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Dan MacLean

@danmaclean.bsky.social
175 followers 575 following 83 posts

Head of Bioinformatics at The Sainsbury Laboratory, Hon Professor UEA Computer Science. Likes genomics, stats, proteomics, bioinformatics, R user, Python wrangler. Wiganer.

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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Maybe! It's a good idea! I just try and make sure I'm doing the bits I like as much as I can and that helps.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I think something similar. I think it stems from suddenly becoming an editor and reviewer and not a creator so much. Doesn't matter so much for home projects and mine in any case are small enough to be easy to review and dont take up so much headspace.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
The Metropolitan Borough Council Strikes Back
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Make a band bigger: The Hercules Beatles
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I guess. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Amateur Norfolk gardener wins prize at topiary awards
Paul Everden says creating his 17th Century-style masterpiece was "just fun in the moment".
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Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
“I got Claude Fable to do this analysis and write this paper. I’m posting it here, but I haven’t checked it yet.” WELL CHECK IT THEN. WHY ARE YOU POSTING THINGS YOU CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I delete almost every post I write.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Post a perfect album from the 90’s that isn’t Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice In Chains
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
😆 This was my question also!
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Mick @mick002.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Fucking bluesky intelligencia wanking each other off while criticising the crowds at the football singing "Wonderwall". It's not about the song, it's about shared joy & social cohesion. Having travelled thousands of miles to support the team, they can sing whatever they want. Good luck to them.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/
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Karsten Konrad 🇪🇺 @zabong69.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
The fractal Mandelbrot set is sometimes called "Apfelmännchen" ("little apple man") in German. My local Gemma 4 model and I clearly had a misunderstanding when I asked it - in German - to write Python code that draws a Mandelbrot set.
Apfelmännchen
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Jordan Harper @jordanharper.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
How long is a million seconds? ​

First, let me ask you a question: How long do you think a million seconds is? In terms of days, weeks, years, decades, or whatever.

Turns out it's 11.5 days. That's it. Less than two weeks.
How long is a billion seconds? ​

Now, how about a billion?

A billion seconds is 31.7 years.

So a million seconds ago was last week, and a billion seconds ago was 1993.
How long is a trillion seconds? ​

Okay, last one. How long do you think a trillion seconds is?

A trillion seconds is 31,689 years.

A trillion seconds ago, humans were still in the Stone Age. Writing hadn't been invented. Agriculture hadn't been invented. We were hunter-gatherers using basic tools.
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Amy @lolennui.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Not finished yet, but enjoying. Also just learned Richard Ayoade is on the next series. Im hoping that will be fabulously awkward!
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Playing with some bioinformatics code, genome browser - literature scraper. Even then after code audit, it warns me that this looks like it might fall under prohibited use.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Ha! The British public are being asked to vote what's going on the new edition of the banknotes. How will we Boaty McBoatface this one? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Puffin and bumblebee among 18 creatures shortlisted to feature on banknotes
The Bank of England is asking the public which animals should appear on future banknotes.
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part time xyla @xyla.zip · 13/05/2026
faith in humanity restored
Cambridge Dictionary • @CambridgeWords

slopper
noun

someone who relies too much on Al chatbots to make decisions, find out information, etc.

He's become such a *slopper* that he won't even choose a restaurant without asking an Al.
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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
Britain is home to almost half of the world’s bluebells, found in ancient or semi-natural woodlands, flowering in April and May. 'Bluebell woods' by contemporary UK painter Susan Entwistle #WomensArt
Painting of a woodland carpeted with light purple blossoms
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
It's not a staycation if you actually go somewhere.
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CRAN Package Updates Bot @cranberriesfeed.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
New CRAN package peppwR with initial version 0.1.0 #rstats cran.r-project.org/package=peppwR
cran.r-project.org
CRAN: Package peppwR
Estimate best fit distributions and do power analysis for hypothesis tests on phosphopeptide abundance data.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
"It didn't fail" definitely reads like "It didn't succeed" to me.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
I have an A1200 in the back room cupboard that I keep promising myself ill get working again.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_r...
en.wikipedia.org
Tudor rose - Wikipedia
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Charles Louis Richter @richterscale.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
Penguin Classics cover of John Marr and other Sailors by Herman Melville. Cover image is a b/w promo photo of The Smiths
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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think
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Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 07/11/2025
LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵
arxiv.org
Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Thank you very much, Gaurav, I appreciate you taking the time to say so.
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Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
(With apologies to Randall Munroe)
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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 08/10/2025
I really really really liked The Oatmeal’s take on AI here theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
theoatmeal.com
A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal
This is a comic about AI art.
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Nick Talbot @talbotlabtsl.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
New pre-print from our group showing remarkable synchrony of proliferative growth and regulated cell death during plant infection- each conidial cell has a different fate - by the rice blast fungus. Led by Alice Eseola with @osesmir.bsky.social Lauren Ryder @danmaclean.bsky.social and Martin Egan
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
2️⃣ For the love of all that remains sane in the world.
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Ben McKennaaaargh @benmckenna.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Great to hear Burnham's been to Mancwalk 2000.
Walk like a Manc classes
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Christian Minich @christianminich.com · 16/09/2025
Normalize never saying "leverage" or "utilize" as a verb. Tempted? "Use" is right there! Simple words are better words
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SomersetWhovian 💙 🇺🇦 @clairecopperman.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
"It has never been clearer: this is a class war, mediated through one person." Love this article from @zoesqwilliams.bsky.social. I snorted several times, but she makes some serious points: in the eyes of the tabloids, the working class Rayner can't win, whatever she does.
theguardian.com
Why are the tabloids so enraged about every aspect of Angela Rayner’s life? | Zoe Williams
Whether it’s her housing, clothes, the restaurants she goes to, or the fact she watches opera and drinks wine, she can apparently do nothing right, writes Guardian columnist Zoe Williams
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
$ ls -laht drwxrwsr-x 3 uname grp 27 Nov 16 2006 .nautilus drwxrws--- 3 uname grp 26 Nov 16 2006 .metacity -rwxrwx--- 1 uname grp 26 Nov 16 2006 .dmrc 😐
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GigaScience Journal @gigascience.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Chris outlining the different AI coding agents that can be used for ontology development. Working on documenting best practices for this ai4curation.GitHub.io/aidocs #BOSC2025 #ISMBECCB2025
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GigaScience Journal @gigascience.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Today #BOSC2025 and #BOKR (formerly Bioontologies) COSI’s, Chris Mungall is doing the keynote on Open KBs in the age of generative AI #ISMBECCB2025
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Darakhshan Nehal @darakhshann.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
*Learning visualization in Python as an R user* #ggplot
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fesshole 🧻 @fesshole.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
I work with a lot of very intelligent people - the experts in a very select field - yet every morning they fight over the parking spots in the shade. By lunchtime they're all in full sun and my unwanted "sunny" spot keeps my car nice and cool. They never learn.
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Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 12/07/2025
AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done. clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...
clauswilke.substack.com
No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding
Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
open.substack.com/pub/clauswil...
open.substack.com
No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding
Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.
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Michael Love @mikelove.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
I recently ran a session at CSAMA with Laurent Gatto and this is the way. "Good enough" with knowledge of the tools that can help you get there. Here's some of the recs from the paper.
Recs from the linked paper
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
😀 This is good to hear. My kid is past kpop phase so won't choose it, but I put it on my mental watchlist as a candidate for one of those nothing else on, dad can still choose some good things, type evenings.
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Nice. An API is like a structured set of URLs for querying data that you can send to someone's computer and they'll send you an appropriate response. Eg api.mcdonalds.com/menu/sold/cheeseburger might return 31234543219494938263628 (some big number, anyway)
api.mcdonalds.com
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Mel Brooks @officialmelbrooks.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
I told you we’d be back
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
If it was a small sample I might try Internet archives set of scanned magazines, iirc they have ads scanned or you might find it in reviews archive.org/details/comp...
archive.org
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
I use this yihui.org/tinytex/ (mostly through quarto so ymmv) but it's ok for that.
yihui.org
TinyTeX - Yihui Xie | 谢益辉
TinyTeX is a custom LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live that is small in size, but functions well in most cases, especially for R users. If you run into the problem of missing LaTeX packages, it &hel...
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Dan MacLean @danmaclean.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
media.tenor.com
a group of black and white cows standing next to each other with the words okay one last time written on the bottom
Alt: Father Ted explains to Father Dougal that the toy cows are small, but the real ones observable through the window are far away
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