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robp.bsky.social
Associate Professor of CS @ University of Maryland. Proud Rust advocate! I ♥ science & compiled, statically-typed programming languages! Views are my own.
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Truth nuke ~13:40; “C++ sucks”. I’m reserving judgement on Mojo, but this is an opinion about which I unabashedly agree. Sing it from the mountains, Chris! youtu.be/04_gN-C9IAo?...

🖥️🧬We're thrilled to announce that one of our keynote speakers at #WABI2025 will be the inimitable @benlangmead.bsky.social! wabiconf.github.io/2025/talks/t... Ben's keynote is titled "We are what we index; a primer for the Wheeler Graph era", & it's sure to be a whirlwind tour of full-text indexing!

A decade of fatherhood so far. It's by far the hardest job of all of those I hold or have held, but without a doubt, it's the best and most rewarding. Happy father's day to all the dads out there doing good dadding!

🖥️🧬 Thanks to the dedicated & focused effort of the entire PC, the WABI '25 decisions are out. We have a great program this year! Unfortunately, there was more solid work than we are able to accommodate, & we thank all of the authors for their submission. Congratulations to the proceedings authors!

Wow, it's really "done" --- the jemalloc post-mortem : jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/j...

Spending a few days with intramural researcher at NIH has me thinking about the old Bell Labs, the storied research institute where major breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and mat sci (and associated @nobelprize.bsky.social awards) were made in the 70s-80s 1/n

New preprint! Deacon is a versatile tool for filtering FASTA/FASTQ files and streams at hundreds of megabases per second using minimizers, built with rapid metagenomic host depletion in mind, but equally useful for search. github.com/bede/deacon

The every 30 second multifactor authentication craze is, in fact, just a giant pain in the ass security theater. I'm shocked; shocked, I say!

A unanimous Supreme Court rules that a family whose house was wrongly raided by law enforcement can sue.

This seems like an awesome course! jshun.csail.mit.edu/6506-s24/! If there were more hours in the day, I'd want to put something like this together at UMD.

1/4 Hash functions in genomic sequence analysis (tinyurl.com/4kk9ccmt) : a new survey written together with Ke Chen, Xiang Li, Qian Shi, and Mingfu Shao. Before submitting it, we are posting it online to get feedback from the community.

With Rob's team, we are working to help users track data provenance during long read RNA-seq workflows, for both annotated (e.g. GENCODE) and novel transcripts (assembled during sequencing). Part of this involves formally designating the two sets, so they can be properly handled downstream.

🧬🖥️ User survey (cc @mikelove.bsky.social)! In the next oarfish ver., we are going to track separate provenance of existing annotated transcripts & novel / assembled transcripts. The user can provide 2 files as input, (1 for existing txps, 1 for novel). What should the cmd line option names be?

Davide Cenzato, Francisco Olivares, Nicola Prezza Testing Suffixient Sets https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08225

Look; democrats are going to keep running longtime would-be reitrees if people keep voting for them! Especially when the stakes are like this, send a message. It's time to pass the baton to the next generation (who in a normal world would already be near the end of their service)!

How much of this is a manufactured media narrative? Personally, I think a 7 year console lifecycle is completely reasonable. How is this "far too soon"? Now the bigger question is, can the console manufacturers make something actually worth upgrading to? www.gamingbible.com/news/platfor...

I want to learn more about “Suffixient sets” for indexing, but am finding the (clever) term very difficult to Google!

A monumental collaborative effort with many incredible people ☺️ Proud to be part of this!

The panel should convene and continue to publicly announce their recommendations for the record, so that we can document in detail how many preventable deaths RFK Jr.'s anti-evidence-based policies kill.

Bioconda PRs right now 😅

Monday morning hot take. 8GB gaming GPUs are dumb and shouldn't exist anymore in 2025. Convince the vendors of this by refusing to by immediately antiquated hardware!

ish is a grep-like CLI tool that uses optimal alignment instead of exact matching. It’s record-type aware, supporting line, FASTA, and FASTQ records. Built in Mojo as a proof of concept for bioinformatics. 🧵1/5

Qualified immunity is complete and utter nonsense. The idea is fundamentally flawed and it should be repealed!