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Timothée Poisot

@ctrlalttim.com

18K followers 1.6K following 1.8K posts

Almost certainly one of the ecologists of all time. AI/ML, biodiversity monitoring, viral emergence, open science, methodological anarchism he/they 🧪 https://poisotlab.io/ 📰 https://buttondown.email/ctrl-alt-tim

poisotlab.io

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · Feb 25

I am now fully onboard with the idea of using the legend of a map to provide additional information about the data.

A map showing project time of arrival of some species for Québec, with the legend replaced by a barplot giving the proportion of the landscape additionally gained at each year

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 2h

Yes, a few times (in Canada)

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 19h

me when I'm reading stack overflow

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20h

And I'm right, of course. One is done by persnickety little nerds, the other by weirdos but with, like, chill vibes?

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20h

Me, a gainfully employed computational ecologist, while teaching: "Biostatistics are pâtisserie, but data science is cuisine"

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 2d

The Still Tide opened, and I also need to listen to them a lot more.

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 2d

We went to see The Tallest Man on Earth tonight, and in lieu of a review: I bit my lip so hard I drew blood. What an incredible artist.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

I just finished Metal From Heaven by August Clarke, which is a great read - and it also contains a plot twist that made me go "no, no way" out loud. I love it when a plot twist is very transparently foreshadowed, but only in retrospect.

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

15 years of failing to engage in a slow bug systemic transition towards open by default data means that well live through 18 months of transition to, for lack of a better work, open data cop shit. If we don't build a good system, we are imposed a bad one.

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

The consequence won't be that open data will fail to become the default. The consequence is that you'll hear more funders say things like "we got the 90% carrot 10% stick proportions wrong and we'll have to switch them" out loud.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

We can build the best training and publicise the best values and launch the best databases, and it's all immediately undone by someone saying "mhhhh no".

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

Inspired by an event I attended this week: the number one issue for adoption of data sharing practices is that part of the open science community is unable to conceptualize that incentives won't ever fix the fact that some people just don't want to share.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 3d

nah i think it's because of. time zones or something.

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 4d

Every time, these mistakes were of the "the paper should be retracted" kind. The complexity above which LLMs generate nonsense code is not that high, plus data suggest that it actually takes longer to review the code than to write it once you reach even moderate proficiency.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 4d

I've used both paid and free LLMs, and on moderately complex programming tasks, they made mistakes that no one with a deep knowledge of the material would have been able to detect. The code ran, but didn't work.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

Very sincerely, we don't do the "lay piles of paper on the ground" type of research enough anymore. This was peak research.

⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 7d

Researchin'

A hirsute and bewiskered dork sits at a messy desk overflowing with various books, notes, and tea. Arranged on the floor in organized (and labelled) piles are papers on various topics.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

Ooof Gift of the Gloaming sounds wonderful

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

10/10 no notes

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

I don't think anything can replace my note taking setup (pen and paper for life), but as a knowledge base + project management tool, it's replacing a lot of other software I needed to buy a subscription to.

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

I spent the last 3 years or so thinking that Obsidian was meh. I was wrong. I was so deeply, fundamentally wrong. Obsidian is my life now.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 7d

"You don't have wifi because you're on Linux"

No, IT guy, I don't have wifi because my desktop doesn't have a wifi card. I don't think running windows would help with that.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 14d

_scratch.whatever

Jeremy Allen @jeremy-data.bsky.social · 15d

Something I jokingly said at work, but dang if it isn't actually true:
"Everyone needs an emotional support R script."

You know, those R scripts in your project where you test your freak code before you're confident it works?
#RStats

Screenshot of the top corner of the Positron IDE with three files open and their tabs are named "todo," "violence.qmd," and "play.R." The third one is circled with a pink line.

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20d

oh no it's aspyr

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20d

I did, in fact, ask for this.

Wario64 @wario64.bsky.social · 20d

Deux Ex Remastered announced (Aspyr), out Feb 5

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20d

wow ok

Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · 20d

Sadly, as I'm not an over-eager grad student or an emeritus faculty, I don't think I'm allowed to write this paper!