Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Was wondering how much UWA's executive layer had grown in the last 10 years and had an LLM try to piece together the numbers - from 4 pro-chancellors to 9 PVCs in 10 years. Sporting! At the same time, rankings went up, so UWA will be Nr. 1 uni in the world at about 18 PVCs.... 010
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026New Opus is out and immediately refuses to work on my repos, time to get whitelisted. Seems like security theatre 010
Reposted by Philipp BayerColin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 6386154
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026What if mathematics is pretty because the mathematicians only look for pretty proofs. What if the upcoming swarms of LLMs find all the ugly theorems and ugly proofs. What if mathematics is just really ugly its just nobody ever looked 110
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026This is such a joy to read; after spending all week drowning in AI slop from left and right, just wonderful to read short, honest, funny, beautiful sentenced again 010
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026I grew up being told that the world was my oyster but I've yet to see the thing open 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026I was wondering whether I looked at my old papers through rose-tinted glasses, so I gave one of them to Opus with instructions to critically assess. More brutal than reviewer #3 on the methodological shortcomings. May need to lie down 110
Reposted by Philipp BayerAnnaliese Mason @annaliesemason.bsky.social · 17/09/2026My faculty is advertising a tenured open-call #cropscience / #plantscience professorship linked to the PhenoRob Excellence Cluster at Uni Bonn, Germany - apply until 30th Sep :) www.uni-bonn.de/de/universit...uni-bonn.deW2 Professorship within the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRobW2 Professorship 0511
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Seeing the scienceblogs.de comment section quoted in a 'AI solves old riddle' post gives me the strangest flashbacks 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Every iteration of frontier LLMs writes worse English. I see Opus sentences so random, they may as well have come from a Hidden Markov Model. Structurally sound nonsense 010
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026What if the accelerationists were right after all 001
Reposted by Philipp BayerZach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 08/09/2026For anyone not following the drama, there's been apparently a big development in ai math, along with some accusations of very bad behavior by OpenAI. But we don't have details yet. If I understand it, Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge made a big discovery on Navier-Stokes. Events go something like this: 17416158
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Another week of typing things into Claude Code, then reading what it says, then accepting, then typing in more things 020
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Another week, another "university underpays staff by millions" scandal thewest.com.au/news/educati...thewest.com.auProbe uncovers Perth University underpaid staff by $5mMurdoch University has shelled out nearly $5 million in backpay to hundreds of staff members after underpaying them for a decade. 040
Reposted by Philipp BayerRichard McElreath 🐈⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Last year, I publicly complained multiple times (see e.g. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...) that the open access movement had been captured by publishers, and we are now worse off than before open access. Well people got mad at me for saying it. But I think things are still getting worse. 616466
Reposted by Philipp BayerKatharina Hoff @katharinahoff.bsky.social · 31/08/2026A revolution in annotating protein coding genes in eukaryotes: Richard Krieg, Joscha Diehl & @masta.bsky.social developed Vipsania, a genome foundation model with integrated HMM-layer: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🎉💐 So impressive work! Congratulations!biorxiv.org 11513
Reposted by Philipp BayerClaus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 30/08/2026I'm really frustrated by the constant fear-mongering about AI-designed superviruses. Can we focus on the things that should actually worry us, such as measles? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...blog.genesmindsmachines.comI'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirusGod save us from economists who think they can competently talk about biology 412557
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026I am in the process of becoming the worst version of myself. That's an accomplishment 120
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Today I learned that the many ensembl transcripts per human gene aren't really linked to the isoforms on Uniprot - even if you translate the transcripts chances are, most won't fit a Uniprot isoform. How strange! 121
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Outside ot the US, postdocs are regular staff. It's always interesting to see Americans justify their unusual ways to themselves 040
Reposted by Philipp BayerToby Hodges @tobyhodges.carpentries.org · 27/08/2026This was a difficult blog post to write, but an important one. With the impending reduction in Core Team capacity, we had to make tough decisions about what work we put down. [1/4] 172
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 26/08/2026This is such a delightful talk - what an energy! youtu.be/656058JxTM0?... His book on how he traced the hacks in 1986, The Cuckoo's Egg, is one of my favorite booksyoutu.beDefCon 34 - Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later - Cliff StollYouTube video by DEFCONConference 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Bioinformitician: you thought the cup had content, but that is based on a long-disappeared postdoc's Perl script's outputs, which by the way you can't replicate using new data, and by this point you doubt whether there ever was a cup 150
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 22/08/2026I have watched the German remake of IT Crowd and it's exactly like what it sounds like (never made it past the pilot) 110
Reposted by Philipp BayerThe Carpentries @carpentries.carpentries.org · 19/08/2026The Carpentries Executive Director @drkariljordan.carpentries.org and Associate Director @erinstellabecker.bsky.social will step down on 1 September 2026. Dr. SherAaron Hurt will serve as Interim Executive Director for a 6-month term from 2 Sept. Full announcement: carpentries.org/blog/2026/08...carpentries.org 158
Reposted by Philipp BayerGenome Biology and Evolution @genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Zhang et al. generate the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved nuclear genome assembly for any Australian terrestrial orchid 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #societyjournal #genome #evolutionacademic.oup.comInterhaplotype Inversions and Repeat Expansion in the Sexually Deceptive Orchid Chiloglottis trapeziformisAbstract. High-quality nuclear genome resources remain scarce for most orchids, particularly Australia's diverse terrestrial lineages. Chiloglottis trapezi 053
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Now that LLMs can write decent-ish, average-ish papers and journals are getting flooded with submissions, can we finally move beyond judging researchers by research output? No? Ah, thought so 0100
Reposted by Philipp BayerT. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦 @tryangregory.bsky.social · 15/08/2026If you're a biologist, especially one in a field that has a history of eugenics and racism (which absolutely includes my own field of evolutionary biology) and you choose to remain "neutral" as race science once again crawls out from under its rock, you are not in fact neutral. 6144431069
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026The newest Positron finally has in-line figures in Quarto documents!!!! No more blind describing of figures that render somewhere else Seems simple to display some figures but knowing computers, probably took a ridiculous amount of work 110
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026How come they release tenth anniversary remastered editions of records i could swear were released a few months ago 000
Reposted by Philipp BayerTed Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 08/08/2026initially seems good, but the more you use a tool like this, the more you lose your own ability to forecast cylones 20717113
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026Another piece of work i was involved in in a past life: capturing the gene content of wheat landraces 'missing' in elite lines www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...biorxiv.orgCapturing the missing gene content of elite wheat by analysis of wheat landracesThere is a need to breed superior wheat cultivars to meet increasing global food demand. However, modern cultivars have undergone a substantial loss of genetic diversity due to intensive breeding. A p... 062
Reposted by Philipp BayerPeter Solomon @plantpathpete.bsky.social · 03/08/2026We're recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow at ANU to help strengthen Australia's preparedness for wheat blast. The project spans plant pathology, genetics, breeding and biosecurity, with collaborators in Australia and Brazil. Apply here: tinyurl.com/25zcj9yy #PlantScience #Postdoc #Biosecuritytinyurl.comPostdoctoral Fellow - Canberra / ACT, ACT, AustraliaClassification: Academic Level ASalary package: $91,546 - $114,906 per annum plus 17% superannuationTerm: Full-Time, Continuing (Contingent Funded) Note: This position will be primarily based at the N... 01929
Reposted by Philipp BayerEMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 01/08/2026I cannot rest from discourse. I will see that film again tomorrow. I will drink life to the lees. Again I will enjoy greatly, will suffer greatly, both with those that love me, and in Pleasantville NY. I am become a meme. Film showing: burnsfilmcenter.org/booking/the-...burnsfilmcenter.orgThe Odyssey : Jacob Burns Film CenterThe Odyssey, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Odysseus, Greek, Classic, Antiquity 802809296
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 31/07/2026I filled out the census and the website only crashed twice. Not bad! 010
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/07/2026Ran into a frustrating issue with nf-core/pacvar today: it crashed saying the bam file was malformed. Took a minute of digging but pbalign depends on pbbam, which has a hard-coded check for instrument names that hasn't been updated in years. We have Vega data that wasn't included in the check... 131
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Kids school asked for scientist-parents to come in and talk to kids about science and im sitting here thinking, what's the point? What STEM career could these kids have with the way science funding has depleted and unis are being defunded across the world? 112
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Weekend book haul at Bella Books while my son had class! All in on the dad-core 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Hmm looks like my bluesky account was taken over and auto-locked. Thanks! From what I can tell, there were two posts tagging random accounts in replies to 'send me money pls' scam posts. Anything else? 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/07/2026I'll have you know that I found a beautiful significant clean 1.4 fold-change last week, followed dose level and everything that was purely due to one transpose too much. Where's my prize 000
Reposted by Philipp BayerCedric Boeckx @cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 18/07/2026A great new resource for future comparisons across model systems, species, and disease states, on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social: a consensus atlas of human brain development, identifying cell type-specific maturation trajectories across the lifespan 🧪🧬🧠📈 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...biorxiv.orgA consensus atlas of human brain development defines cell type-specific maturation trajectories across the lifespanHuman neurodevelopment is a continuous process that begins prenatally and extends into postnatal life. Current transcriptomic datasets are limited, fragmented across analytical frameworks, precluding ... 12113
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/07/2026Im going to watch The Odyssey like any other parent! On my mobile phone in approx. 700 blocks 010
Reposted by Philipp BayerbioRxiv Genomics @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 22/07/2026HPRC2: A human pangenome reference with near-complete coverage of common genetic variation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20… 04024
Reposted by Philipp BayerARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 22/07/2026The lack of funding is absolutely the driving problem here. Everything is secondary, by a very large margin. ARC needs to be funded 3 times more than it is now. Anything less is just not serious. 274
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 22/07/2026First reaction: seems like they just renamed the old grants? Initiate Fellowship seems identical to DECRA at first glance 120
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/07/2026Fun kanji of the day: 冗談, joudan, じょうだん. by the kanji it literally means 'superfluous talk', but it means 'joke' 000
Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 20/07/2026Well done on getting this out @drjulieb.bsky.social!! A product of Julie's visit to Perth more than a year ago. I'm very happy this is out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...biorxiv.orgPredicting phenotypes with one step genetic decision treesGenomic prediction of complex traits is limited when phenotype records are restricted and when using linear models. Increasing the amount of phenotypic data with high-throughput, image-based phenotypi... 121