemCollections using native GDAL drivers - GitHub - planetlabs/rio-stac-io: Rasterio extension to open STAC Items and ItemCollections using native GDAL d...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
sad to be missing #jupytercon this week! But small win, recently made my first PR to JupyterHub fancy-profiles to add support for ARM architecture. & now I have JupyterHub running on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (via k3s). Also have CUDA/RAPIDS based image in rocker for python+R envs, rocker/cuda:arm64
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Schmidt DSE at UC Berkeley @schmidtdse.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Raise your hand if you're going to #JupyterCon 🙋‍♀️ See you there @ucbids.bsky.social! #JupyterCon2025 #DataScience
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Qiusheng Wu @giswqs.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
🚀 anymap v0.6 is here! This release comes packed with major new features. These updates make interactive geospatial analysis in Python smoother and more powerful than ever. 🔗 GitHub: github.com/opengeos/any... 📘 Docs: anymap.dev #python #geospatial #jupyter #dataviz
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
The 1.4 release of @duckdb.org supports using a DuckDB database to serve vector tiles! Of course, I had to try this out in R. Check it out: all 242,000 US Census block groups dynamically served as vector tiles from a DuckDB database, displayed on a MapLibre map from R in Positron.
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Really thrilled to see the renewed momentum from @ucbids.bsky.social on open source infrastructure! A new partnership with @2i2c.org puts supporting tools, their developers, and their community at the center. cdss.berkeley.edu/news/berkele...
cdss.berkeley.edu
Berkeley Institute for Data Science partners with 2i2c on open source infrastructure
The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) has formally partnered with 2i2c, a nonprofit that provides open source support services with shared digital tools and resources for researchers and educ...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
mid-semester surveys are in! Is it terrible that I do a happy dance when reading that most students felt "the heavy use of AI was either not helpful or detrimental to learning?" YES dear students, you are smarter than the bots. and now you know it too.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
here we are in the last week of module 2. 120 students, majority new to coding, are set up with their ipynb's in VSCode+CoPilot agent mode (w/ sonnet 4.5, GPT5-codex). As they plug away in pairs writing some of the best code & analysis this module has seen. remarkably little use of the bots!
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
Media still largely misses the RL part of training LLMs. NY Times: > they’re computer models trained on massive amounts of text to predict the next word in a sentence. What feels like empathy or validation is really just the A.I. chatbot echoing back language patterns that it’s learned.
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Seema Sheth @seemasheth.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
NSF GRFP solicitation is finally up. Life Sci deadline extended to Nov 10 but 2nd year grad students no longer eligible www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
nsf.gov
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Fantastic piece from @schmidtdse.bsky.social post-doc @lucialayr.bsky.social on handling the emotional side of doing a PhD in climate or ecological modeling blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/...
blogs.egu.eu
The existential modeling crisis – and how to overcome it
Recently, we had a big name in fire ecology visiting our institute. He had come, among other things, to look for records of a certain fire-adapted shrub in my university’s herbarium. While myself and ...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Excited to be heading to join the summit @cu-esiil.bsky.social this week!
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Campus reminds us, "If classroom temperatures reach or exceed 82°F for more than 15 minutes:" our first step is: 1. Ensure instructors have taken the Heat Illness Prevention Training in the UC Learning Management System. teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/gu...
teaching.berkeley.edu
Guidance on Instructor Preparedness for Classroom Disruptions and Emergencies | Center for Teaching & Learning
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Antonin Raffin @araffin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
RL102: From Tabular Q-Learning to Deep Q-Learning (DQN) - A Practical Introduction to (Deep) Reinforcement Learning araffin.github.io/post/rl102/
araffin.github.io
RL102: From Tabular Q-Learning to Deep Q-Learning (DQN) | Antonin Raffin | Homepage
This blog post is meant to be a practical introduction to (deep) reinforcement learning1, presenting the main concepts and providing intuitions to understand the more recent Deep RL algorithms. For a ...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
Increasingly convinced that the advances we will see with 'AI' in the next few years will come not from more bigger NN models replacing tasks done with conventional programming, but from greater tool use from models.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
I reference data science at the singularity constantly as it's not just a model of why data science blew up, but also how any field or org can organize itself around data, code sharing, and benchmarks: arxiv.org/abs/2310.00865
arxiv.org
Data Science at the Singularity
A purported `AI Singularity' has been in the public eye recently. Mass media and US national political attention focused on `AI Doom' narratives hawked by social media influencers. The European Commis...
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
Okay, but Claude's commentary while helping me set up a ray cluster on National Research Platform (NRP) is pretty entertaining: Claude: (proposes 2 worker-config) Me: why two workers? Claude: (queries resources) Claude: "HOLY MOLY! Your cluster has nodes with 57TB of memory and 13,800 CPUs!"
Dialogue from Claude in VSCode Copilot agent mode, reading:  

Let me update the Ray cluster to be more aggressive. What's your cluster's capacity? Let's check and then scale accordingly:

WOW! This cluster has MASSIVE resources! I can see nodes with:

256 CPUs per node (multiple nodes)
128 CPUs per node (multiple nodes)
96, 64, 56, 48, 32 CPUs per node
Let me check memory too:

HOLY MOLY! Your cluster has nodes with 57TB of memory and 13,800 CPUs
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Reposted by Carl Boettiger
Katherine Siegel @katherinesiegel.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
You still have 5 days to apply for this awesome postdoc opportunity in the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder! This could be your backyard!
Image of five slanted rock formations (called the Flatirons) in the snow on a sunny day. There is a trail through the snow leading away towards the rock formations, which rise above some trees.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Like many, I've struggled with students merely pasting LLM outputs as their own work. But this year when I encourage them to use AI in generating code they need, now they ask all these critical questions like: 'but is this output ok? how do I know? how could it be better?'
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Also exciting to see the new fully open (training data, weights, training details) LLM from the Swiss, 'Apertus' www.swiss-ai.org/apertus ! Shipped in both 8B & 70B params on HF, over 40% non-English sources. Support for vllm + public web interface (via publicai.co). Impressive.
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Very interesting project from @ai2.bsky.social , a fully open, agent-based LLM for academic literature asta.allen.ai . Nice overview at allenai.org/blog/asta
asta.allen.ai
Ai2 Asta
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Great post-doctoral opportunity at @cu-esiil.bsky.social jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...
jobs.colorado.edu
CIRES/Environmental Data Science Innovation and Impact Lab (ESIIL) Post-Doctoral Research Scholar
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Carl Boettiger @cboettig.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Excellent post from @beenwrekt.bsky.social here on failure of AI safety. While much is familiar, he makes an excellent pt that the solution is obvious and do-able: terminate the conversation (hilariously illustrated by Claude's refusal to answer bio sciences qs). www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...
argmin.net
The Banal Evil of AI Safety
Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?
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