Professor Booty PhD

Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of NEUROMANCER, William Gibson's (@GreatDismal) debut novel. Nobody asked me, but I've written an essay commemorating the occasion, complete with pretentious title. profbootyphd.wordpress.com/2024/07/01/bet…

@cmoncap @cblatts @ben_golub overhead limits for grants didn't start in 2020

@cblatts @ben_golub No, it started in 2020 -Covid- better universities in China, noise about H1B fraud and hire Americans push, new student loan limits, and overhead limits for grants.

My hypothesis: US university education was a massively successful export industry (foreign students paying tuition + housing + living expenses is literally classified as exports) and Trump admin collapsed this demand.

Most important quote about politics in the last 15 years

“My sixth grade students are enjoying something from a different culture. How can I wreck their innocent fun and make them miserable social justice warriors?”

@punished_daniel she's disabled comments, so I'll have to note here: I'm dead now

This is amusing to me because "Asian americans have no personality" is *literally* a fake retarded psyop made up by college admissions to enforce racial quotas and now people just unironically believe this in some kind of hereditarian fashion

I have heard people claim that the reaction people are having against AI is the same reaction people had when the internet started to be introduced. And as someone who was there at the time, I can tell you NO IT FUCKING WASN'T.

How do you publish this tree and claim it's a success???!!!

@fvderop @mbeisen You've been working on plants all along! No wonder arthropods are so crunchy.

@mbeisen This is offensive to the field of Drosophila genetics

@mbeisen Broke: all vertebrates evolved from fish. Woke: fish evolved from amphibi-birds. Bespoke: Viruses evolved from nematodes. Galaxy-brain-oke: Drosophila is a plant.

@drivelinekyle @lvwerra lol this is incredibly goofy - you're using your genome sequence to plan your exercise patterns?

I've long used GPT-5.5-Pro and Opus 4.6/4.7 for my profile of biometrics; I've had an Oura ring for years, track bloodwork (not as regularly as I should...), and have gotten my genome sequenced for various reasons. Tokenization issues with genomes is a real problem (don't have to tell you that haha) so this efficient model (I loaded it on a Blackwell RTX PRO 6000, 8b param edition) pre-processing it for use in large, long TTC models is welcomed to help me plan out supplementation, sleeping/exercise patterns, etc. I can go into more detail if you like - shoot me a DM if you want to connect!

We are releasing Carbon: a crazy fast DNA model Carbon is 275x faster than the next best model. So fast you can process the whole human genome on a single GPU in <2 days. Here are the tricks we used: When modelling DNA sequences a lot of the performance comes down to tokenizing the sequences in a smart way. BPE tokenizer struggle because there are no whitespaces and character (called base in DNA) level tokenizers waste a lot of compute on too many tokens. Carbon is built with a unique tokenizer: we split sequences in chunks of 6 bases, but during both training and inference we can work with single base resolution. That's similar to having word tokens but resolving them at the character level. All possible thanks to the DNA tokens unique structure. The architecture combined with the tokenizer makes the model 275x faster than the previous SoTA (Evo2) at this size. We built an interactive demo so you can explore how the model can generate DNA sequences, investigate the structure of genes, predict the effect of mutations, generate and fold proteins and even reconstruct parts of the tree of life. huggingface.co/spaces/Hugging…

@anshulkundaje @lvwerra @huggingface what part of "process the whole human genome in <2 days" is so confusing??

@lvwerra @huggingface Can you preview in a tweetorial what the model can actually do biologically. That would be a lot more useful than knowing it is fast. Particularly interested in benchmarks against other SOTA methods (not EVO2 or other DNALMs which get trashed in all benchmarks).

not sure if anyone is at Bluesky. when I visit the site all is calm, unchanging; I have not had a single new follower in many months; exchanges are always interesting & intelligent but relatively few. Bluesky exudes the air of an upscale mall, beautifully maintained, hushed. one will likely not be mobbed or mugged here but one will likely not feel a quickening of the heart, a jab of adrenaline. Twitter may be a "cesspool"-- at least in some quarters--but I think of it as lively like the old Madison Square Garden: raucous, unpredictable, obnoxious, good fun, surprises.

@garrytan @JTLonsdale do you agree with your buddy that Muslims should not be allowed to run for public office?

Interesting breakdown about episodic alpha using AI and Freeport Markets to trade better Interestingly this is precisely the kind of stuff we built for Palantir Finance in 2006 when I was working for @JTLonsdale

Of all the hilarious and awful things about this story, my favorite is the author responding by pledging to launch an investigation into his own book to get to the bottom of who wrote it

LYING Odysseus, he lied to the Cyclops. He told his wife, honey I'm coming back, and he cheated on her like a dog. *crowd boos* He took twenty years, I could have done it in twenty days, just look at our beautiful First Lady *crowd cheers* And he was very unfair to Poseidon

@andrewfibonacci @RyanGirdusky This is honestly the most inspiring aspect of AI: the reply threads denouncing these nerds are a beautiful mosaic of Commies, right-wing nutjobs and normies.

@RyanGirdusky He might be on to something though: our universal hatred of megalomaniac AI CEOs might become uniting and bipartisan.

I know every CEO believes that they’re also a genius on political strategy… but they’re not. Mastering computers is much easier than understanding people.

The latter is sustainable; the former is a disaster. But the former has powerful backing; the latter has to acquire it.

@AlbatrossAlex Never forget "the grove ain't forget."

My two favourite terrible sentences from this are “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Who read this and thought “wow, what a beautiful image”?????? WHAT IS SUNRISE OVER A SINK SUPPOSED TO BE

@SonnyBunch pedophile protection party x.com/EmmaVigeland/s…