iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 1h

Non mais sérieux la France là en ce moment ça va de mal en pis …. 😨

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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 4h

From a discussion of updating a department website...

A photo with baby Yoda and adult Yoda with the caption "Could it be time for a new photo?"

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Development @dev-journal.bsky.social · 5h

Development wants to help you publish and it’s easy to submit to us. We offer pre-submission enquiries, format-free submission and competitive handling speeds. We are a Review Commons affiliate journal, and offer Fast track journal transfers. More reasons to publish:

journals.biologists.com

Reasons to publish in Development | Development | The Company of Biologists

Reasons to publish in Development | Development | The Company of Biologists Reasons to publish in Development Development is more than just a journal - we are part of your community. Published by a…

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 6h

There is also something about the pace, the balance of the sentences, etc… it is both perfect and repetitive. Like everything with genAI it is simultaneously mid and pleasant. It would be very interesting to see a stylistic latent representation.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 7h

‘researchers say’, really ? Who could have thought that misrepresenting the underlying data could be problematic ? Is it written by @nytpitchbot.bsky.social ?

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Maxime Laprise @maxlap.bsky.social · 21h

Je prépare un texte pour Pivot à propos des engagements des partis concernant l'enseignement supérieur. L'un de mes constats: aucun parti n'a la moindre proposition sur le financement de la recherche.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

« A spokesperson for Anthropic told the FT it was not aware of any previously published work describing the same biological finding » the ‘not previously published work’ excuse is really something, from companies that literally incite you to share everything (unpublished) with them…

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Pour les collègues et étudiants UdeM, vote anticipé sur le Campus aujourd'hui et jeudi (j'ai dû googler pour savoir, je n'ai pas vu passer l'info donc partage ici) nouvelles.umontreal.ca/annonce/2026...

nouvelles.umontreal.ca

Annonce

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I am sharing links and information about this with all my trainees and colleagues. And we absolutely need robust institutional responses to this, beyond the usual lame response, this is once again crucial to the long term survival of higher education and scientific research.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We really have a structural problem here.

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Alexandre Pratt @alexandrepratt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

« Ca va être l’enfer », avait annoncé la mairesse. Et bien si c’est ça, l’enfer, ouvrez-moi les portes! Les Mondiaux de cyclisme de Montréal ont été un immense succès populaire. Et si on rêvait à quelque chose d’encore plus grand? lp.ca/xrdrrK?shari...

lp.ca

Championnats du monde de cyclisme | Si c’est ça, l’enfer, ouvrez-moi les portes !

La mairesse Soraya Martinez Ferrada nous avait alarmés.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Je ne suis plus trop la politique française mais là quand même 😨😨😨

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Mon bureau en Mondovision : sur cette photo de la course, il est EXACTEMENT derrière le sommet de la coupole (dans le bâtiment du fond, au deuxième etage)

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Montréal pendant un championnat du monde de cyclisme, c’est quand même bien sympa :)

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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is it. This is what everyone is enabling by humoring genAI: you spend months writing something that took you years to get at, for an opaque algorithm that a few control to spit a number and cut you off right there and then. This is what we're up against 🧪

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

By the way, yesterday I asked Claude a question about flu evolution (from my university office), and it did not want to reply for safety reasons. We can see where this whole ‘AI for biology’ buzz is heading.

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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Worse than having a close competitor who is a very well funded is having an incomprehensibly well funded competitor who may not even care about its findings.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Course junior femmes en cours, allez les encourager ! (Voiture balai ici, je ne savais pas qu’il y en avait une !)

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Also this. I still hit paywalls daily (eg with the multiplication of NPGs journals where everyone nevertheless wants to publish). We really are living such a bizarro reality.

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

If you view AI as filling in the convex hull of knowledge, this is great in the short term but bad in the long term if there's no one left to expand the hull after

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The security measures around the campus are completely insane. Traffic blocked everywhere, sidewalks gated… on a positive note, just saw one team USA and three Uzbekistan riders

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

My take : the Bayeux tapestry, currently on display in London, explicitly proves that the English are French 🤣

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There is a huge debate those days in France/Québec about Pangram use. It is clear that these tools have issues, e.g. old texts are classified as A.I. On the other hand, my experience is that it works very well on scientific texts, it could detect with great accuracy bits of texts I wrote with AI.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I am following this from a distance and have a naive question : when I first heard about microscopy images ‘enhanced’ by AI (a few years ago), I immediately wondered about ‘hallucination’ control. What is the status of the research here ? Are people routinely using validated tools ?

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“En génie et en sciences humaines, les sommes attribuées chaque année sont environ 20 x moindres que celles des bourses Goldenberg, selon l’analyse du professeur Larivière.” Excellent billet avec l’avis de notre toujours tres pertinent collègue UdM Vincent Lariviere www.lapresse.ca/dialogue/chr...

lapresse.ca

Recrutement de chercheurs des États-Unis | Attirer les cerveaux sans écœurer les nôtres

Tant pis pour Donald Trump, et tant mieux pour nous. C’est le message que je lançais récemment en apprenant que le Canada avait réussi à recruter des dizaines de chercheurs de pointe aux États-Unis1.

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James Briscoe @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Our latest paper on building models of cell fate decisions -with David Rand, Marine Fontaine & @joadelas.bsky.social- combines developmental biology, dynamical systems theory and bioinformatics. I wrote a short piece to summarise it & explain ideas behind the approach briscoelab.org/blog-quantif...

briscoelab.org

Quantifying Waddington's Landscape | Briscoe Lab

I have written before about how two conceptual frameworks have shaped our thinking about cell fate, Waddington's epigenetic landscape and Davidson's gene...

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Just this morning, I saw two USA, one French and three Polish riders training on Chemin de Polytechnique. This is awesome.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Quand tu vois les mecs monter à fond la côte de la rue Berri sur laquelle tout le monde souffre 😨🚲💪

Evenepoel qui grimpe la côte à fond en danseuse !!!

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Dimanche matin, 2h de travail jusqu’ici mais ça commence à sentir bon ! (tout à été cueilli dans les parcs et dans la rue !)

Pommettes coupees avant
cuisson dans une bassine en cuivre

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Savchenko Volodymyr @savchenkoua.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🇵🇱🇺🇦 Polish PM Tusk: In May 1939, a certain French politician, a future Nazi collaborator, asked in the French press: "Why die for Gdańsk?" A few months later, all of Europe was dying. To those who today say that this is not our war, I remind them of this lesson of history.

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Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

We really ought to sit with the fact that Verhoeven, three decades later, has to publicly say 'Guys, the one I made about the militarized society in nazi uniforms waging an expansionist total war against aliens they refuse to understand? It's about fascism' www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general...

hollywoodreporter.com

Paul Verhoeven on U.S. Space Force’s ‘Starship Troopers’-Inspired Uniforms: “It’s Based on Leni Riefenstahl”

The director of the 1997 sci-fi film, which has often been misunderstood, says the gung-ho soldiers who are its heroes "are fascists without knowing that they’re fascists. That’s the point.”

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I've spent a lot of years studying a lot of collapses, and the truth of the matter is that they're always mundane: mild climatic shifts that reduce crop yields, a dumbass in power who makes some terrible decisions, neglecting things that obviously matter but the will to fix them can't be summoned.

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Maria Popova @popovaprof.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This serious geopolitical moment of Canada’s pivot to Europe is also super fun and entertaining. I love the positive vibe!

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Benjamin @abk6.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

AI urge will definitely compromise open access policies because « open » now means « can be scrapped by LLM bots »

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Paul Cohen @paulecohen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

if he keeps this up, Canada will be part of Schengen, its youth eligible for Erasmus, its voters readying to elect their very first members of European Parliament, and its legislators rewriting the Constitution to make it compatible with the European treaties before the fortnight is out

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The Canadian Press is now even discussing the possibility that Canada could enter Shenghen. This would be an absolute game changer for science and innovation, strongly encouraging exchanges between Canada and Europe.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Actually, the local croissant, bread and cheese scenes in Montreal have reached escape velocity and are already well within the French orbit.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I am using Notability to read and annotate pdfs by hand. This morning, the app offered to quizz me on a grant I am reviewing (!), which led me to immediately switch off all AI features I did not know about . All of this is highly problematic.

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The Company of Biologists @biologists.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A huge thank you to all our peer reviewers. Each digital tree in the #forestofbiologists represents a real-life tree in Great Knott Wood that is being protected, thanks to the important work of our peer reviewers. Check out the full on forest.biologists.com/landscape. #PRW2026 #PeerReviewWeek

4,570 trees for published articles

14,640 trees for peer reviews

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I am kind of shocked by this video, it actually perpetuates many racist tropes, eg the fact that les Bleus (and more generally second generation immigrants) would not be really French and would have another, truer, home.

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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 13/09/2026

Approximating the Lorenz attractor with a chaotic leaky water wheel. The orange dot is the centre of mass of the water. It traces (a projection of) the familiar attractor as the wheel spins seemingly randomly left and right.

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Paul Francois @pfrancois.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Paul Seixas en tête qui passe devant mon bureau !!!❤️❤️

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Dan Kaszeta FRHistS @dankaszeta.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Best bit of the Bayeux tapestry is the 1944 addendum

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