Cishet men, you can wear colors too. It's ok, really. No one even has to know you're straight. #SummerofColour
Remote
James R.B. Eastwood
@jrbe@scholar.social
mastodon 4.7.3Great ape.
PhD in #Chemistry, developing computational tools for molecular science. Always looking for opportunities to learn new computational chemistry methods, develop new open source molecular software, and expand the boundaries of who can participate in computational science and what they can accomplish. He/him
Parent to two precocious children, and aspiring Trekkie.
136 Followers
253 Following
50 Posts
Joined March 04, 2019
Research Area:
Chemistry
Sometimes you just have to raise your glass to the drink itself.
My 3yo, who always turns around in his seat on the bus or the train so he can look out the window, asks a great question:
"Why do grown-ups not prefer looking out the window?"
#StarTrek project idea: propose alternate resolutions to as many plots as possible by making creative use of the transporter.
When I picked up my 5yo from his 3rd day of kindergarten, he told me "I did something funny in the cafeteria today: I had a chat about having a chat."
My personal interpretation of recent (and prediction about future) events in the "Frontier Labs" is that the upcoming generation of models are experiencing something close to model collapse. Probably they are not completely useless, but their behavior is further than ever from being understandable by (or all that useful to) humans. The agreement to slow down model development is a cover for their efforts to build "harnesses" that can recover utility before IPO.
New rule: anyone talking about "peptides," whether they be journalist, influencer, or the Health Secretary, has to at minimum read out the peptide sequences they are discussing, and preferably also cite the target.
Otherwise I'm going to assume they're talking poly-glutamine.
I'm engaged in a very deep study of gender expression and development by raising three AMAB children. So far I have a lot of questions and few answers.
My 5yo asked for a globe of Mars, asked *why* Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, and lamented that Earth isn't as big as Neptune because he wants to have plenty of room to go for long walks and ramble around.
Maybe we're on to the space phase now?
#precocious #parenting
While I was in a late work meeting and my wife was nursing the baby, the 5yo washed his hands in the bathroom, plugged the sink, left the water running, and closed the bathroom door.
After my meeting, I was reading to the older boys for bedtime when the super knocked at the door to tell us the apartment below us was flooding.
How's your evening going?
Looking forward to running a small book club at work! @grimalkina@mastodon.social
Replying to
@worstimpression@kolektiva.social yeah, the men's clothing department is often the depressing side of the store. Women get a lot more opportunity for self-expression mass-marketed to them. At least we get pockets?
Replying to
@kaneel@mas.to @tante@tldr.nettime.org it's not the people. It's BS products being developed by corporations and shoved down our throats. Google enshittified their search function, the backbone of knowledge transfer for two decades, and is replacing it with botshit. Employees have their job security tied to AI adoption. The entire media landscape is running with the story that AI is going to transform everything beyond recognition.
Approximately no one is using it because it makes their life slightly easier.
Who called it an "AI Therapist" and not "Freudian Slop?"
h/t @AgnesBC@social.vivaldi.net
What if the LLMs overuse em-dashes because colons have syntactic meaning in YAML format?
I didn't set out to post a thirst trap, but my selfie of my bright summer wardrobe from early June now has 40 boosts and 113 favorites. I'm hot on Mastodon!
What did Google find in my inbox that led them to serve me ads for a Gulfstream?
Mom overheard the 5yo say something about "Nike," so she asked him what he was talking about (her brother works for the shoe company). He replied "The Goddess Nike, from the famous sculpture." She asked him how he knew about that, and he said "it's in the book 13 Famous Sculptures That Every Kid Should Know, and if every kid should know about it then grown-ups should know too."
5yo was taking bites of dried peppers that he found on the counter. We have repeatedly warned him how spicy they are. Suddenly he's crying and screaming, and 3yo is laughing at him.
5yo observed that my pizza crust looked like a guy, so we got way too excited by placing the toppings accordingly. I give you, "pizza guy!"
The moment when your doctor's demeanor shifts from, "everything's fine" to "I'm going to save this patient's life RIGHT NOW. "
I helped my two older boys (5 and almost 3) extract DNA from strawberries, which the 5yo had been asking about for weeks. 2yo has a very old-school biochemistry approach: he wants to taste every step. When we had our product, they wanted to know "what can we do with it next?"
I had to dash their ambitions by explaining that we don't have a sequencer in our apartment.
Me, when I read neurodivergent folks' descriptions of their own mental processes: "That's not cognitive difference, that's just cognition! After all, that's very similar to my own cognitive process."
Me, a moment later: "Huh..."
It's nearly impossible to get in 8k steps per day while caring for young children full time.
At breakfast my 2yo started crying because I told him I wouldn't l let him leave his cup of milk on the table all day so he could taste sour milk in the evening.
Every time my team has talked about AI usage, I've exhorted them to keep their workflows robust against a huge increase of the cost of the LLMs. If we can't afford the new, "AI-powered" workflow, we need ro be able to fall back seamlessly to the old workflow.
I'm going to check in about Copilot usage at our sprint meeting later today, and I sure hope they took my advice.
2yo saw 5yo juicing lemons and asked, "can I lemonate?"
I didn't expect Ronnie Chieng to be the prophet of the Butlerian Jihad. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/harvard-graduation-ronny-chieng-ai-tirade
Surprisingly sophisticated class analysis, for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/magazine/the-politics-of-the-downwardly-mobile-professional-class.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mVA.eeGO._0ULWoo_jq9Z&smid=url-share
BRB, got go assess some asses. #asstodon
I used cold ethanol to precipitate DNA that my kids extracted from strawberries, and now I want a daiquiri.
Can I pay my rent in story points?
Replying to
Can an LLM with a persistent, recycled context window learn? We could test that. We could attempt to "teach" the LLM new verbal skills by saving them in a context file. If the LLM can recover information from the context file, that's not exactly a breakthrough in AI. But how about learning a new dialect -- a new language, even -- without updating model weights?
Replying to
@michaelc@scholar.social In reality, it's probably more like "I don't know what to do with my hands..."
Why do vloggers often record their video with a lapel mic held between their fingers?
Replying to
@michaelc@scholar.social "I don't know how to operate a clip-on lapel mic, therefore my opinions are obviously more valid" -- got it.
So if I understand correctly, I've been making smashburgers this whole time, they just didn't have such a trendy name a decade ago. I learned them as "diner-style" burgers, as opposed to "pub-style," which were in fashion in those days.
Shakespeare in the park!
#nyc
Shouldn't "denuded" mean "put clothes on?"
Combat wombat
Is this anything?
Replying to
@Dero_10@thecanadian.social @fesshole@mastodon.social prog = progressive rock, a style of music mostly associated with self- important white dudes on the nerdy side, with deep British roots. Stream = listen to music over the internet. Take the piss = ridicule him.
Replying to
@shlee@aus.social the Rastafarians in Neuromancer always made me dream about the space reggae they would play.
I have no complaints about AI-generated advertisements. Rather, my complaint about slop is how it mechanizes the production of advertising-quality "content."
Judicial review is incompatible with democracy.
Pink Pomelo Club
There's no reason "he looks like a violist" has to be a put-down, and yet...
Do young girls (ages 2 - 5, let's say) explore a new toy by immediately pounding it as hard as they can on the nearest surface, object, or person? Or is that a gender- specific behavior?
All the juice joints in Harlem
At what point does "fail fast" just become "fail?"