iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 15h

I had a Bitcoin wallet when they were worth ~1 cent each. I have many regrets.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 29/09/2026

Intruders under the blanket!

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 29/09/2026

Intruders under the blanket!

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Postdoc appreciation week is over, so please, STOP appreciating postdocs. They will get some more appreciation next year

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 25/09/2026

Nicolaas van Kampen's essay on the Gibbs Paradox, in addition to being an insightful, no-nonsense explanation gas entropy and indistinguishability ("Quantum mechanics has no bearing on the question"), opens with some comments on physics education that were ahead of the times for 1984!

Beste Dik,
It is a long time since we both attended the lectures by Mrs de Haas-Lorentz on thermodynamics. They were excellent from a pedagogical point of view since they forced you to figure out almost everything yourself. That is a much better way of learning physics than the spoonfeeding of predigested formalisms which is nowadays regarded as the highest wisdom in education. I remember how puzzled I was by the sudden appearance of the term —kN log N in the entropy. After I figured it out I found that there is still much confusion about it in the literature. That is my excuse for bothering you with such a time-worn subject.

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Rob Beschizza @beschizza.com · 23/09/2026

The time is nearly perfect for a movie about the famously chaotic and dramatic 1976 production of Star Wars, starring Ewan McGregor as Alec Guinness and Hayden Christiansen as David Prowse.

Ewan McGregor looking a lot like Alec Guinness

Hayden CHristiansen looking a lot like Dave Prowse

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 22/09/2026

To add insult to injury, it's full of AI slop images.

A hallucinated man in a suit holding a metal rectangle that has merged with his elbow

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Sergey Ovchinnikov @sokrypton.org · 14/09/2026

Finally a more intuitaive way to learn pLDDT/pAE? 😎 sokrypton.github.io/protein_figh... (Character idea from @hannes-stark.bsky.social & Alex Waldherr)

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Lauren Lassabe Shepherd @llassabe.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Two types of academic correspondence are “apologies for the delay but I’ll need more time” and “hey do you wanna do this thing with me three years from now”

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 09/09/2026

This is a really nice post about teaching and giving exams now that LLMs are everywhere. Rather CS-focused, but still interesting generally. ploum.net/2026-01-19-e...

ploum.net

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 09/09/2026

I deleted my quote tweet of this yesterday because I figured I ought not react too quickly. But man, this is such a naively simplistic view that it's hard to take seriously.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 08/09/2026

Hyperparameters aren't enough; we need omniparameters

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 08/09/2026

Perhaps important to note in Buckmaster's statement: "The program this fits into was not started by us nor was it proposed by a Large Language Model." Certainly puts a damper on the "zomg AI is solving all of math" narrative being pushed by OpenAI cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

cims.nyu.edu

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 08/09/2026

Very interesting to see news outlets seemingly taking sides on the Navier-Stokes priority dispute right from the start.

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Thorn @coelliptic.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

here's the aerodynamics of the barbie jet at mach 0.3

someone put the barbie jet into an aerodynamics finite element model and ran it at mach 0.3

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 22/08/2026

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Physicist: The cup *was* half full of superfluid Helium-4, but it has climbed the walls of its container and the cup is now empty

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 19/08/2026

These are the kinds of diagrams I want in the math books I read Taken from "Tubes", 2nd Ed. by Alfred Gray

Excerpt from "Tubes" 2nd Ed. by Alfred Gray:

"Import Remarks:
(1) If P has a boundary, then
T(P,r) =/= {m in M | distance(m,P) <= r},
because the ends of the set on the right-hand side must be excluded to get the left-hand side"

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 18/08/2026

Some fun with parallel curves

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 28/07/2026

Hopkins sent out a fairly obvious phishing attempt as a training email, and it's rather distressing that there's now a thread in the JHU subreddit full of people complaining about getting caught by it and being required to take anti-phishing training.

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CMU Mellon College of Science @cmuscience.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

CMU biophysicists are flipping the script on cell membrane dynamics. They’ve developed a new theoretical framework that links membrane stress to lipid flip-flop, uncovering a key driver of membrane asymmetry. 🧪⚛️ www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

cmu.edu

CMU Researchers Capture the Randomness of Lipid Flip-Flopping

Cell membranes are dynamic, two-sided structures made of asymmetric lipid layers. While lipids can randomly flip-flop from one layer to the other, membrane proteins sort lipids between the two sides. ...

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 17/07/2026

Oh boy, I better go find a phone book!

A poster page in the back of a book:
"For more adventures of Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron, head to your local comic-book specialty store! You'll find it listed under 'comic books' in your local telephone directory!"

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 12/07/2026

It's so funny to read a (science fiction/fantasy) novel written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and get to a chapter that's just a completely undisguised complaint about how annoying this newfangled "TSA" is.

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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 09/07/2026

This sums up the frantic and coerced deployment of "AI" throughout public and private sectors. Results of even cursory audits are horrifying every time, invariably paired with forced adoption and retaliation for asserting professional norms. Colonialism is a cherry on top.

Specific allegations in the lawsuit include that Mayo researchers tried to cover up or ignore research results showing that the health system’s MAYA digital assistant tool had a 67% error rate. In a separate situation, Eto claimed she opposed the use of a high-risk investigational medical device for a cardiac surgery because it hadn’t been properly vetted by an IRB; she said her supervisor ignored her objection and approved the use of the AI-enabled device for a surgery in another country.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 07/07/2026

Watching a required university training video and... is Sameer here living in Cyberpunk 2077?

A man in the foreground, with a high-tech futuristic apartment in the background with neon lighting and a view of a cityscape from the perspective of a high-rise building.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 06/07/2026

Is there a nice (standardized) way to indicate or hint at the integration measure of the functional when writing down a functional derivative? I find it annoying that I can't deduce the units of a functional derivative at a glance the same way I can for ordinary derivative expressions

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 06/07/2026

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Michael Wriston @michaelwriston.com · 05/07/2026

The 4th of July. Reservoir Hill. Baltimore, MD. 2026.

A bolt of lightning strikes from storm clouds over a skyline of square and triangular rowhouse rooves in west Baltimore.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 03/07/2026

Homescreen weather widget was not designed with this weather in mind

Google weather widget cutting off the current temperature as "10" (no units) when it is actually 100°F

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Jason Rasgon @vectorgen.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

In terms of both eh direct costs and indirect effects, we've spent 3 times the NIH budget on the fucking war with Iran, and instead of cures all we got was 5 dollar per gallon gas and the loss of all our allies

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Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Article by Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels about the value of academic research and the highly productive partnership between academic institutions and the federal government. Read it here: www.science.org/eprint/VXUK8...

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 02/07/2026

Apparently autonomous teams of engineers require significantly higher capability than autonomous teams of researchers, for some reason. Setting aside whatever units "capability" is supposed to have. Inverse hallucinations? Fizzbuzzes/minute?

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 30/06/2026

What if instead of a grant proposal, I could just put together a packet of all the scribbled down notes on random science ideas I've had and then the reviewer just picks the one they want to fund. I think it would save us both a lot of time.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 29/06/2026

On the bright side, though, this is my 100th citation according to google scholar!

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 29/06/2026

I like to peruse the papers that have cited my work to get an idea of who finds it interesting and useful. For the first time, I've gotten a citation from what seems to be a review-style article chock full of AI-generated figures. In a (supposedly) peer-reviewed journal with a modest impact factor.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 29/06/2026

Clicking "Access Through Your Institution" on an article's webpage and being assaulted by the flashing lights of 8 half-pageloads and redirects in the span of two seconds Then being returned to the same page with no PDF download link and an "Access Through Your Institution" button

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 27/06/2026

Mesmerizing waves that seem to move in slow motion at a water-cyclosiloxane interface.

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Markus Deserno @markusdeserno.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

📣 Hear! Hear! 🦋 Behold this Bluetorial on a cool paper written with my PhD student Nathaniel Wesnak 🧪 If you want to dive into the rabbit hole of lipid flop-flop and its description as a stochastic process—here’s your TEASER TRAILER on some flippin’ awesome work: doi.org/10.1063/5.03... 1/26

doi.org

Stochastic process description of lipid flip-flop

Since lipid bilayers are self-assembled macroscopic aggregates, their constituent lipid molecules can spontaneously transition between the two leaflets. This so

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 18/06/2026

"How was the simulation time step decided?"

Part of a classic "Calvin and Hobbes" comic:

"How do they know the load limit on bridges, dad?"

"They drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks."

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 15/06/2026

Oh no I accidentally posted a comment that turned out to be a hot take and now my notifications are exploding

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 14/06/2026

Even all the way in Baltimore, if you aren't watching the game, you still find out the Knicks won by people screaming in the street.

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 12/06/2026

Just checked and Firefox still suggests that I might mean "clarinet-mediated endometriosis" whenever I type "clathrin-mediated endocytosis"

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 11/06/2026

🧪⚛️ Our paper is finally published in Phys Rev Research! doi.org/10.1103/cnfz... Can cells make decisions using equilibrium physical principles, without resorting to irreversible, energy-consuming signaling cascades? We say yes, with the help of self-assembling membrane proteins! 🧵(1/7)

$Plot of fractional response vs receptor concentration, comparing three different "passive sensing mechanisms": direct binding from solution, membrane-assisted binding, and membrane self-assembly.$

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Margaret Johnson @mejohnson81.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Self-assembly can help cells make decisions: see Sam's awesome work!

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Sam Foley @samuelfoley.com · 11/06/2026

$Plot of fractional response vs receptor concentration, comparing three different "passive sensing mechanisms": direct binding from solution, membrane-assisted binding, and membrane self-assembly.$

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Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

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