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Philipp Bayer

@philippbayer.bsky.social
1K followers 1.2K following 1.2K posts

From plant breeding bioinformatics to marine eDNA to rare disease drug development! 'It is required that one man should goof gloriously for the people.'

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Booksale! Booksale!! Another success
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Was 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....
Figure: UWA rankings vs numbers of PVCs
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
New Opus is out and immediately refuses to work on my repos, time to get whitelisted. Seems like security theatre
Warning from positron session sating that opus 5.5 can't work on this repo
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
ere we show with three national surveys of non-Hispanic white adults (conducted from 2021 to 2025) that support for white nationalism is (1) higher among white people encountering personal hardship and local social distress, consistent with strain theories3,16; (2) unrelated to local racial composition or recent demographic change, complicating status threat accounts4,17,18; and (3) elevated among white people with close friendships primarily online, consistent with theories of extremism driven by online mobilization7,10,19.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What 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
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This 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
Cover: a journey round my skull, frigyes karinthy
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I grew up being told that the world was my oyster but I've yet to see the thing open
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I 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
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Annaliese Mason @annaliesemason.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My 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.de
W2 Professorship within the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob
W2 Professorship
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Seeing the scienceblogs.de comment section quoted in a 'AI solves old riddle' post gives me the strangest flashbacks
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Every 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
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
What if the accelerationists were right after all
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
For 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:
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Another week of typing things into Claude Code, then reading what it says, then accepting, then typing in more things
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Another week, another "university underpays staff by millions" scandal thewest.com.au/news/educati...
thewest.com.au
Probe uncovers Perth University underpaid staff by $5m
Murdoch University has shelled out nearly $5 million in backpay to hundreds of staff members after underpaying them for a decade.
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Last 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.
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Katharina Hoff @katharinahoff.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
A 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
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Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 30/08/2026
I'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.com
I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus
God save us from economists who think they can competently talk about biology
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I am in the process of becoming the worst version of myself. That's an accomplishment
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Today 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!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Outside ot the US, postdocs are regular staff. It's always interesting to see Americans justify their unusual ways to themselves
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Toby Hodges @tobyhodges.carpentries.org · 27/08/2026
This 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]
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This 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 books
youtu.be
DefCon 34 - Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later - Cliff Stoll
YouTube video by DEFCONConference
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Optimist: 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
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I have watched the German remake of IT Crowd and it's exactly like what it sounds like (never made it past the pilot)
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The Carpentries @carpentries.carpentries.org · 19/08/2026
The 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
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Genome Biology and Evolution @genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Zhang et al. generate the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved nuclear genome assembly for any Australian terrestrial orchid 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #societyjournal #genome #evolution
academic.oup.com
Interhaplotype Inversions and Repeat Expansion in the Sexually Deceptive Orchid Chiloglottis trapeziformis
Abstract. High-quality nuclear genome resources remain scarce for most orchids, particularly Australia's diverse terrestrial lineages. Chiloglottis trapezi
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Now 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
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T. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦 @tryangregory.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
If 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.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Book sale! Book sale!!!!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The 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
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Idea of the day: I should microwave lutefisk
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
How come they release tenth anniversary remastered editions of records i could swear were released a few months ago
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 08/08/2026
initially seems good, but the more you use a tool like this, the more you lose your own ability to forecast cylones
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Another 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.org
Capturing the missing gene content of elite wheat by analysis of wheat landraces
There 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...
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Peter Solomon @plantpathpete.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
We'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 #Biosecurity
tinyurl.com
Postdoctoral Fellow - Canberra / ACT, ACT, Australia
Classification: 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...
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EMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I 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.org
The Odyssey : Jacob Burns Film Center
The Odyssey, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Odysseus, Greek, Classic, Antiquity
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I filled out the census and the website only crashed twice. Not bad!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Ran 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...
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Kids 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?
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Weekend book haul at Bella Books while my son had class! All in on the dad-core
Six books including Orientalism and Smartest Guys in the Room
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Hmm 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?
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I'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
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Cedric Boeckx @cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
A 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.org
A consensus atlas of human brain development defines cell type-specific maturation trajectories across the lifespan
Human neurodevelopment is a continuous process that begins prenatally and extends into postnatal life. Current transcriptomic datasets are limited, fragmented across analytical frameworks, precluding ...
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Im going to watch The Odyssey like any other parent! On my mobile phone in approx. 700 blocks
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bioRxiv Genomics @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
HPRC2: A human pangenome reference with near-complete coverage of common genetic variation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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ARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
The 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.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
First reaction: seems like they just renamed the old grants? Initiate Fellowship seems identical to DECRA at first glance
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Fun kanji of the day: 冗談, joudan, じょうだん. by the kanji it literally means 'superfluous talk', but it means 'joke'
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Well 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.org
Predicting phenotypes with one step genetic decision trees
Genomic 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...
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