Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

@arclight

Heh. "Curb the... incompetence... of HR", he says.

Oy... have I got a story for you!

I am a scientist, now retired. I worked in cancer research at a big pharma, mostly doing applied math & statistics, with the occasional bit of machine learning. (Physicist by training, it says here on my PhD.)

About 2010, we wanted to hire some next-gen sequencing people to run a new part of our lab. We duly wrote the req, and submitted it to HR for a candidate search.

HR *rewrote* the req, introducing numerous technical errors which would be off-putting to any qualified applicant.

More interestingly, they added the requirement for TEN YEARS OF EXPERIENCE... for a technology which had been commercially available for less than 5 years or so. As evidence of that, see the plot below, and note the sharp drop in sequencing costs starting 2007-2008.

So unless you were intending to hire the NGS inventors themselves, there could not possibly be *any* candidates!

When confronted with this impossibility, they held their ground saying 10 years was the minimum experience they required for this senior position, and they could not make any exceptions. We would just have to wait for candidates to "age into the seniority required for the position."

Of course we ended up doing an end run around HR, hired a couple fabulous candidates, and (again, *of course*) got into trouble for it.

HR continued to say "scientists are remarkably uncooperative".

That part, at least, was accurate.

"Cooperation" would have been foolish.

I Mobley, "A brief history of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)",
Front Line Genomics, 2021-Jul-26. Figure 1 is reproduced here.

https://frontlinegenomics.com/a-brief-history-of-next-generation-sequencing-ngs/

I had a very personal interview with @SecurityWeek magazine on my career and hopes for the future. https://www.securityweek.com/rising-tides-lesley-carhart-on-bridging-enterprise-security-and-ot-and-improving-the-human-condition/ thank you for giving me a voice.

Incredible reporting by @lorenzofb, who caught an Android spyware campaign in the wild. The spyware, dubbed "Spyrtacus," masquerades as popular apps like WhatsApp, but steals victims' phone data.

Researchers linked the spyware to Italian firm SIO.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/13/spyware-maker-caught-distributing-malicious-android-apps-for-years/

Approaching tech activism without a historical foundation can lead people badly astray.

For example, many modern tech critics think that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
(which makes internet users liable for illegal speech acts, while immunizing entities that host that speech)
is a "giveaway to Big Tech" and want to see it abolished.

Boy is this dangerous.

CDA 230 is necessary for anyone who wants to offer a place for people to meet and discuss anything.

Without CDA 230, no one could safely host a Mastodon server,
or set up the long-elusive federated Bluesky servers.

Hell, you couldn't even host a group-chat or message board:
-- @pluralistic
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

My Electromagnetic Optics textbook is coming soon! Here's the link to the IOP Press page, with both hardback and e-book options: https://store.ioppublishing.org/page/detail/Electromagnetic-Optics/?K=9780750360623

going down an algorithmic rabbit hole and thinking, nothing I know is certain: https://www.quantamagazine.org/undergraduate-upends-a-40-year-old-data-science-conjecture-20250210/

The father of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, was born on this day in 1809.

Happy Darwin Day!
#science #history

I don't have much reach but I'll try anyways (boosts welcome)

People who use an offline password manager (keepass etc), how do you synchronize the passwords file between devices?

#infosec

I am looking for a good way to have bookmarks available from all my devices.

I was once a del.icio.us user and have tended to use services similar to that since, because they easily allowed me to have my bookmarks on all devices without worrying about compatibility with a specific #browser or OS. But I've been thinking that maybe I should use something with better #privacy guarantees, like end-to-end encryption.

Since I'm primarily a #Firefox user, I considered just using Firefox's built-in bookmarking and FF sync. But one issue I have is that it doesn't seem to autocomplete tags when you're entering bookmarks. To me this is important because a challenge with tags is consistently using the same ones and not creating a bunch of similar variants, so I want something that makes it easy for me to tell if I've used a tag before when I'm entering tags for a new bookmark.

Are there Firefox extensions or other web services for this with E2EE that I should be considering?

#web #webBrowser #webBrowsers

The result of the attack is the planting of false long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/02/new-hack-uses-prompt-injection-to-corrupt-geminis-long-term-memory/

Nine years ago we announced to the world that we have detected #GravitationalWaves we did it!

https://youtu.be/lslUF9gdYI8

Time for, well, not a distraction so much as a palate cleanser: a truly phenomenal shot from Hubble of a galaxy that is rippling like a pond that had a rock tossed in it… because that's what happened! Kinda.

And YES you want to grab the hi-res version.

https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/incredible-and-spectacular-hubble-image-of-a-galaxy-that-got-whacked-by-another-galaxy

In a few days we're going to be asking for your financial support to expand our work. Are you excited?

CenturyLink nightmares: Users keep asking Ars for help with multi-month outages
Three more tales of CenturyLink failing to fix outages until hearing from Ars.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/centurylink-nightmares-users-keep-asking-ars-for-help-with-multi-month-outages/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Finally up and running #bofh

Another #astrophysics calculation - would it be faster to travel to the other side of the Earth by falling through a hole or by orbiting around? This is a fun #physics question with lots of parts - but the best part is the #python model at the end.

https://youtu.be/04U6wmOOwRE