Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

In case you were looking for another reason not to submit to MDPI (or its preprint service, preprints.org). Use bioRxiv.

There's a lot of speculation about whether OpenAI's video generation model #Sora has a 'physics engine' (bolstered by OAI's own claims about 'world simulation'). Like the debate about world models in LLMs, this question is both genuinely interesting and somewhat ill-defined. 🧵1/

Well, RIP nginx, long live freenginx: http://freenginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2024-February/000000.html

A thorough report of a software supply chain attack on the #PyTorch project using self-hosted GitHub runners. “Our exploit path resulted in the ability to upload malicious PyTorch releases to GitHub, upload releases to AWS, potentially add code to the main repository branch, backdoor PyTorch dependencies” https://johnstawinski.com/2024/01/11/playing-with-fire-how-we-executed-a-critical-supply-chain-attack-on-pytorch/

Cellpose V3 is out!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.10.579780v1.full
#spatial #cellseg #pytorch #segmentation

Microsoft: I swear have no knowledge about you besides what you tell me.

Microsoft: I insist I have no knowledge of your location.

Microsoft: The weather in Parkville, Maryland where you are is sunny and 35 degrees.

@cyrilpedia

I wonder if the reviewer comment 'this was written by ChatGPT' is going to replace 'get a native English speaker to edit it'.

Reviewers, please, don't do either.

I get it, some papers are badly written. As a reviewer, you want to help the author convey their science, but either phrase assumes something that might not be true.

Just be factual in your review, 'I struggled to understand the conclusions because the writing was unclear.'

"Women in tech dispel a study which saw 80% of men surveyed in the industry saying there is gender parity. Here’s what women think about how things can improve."

Four in five men in tech say women are treated equally, as women criticise ‘invisible challenges’

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/11/four-in-five-men-in-tech-say-women-are-treated-equally-as-women-criticise-invisible-challe

Ever wanted to do spatial clustering of orign-destination (OD) data? Well you may want to now! University of Leeds Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) and Alan Turing Institute PhD student Hussein Mahfouz has created this early-stage visualisation of spatial clustering of these zone-zone flows 🏗️ Case study of #Leeds. Looks beautiful AND useful 🎉

Good morning! It’s the first Tuesday in February, and so you’re all invited to look through Wikipedia’s List of common misconceptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions) per xkcd custom.

Learning to code in 30 lessons

My 15-year-old nephew wants to learn to program, and I will teach him.

This is the first blog post of our journey together detailing how to set up the environment we will use for the rest of the classes.

https://yabellini.netlify.app/blog/2024_learningtocode/01-learningtocode/

#rstats #100DaysToOffload - day 10

Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist

Hong Kong firm tricked by simulation of multiple real people in video chat, including voices.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/deepfake-scammer-walks-off-with-25-million-in-first-of-its-kind-ai-heist/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

@victorp Respectfully disagree. By this logic, journalism and every other industry which relies on computers (basically everything) is a sub discipline of computer science. It would be far more accurate to class it as a sub of maths, heavily overlapping with other applied-maths disciplines like statistics, operational research (OR) and economics.

Introducing {fastpng} when you need to write PNG files, but you want to do it quicky.

{fastpng} allows for the tradeoff between compression and speed.

Writing PNGs can be 75x faster when compression is turned off.

Supports: arrays, rasters and native rasters.

https://github.com/coolbutuseless/fastpng

#RStats

This is an excellent argument by Jennifer Listgarten about why Large Language Models #LLM like #chatGPT are not a silver bullet for scientific discovery. I am also motivated to study #ExperimentalDesign using #MachineLearning for the reasons Jennifer argues in this paper.

We need better data in #science.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02103-0

@Daojoan Alternatively, your corporate overlords have embraced M365, so you migrate data between a series of half-baked products and are then requested to extract said data into Excel/PowerPoint/Email because middle and upper management still haven't figured out how to log into any of the other Microsoft applications.

In case anyone was wondering about quarto and pseudocode:
https://github.com/leovan/quarto-pseudocode

Working on some, ahem, *colourful* new printing options for {palettes} 🎨 #RStats

Douglas Allchin, Jonathan Osborne, and I have a new paper out about teaching science in this age of online misinformation.

The idea is simple: we tell people to trust the science, but we rarely teach students about the social processes that make it trustworthy.

https://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2024JCST.pdf