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Kai Blin

@kblin

Microbiology PhD, co-author of antiSMASH, Open Source geek, views are my own. @kblin@scholar.social

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27.09.2023
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Latest posts by Kai Blin @kblin

Just listened to an interview with the OpenClaw dude, and this must have been the most dystopian thing I have heard in years.
It had its funny parts when they were talking about security, I’ll grant you that. But overall, it was really bleak.

06.03.2026 07:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

But my OpenClaw told me it was a brilliant idea...

05.03.2026 05:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Debian?

02.03.2026 20:56 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm just remembering the abridged version of Schiller's Das Lied von der Glocke:

Loch in Boden, Messing rin
Glocke fertig, bimbimbim.

It fails to capture all of the nuance of the > 400 lines of the full version but gets close.

01.03.2026 08:48 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s gotten a bit harder now that a lot of search engines also throw genAI replies at you as the first step, and then half of the results also are genAI gibberish. I miss the days of working search hitting interesting blog posts.

27.02.2026 17:13 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Sure, not blaming the little guy/gal. I was mainly surprised the snake didn't hear me approaching. I was being noisy on purpose. But it always pays to watch where you're stepping.

23.02.2026 19:04 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Some years ago, I almost stepped on a rattlesnake that didn't even bother to rattle. It lay on the path I was hiking, all curled up and looking like the ground. It was a path surrounded by steep hills, and I always assumed it fell down somewhere and was dazed. Selection pressure didn't occur to me

23.02.2026 18:47 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Ooooh, this looks nice. I’ll need to see if that’s a good use case for the orangePi that I’ve had lying around because it was slightly too bad to run the LLMs that I wanted to play with at the time.

22.02.2026 16:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Once us unwashed masses can afford to buy machines again.

21.02.2026 13:46 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

If I wanted to read your corporate talk, I’d follow you on LinkedIn.

20.02.2026 07:35 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks to @nicoleeavalon.bsky.social for leading the charge. Looking forward to another round of MIBiG annotathons

20.02.2026 06:57 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Ah, my bad, I misunderstood.

18.02.2026 22:11 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I know nothing about the human side of this, but MSG is frequently produced from fermentation. My guess would be that the carbon source for those fermentations is corn based. Wouldn’t that cause similar problems to what you had with vitamin C?

18.02.2026 16:21 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah, the reason to have a 3d printer at home is so that you can iterate on new designs faster. Many of the things I print are replacement parts that I’m unable to buy. It’s hard to get these right on the first try. If I ever needed something I designed and tested 50 times, I’d outsource.

17.02.2026 07:20 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

I am truly grateful.

13.02.2026 23:03 πŸ‘ 50 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

That’s my reading of it as well

13.02.2026 10:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Marnix Medema appointed chair of Bioinformatics at WUR Marnix Medema has been appointed Chair of the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University & Research as of 1 February. He aims to further strengthen bioinformatics as a connecting discipline within ...

I am delighted and feel honored to be appointed as chair of Bioinformatics at @w-u-r.bsky.social .
I look forward to working with the team and with our collaborators worldwide on keeping bioinformatics science and education flourishing at WUR and beyond.

www.wur.nl/en/news/marn...

12.02.2026 14:13 πŸ‘ 40 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 1

I mean the β€œcan only copy, not innovate”

11.02.2026 13:33 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The last conference I was at in China convinced me that this hasn’t been true in many years

11.02.2026 13:32 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Had the exact same thought process

09.02.2026 21:11 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Oh wow. Overleaf is now pushing an AI assistant on their platform as well. It just gave me a "grammar/style suggestion" that changed the order of magnitude of a number. 1024 is not 10,024, thank you very much.

08.02.2026 20:51 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Which obviously a lot of smart people have pointed out before, but I’m 8 hours into a 6 hour train trip and to hangry to look up a proper quote.

08.02.2026 17:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Which is also why everybody is convinced that every job can be done by AI, just not your own

08.02.2026 17:12 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks, autocorrect. I was too annoyed to notice. I'm more coherent in the alt text

08.02.2026 16:59 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
A screenshot from the Deutsche Bahn app showing a connection with a negative 56 minute changeover time between two trains. The first train is delayed and can’t reach its intended connections.

A screenshot from the Deutsche Bahn app showing a connection with a negative 56 minute changeover time between two trains. The first train is delayed and can’t reach its intended connections.

Ok, who of you jokers wrote this app that thinks -56 minutes is a transfer time that OSS fine not to spite alternative connections for?

08.02.2026 16:43 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

You're welcome. "Looks like an octopus" was legit the first thing my brain settled on when I saw the picture.

08.02.2026 16:20 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

And of course it already looks like I’ll miss my connection. That was the clear bonus going to Cologne. Only one changeover to screw upπŸ˜‰

08.02.2026 11:03 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Feels funny to sit in a train from Stuttgart to Cologne again after over a decade. I’ve been doing that every Monday morning for over a year as a postdoc. Sprinting to catch my connection from TΓΌbingen was on brand, too. I’ll just go on to our MAGIC-Molfun conference in Belgium this time around.

08.02.2026 10:42 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I also think octopuses are cool, but I didn't manage to do a cosplay yet.

08.02.2026 10:03 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Got to lean into your talents, I guess.

I've never stabbed myself with a zipper, but I did handle the one I was just closing up way more carefully than I was when opening it yesterday.

30.01.2026 06:47 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1