John Didion

Yes!

I'll be at #ASHG24 this week with @fulcrumgenomics.bsky.social and my #Rust -colored glasses...find (or DM) me if you want to talk bioinformatics, Rust, basketball (Go Warriors!) or pretty much anything except politics.

Guy complaining about how "every kid gets a trophy these days" while drinking out of his "Worlds's Best Dad" mug.

Kudos to Jakob (is he on here?) and to all the groups who do the important work of independently benchmarking tools in bioinformatics and other computational fields. It is too often underfunded and underappreciated, but I think it's just as critical as developing novel methods.

Peer review is supposed to mitigate such issues, but even then the biases can be so subtle that only the most diligent reviewer would catch them all.

Our tendency is to just look at these headline, accept it at face value, and hit reskeet/tweet/toot.

The incentive to overlook one's own bias is proportional to the degree of financial incentive. It's difficult to get someone to understand their benchmarks are wrong when their salary depends on their not understanding it.

Even when someone is trying to be fair and unbiased in evaluating their own work, they are likely to fail: bias is often unconscious, and humans (especially smart ones) tend towards laziness, hubris, and impatience (to paraphrase Larry Wall).

Never, ever, ever trust benchmarks when the person doing them also has an interest in one of the things being benchmarked. It's the same logic as not wanting the person who implemented the code to be the (only) one testing it.

Ohhh...this is very cool

Does being XX lead to more autoimmune disorders than XY? Here's my story on a chromosomal mystery. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/h... 🧪

Sounds like there's still some exciting stuff that will actually be announced at the conference...let's wait to see.

Damn good title. Bravo. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dear 23 and Me -- I realize times at tough for you right now, but preventing people from downloading their own data is not OK

IMO this is the most exciting news coming out of this year's AGBT. Anyone have anything better? (Please don't reply with "Ultima") seqwell.com/seqwell-and-...

I have no idea what the demographics are for people who listen to metal, but it's gotta be like 90% parents, right? I mean how else do you guys cope?

The best Internet hack I've seen in a while. It actually works. 😯

"If you add “cooked.wiki/“ to beginning of ANY recipe URL (before the https:/) it strips away everything but the recipe and organizes the ingredients and method into separate columns."

stolen from theblower.au/@Maxton/1117...

I'm happy to announce the release of WDL 1.1.1! This patch release includes many improvements to the specification. Read all about it on WDL's new blog: dev.to/openwdl/anno...

Generally agree, but some poisons kill you while others can arguably, under the right circumstances, provide some benefit (e.g., alcohol).

VC money is a poisoned chalice, avoid until unavoidable

A) Any. God please I just need enough to survive until the market improves.
B) Only if the terms are really good.
C) B, plus they’re a follow-on investor you won’t have to talk to much.
D) None. Their advice and connections will be unhelpful at best, and likely detrimental.

Let’s say you’re a biotech founder raising money. You meet with someone from a VC firm who literally believes we have the ability to “uplift other species” (maybe someone gave him a David Brin novel and forget to tell him it’s Sci-Fi). Under what circumstances to you take their money?

If you are looking to use Rust for Advent of Code, this repo is a nice template for the boilerplate setup used each day: github.com/sstadick/aoc...

#rust #adventofcode

baltimorespiritsco.com

They also make some nice Amaro derivatives. And gin. Basically everything they make is great.

I forgot how amazing this stuff is! Found a bottle with a finger left in it and I’m kicking myself or not buying more before I left Maryland.

Really excited about monaspace, but...

Huge missed opportunity to name their new technique "Textural Healing"

A picture of the new second edition Awk book.

The new Awk book second edition arrived today. Awk's enduring relevance is amazing. The first ed. of the book was published before I was born and despite (because?) its age I use Awk everyday and encourage all our students to learn it.

Here are my Awk slides/colab:
docs.google.com/presentation...

A good test to see if you’re writing maintainable code is to re-read it six months later.

Both pandas & tidyverse fail this test, unless I add copious comments about the shape/content/schema/types of the data frames after each transform. Comments should not replace data structures and typing…

It's too bad, I really liked eLife. Will no longer consider reviewing or submitting there.

So incredibly disappointed and disturbed by what elLife has done here

x.com/mbeisen/stat...

And yes this is my brother who they fired for posting a link and a comment about an Onion article. But I can say without any bias what they did was idiotic and wrong.

Evil takes many forms