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davidpfau.com
So far I have not found the science, but the numbers keep on circling me. Views my own, unfortunately.
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Philip K Dick correctly predicted how annoying the future would be, and I think it’s because he was a Bay Area guy

Honestly loathe that abundance stuff is probably just gonna shape up into a left-punching pro-privatization donor pleasing soiree instead of state-capacity building labor liberalism

It is because of this exact, specific stuff that I started posting on Twitter again. This science stuff is important.

Ok now that we've all had a good laugh, I am, uh, extreeeeeeeemely curious to see what all the Elon loyalists with root access to every single database and payment system in the US government do tomorrow.

The typical reply on Bluesky makes me annoyed and defensive. The typical post on Twitter makes me sick to my stomach and fear for the future of humanity.

Alex cross-posts on Twitter, and the post has about 1/20th the engagement there. If you are a scientist and you shut down your Twitter account, please, open it back up again. I know it's full of garbage people, and a garbage owner, but really, the broader public needs to hear these stories.

Lyft driver picked me up from UNC, turned out he was a medicinal chemistry post-doc in a building near mine, until his grant got cut last month. Worked on novel antivirals.

The brain drain will be when scientists are forced into other careers/jobs so that they can keep paying the bills. They will never return. There aren't enough science jobs in other countries to absorb even a fraction of those laid off.

We definitely screwed up the terminology here. Confabulation is a much better term. @jzleibo.bsky.social

Were there people who had been working on ARPANET since the '70s who, when the web came along, went "nah, seems like a bubble, I'll sit this one out"? What are they up to now?

I don't often beat up on the NYTimes, because I think the alternatives are mostly worse, but every once in a while they are so egregious my jaw literally drops. Left: NYTimes. Right: The Telegraph (a paper so right-wing it's often called "the Torygraph")

So, it's been over four months now. Shouldn't a lawsuit challenging the cuts on the basis that they violate the Impoundment Control Act have made it to the Supreme Court by now?

Stochastic vs deterministic Lotka-Volterra: smooth theory vs randomness! Individual realizations (Gillespie algorithm) show populations can crash or go extinct despite stable deterministic cycles or equilibrium. Randomness changes everything! 🦌🐺🧪 Made with #python #numpy #scipy #matplotlib

My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.

The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.

For what it's worth, NEJM, JAMA and the Lancet are basically the medical equivalent of, like, Science, Nature and Cell.

I'm enjoying Andor season 2 but every couple of scenes I see something that looks obviously AI-generated and I feel like I'm going insane.