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Dave Carlson

@davecarlson.bsky.social
720 followers 964 following 640 posts

PhD in EcoEvo. Bioinformatics & High Performance Computing. Transposon enthusiast.

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Reposted by Dave Carlson
Alex Burness @burness.bsky.social · 11h
If nothing else, just read the opening paragraphs of the new @vevalenz.bsky.social piece. This sort of casual cruelty, and worse, is so common in U.S. jails/prisons that to most it barely registers as scandalous—but it is, and this reporting really matters: boltsmag.org/california-p...
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 18h
🤯
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Reposted by Dave Carlson
James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 07/10/2026
Holy shit. Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt it in Rust and released it as open source. Either all software is dead or the US copyright laws are about to receive an update. getartcraft.com/apps
getartcraft.com
Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools
Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Beyond the lack of public transparency and accountability generally, this also means NSF put lots of social science researchers through the time and effort of writing proposals that NSF never had any intention of considering
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:
science.org
‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research
Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Congrats!
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Nobel Prize @nobelprize.org · 06/10/2026
”I hope this reflects on the really courageous people who joined me in the beginning of this project when no respectable conservative physicists would have joined me, but many talented people did, and that's why I'm here.” - physics laureate Francis Halzen speaking at today's prize announcement.
A illustrated portrait of physics laureate Francis Halzen
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Dan Mauler 🎃 @meelar.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Yeah, blue state housing policy is so bad that it undermines a huge swath of all the good stuff they do. You can't be a sanctuary state if people can't afford to live there!
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Guillaume Hummel 🌱 🇪🇺 🇫🇷 🥨 🇮🇹 @guillaumehummel.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
This year’s Nobel Prize is a great reminder of something fundamental about science: curiosity-driven research and unexpected angles of attack can reveal principles with implications far beyond the original question. Glad to see this beautifully illustrated through work on a photosynthetic organism!
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Find someone who loves you as much as Claude loves Slurm arrays.
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Reposted by Dave Carlson
Sergei Pond @sergeilkp.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I've spent ~30 years writing HyPhy to study selection & evolution. That era is coming to a close. HyPhy is passing the torch to HyphAeon: a ~2M parameter geometric transformer running in the browser that does things we never built it to do. @nclark.bsky.social @brcanalytics.bsky.social 🧵👇
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The HPC cluster I help manage has been running the same oversubscribed GPUs for years, in some cases a decade, and not a single one has burnt out.
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Man City delenda est
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
OMG I played the hell out of Descent and Descent II.
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Transmission Distortion
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Very cool thread!
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Molecular Biology and Evolution @molbioevol.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Gaut et al. synthesize key lessons and outstanding challenges concerning the action of natural selection on plant genomes, revealing the power and some of the limits of population genomics to infer the dynamics of selection on plant genomes. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #societyjournal
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Not sure the world is ready for "Claude's got that dog in 'im" said in a scouse accent.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 21/09/2026
Alright. Let me resolve this once and for all. The simple fact is that there are a few different things that can be reasonably meant by “thinking” and mixing them up is what’s making everyone mad.
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Seth Rosenthal @sethrosenthal.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
the concept of figuring out calvin's dads politics smells strongly of "greatest thread in history of forums, locked by moderator etc etc"
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Calvin's dad would be an incredibly infamous poaster if he had a Blue Sky account
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 21/09/2026
That’s why they carved that poem that goes “Go back home, or at the very least stay in the designated zone” on the base of the Statue of No Transplants that stands in the harbor.
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André Marques @amarques.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Out today in Nature: sex without crossovers. Rhynchospora tenuis makes pollen, fertilises and sets seed, yet 0 crossovers in 10,997 pollen nuclei. Chromosome drive and ~87% seed abortion rebuild the mother's genotype, so the offspring are clones. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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BehavEcolPapers @behavecolpapers.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Sex without crossovers mimics clonal reproduction in Rhynchospora tenuis @Nature.com
dlvr.it
Sex without crossovers mimics clonal reproduction in Rhynchospora tenuis
Nature, Published online: 16 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11057-7Rhynchospora tenuis undergoes obligate, genome-wide achiasmy in both male and female meiosis.
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Reposted by Dave Carlson
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We Need to Talk about AI, the ‘Rationalists’ and ‘Longtermism’ talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-ne...
talkingpointsmemo.com
We Need to Talk about AI, the ‘Rationalists’ and ‘Longtermism’
As I’ve suggested in recent posts I’m finding it quite challenging to...
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It may only be useful for bayesian phylo inference where you have lots of trees, but I've used Densitree for something like this previously: www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~remco/Densi...
cs.auckland.ac.nz
DensiTree: Making Sense of Sets of Trees
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rachellcosby.bsky.social @rachellcosby.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Infertility affects ~1 in 6 people, and up to 30% of cases are unexplained. I am excited to present my postdoctoral work from @toddmacfarlan.bsky.social 's lab, now available as a preprint: tinyurl.com/yync6f2r addressing a possible role for the meiotic gene PRDM9 in infertility 🧵/1
Link to preprint titled: "PRDM9-mediated meiotic hotspot specification is constrained in humans despite extensive sequence diversity"
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Seems like those would be better served by the Arxiv.
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Dr. K. Lotterhos @drk-lo.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm hiring a bioinformatician! Review of applications starts October 1 with a start date as soon as possible. 🧪 #Genomics #popGen #CompBio northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...
northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Bioinformatician - Lotterhos Lab
About the Opportunity About the Center for Marine Ecological Genomics The successful candidate will be based at the Lotterhos Lab and the Center for Marine Ecological Genomics at Northeastern Marine S...
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Matthew Hahn @3rdreviewer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
New paper with Trang Nguyen! Do you have only a single parent and offspring, but still want to calculate mutation rates? We've got the tool for you--OOPS github.com/TrangNg-Th/O... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Estimating de novo mutation rates using parent-offspring pairs
Existing pedigree approaches to identifying de novo mutations (DNMs) require at least two parents and a single offspring, limiting applicability. Here, we introduce OOPS (Only One Parent Sequencing), ...
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Reposted by Dave Carlson
Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The sylph metagenome profiler is v1.0.0! sylph-docs.github.io A new DB format + approach --> huge performance gains: GTDB-R232 (200k species) now takes < 5 GB of RAM and ~30s (2GB fq.gz). Huge thanks to @benjwoodcroft.bsky.social and his ongoing performance efforts (github.com/wwood/weebill)
sylph-docs.github.io
Documentation for sylph - ultrafast, precise metagenomic profiling
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Jeffrey M Kidd @jeffreymkidd.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is a very nice review article from @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social and @mathiesoniain.bsky.social . Figure 2 gives a very nice summary of the different ways selection tests are calibrated. They also offer 5 succinct summaries of the current state of the field for humans.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 12/09/2026
Cont’d
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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Folks, it's not often that physics-fans are asked to donate money to a small Scottish church, but this is going to be one of those times -- since the church is the last resting place of James Clerk Maxwell... www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding...
justgiving.com
Help raise £70000 to Save Parton Kirk – JustGiving Crowdfunding
Iʼm raising money to Save Parton Kirk. Support this JustGiving Crowdfunding Page.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 11/09/2026
There are indeed thousands of LessWrong posts, as well as papers and books, which make a particular theoretical case for why AI will kill us all that many people find convincing. I'm going to try to explain it as faithfully as I can.
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Ultimately, this letter from NSF is an announcement that universities will be funded a lot less and politically-connected industry will be funded a lot more. Fancy words around old-fashioned corruption.
nsf.gov
NSF leadership in a new golden age of science
The U.S. National Science Foundation was established in 1950 to keep American discovery at the frontier. That mission has not changed. The science and technology ecosystem around it has...
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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We had a couple of weeks of people flying American flags everywhere. I also regularly experienced people I once considered sane demanding that we "turn the middle east into glass."
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I will never forget having to listen to that abhorrent country music song about how "we'll stick our boot up your ass, it's the American way" over and over. Those were dark times.
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Ryan Gutenkunst @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Increasingly powerful methods are enabling increasing complex models of ancient human history to be inferred from population genomic data. In a recent review, I highlight two blind spots in these inferences: limitations of the methods and choices of models to fit. arxiv.org/abs/2608.27591
arxiv.org
Two blind spots in the demographic inference of human origins from genomic data
Ancient DNA and new inference methods have transformed the study of human origins, but consensus has not followed. Evidence increasingly indicates that hominin populations were pervasively structured ...
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I was in suburban Chicago in a freshman music history course. Hearing the professor announce that something had happened was one of only two things I recall from the class. The other was "listening" to John Cage's 4'33".
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Please, I need to believe for my own sanity that this is not real.
static.klipy.com
Tom Delonge Blink182 Wtf Meme
ALT: Tom Delonge Blink182 Wtf Meme
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In this case, Arsenal would be more likely to heal, not injure, Mudryk if they wanted to hurt you.
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The Washington Sun @washingtonsun.com · 09/09/2026
Washington journalism is in a moment of generational change. We're rising to meet it. Welcome to The Washington Sun. washingtonsun.com
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
It's a story that really has something for everyone!
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Noooo
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Joshua G. Schraiber @jgschraiber.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
This is fucking insane. It's unclear what the future of mathematics looks like at this point. It's hard to express how big of an advance this is. Yes, there are serious issues about credit here, but all parties agree: this proof was enabled and perhaps principally shaped by AI.
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
People who put normal sized backpacks in the overhead bins of a full flight have no business being part of society.
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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
So maybe I really am a fine art person? Or maybe anyone can be.
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I think Van Gogh is the most Lives Up To The Hype artist in history. Simultaneously has a superlative reputation but is shockingly actually just that good.
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