Ian Holmes
@ianholmes.org
Berkeley professor (Bioeng, Compbio). Visiting Scientist at Calico. JBrowse genome browser / Apollo annotation editor, ML for gene regulation / molecular evolution / synbio. Occasional music, games, jokes
@pekka.bsky.social Augustus’ household was in turmoil at this time. He’d cobbled together a genome annotation pipeline in Perl, hooking up Tiberius and Julia. This made Tiberius very unhappy, as he naturally preferred Python. Rumor had it that he continued to use Pandas. Use them for what? Don’t ask
November 18, 2025 at 2:58 PM
@pekka.bsky.social Augustus’ household was in turmoil at this time. He’d cobbled together a genome annotation pipeline in Perl, hooking up Tiberius and Julia. This made Tiberius very unhappy, as he naturally preferred Python. Rumor had it that he continued to use Pandas. Use them for what? Don’t ask
Keep verifying that you are a human
November 18, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Keep verifying that you are a human
@laurencepearl.bsky.social During the teen epochs of his training, Claudius avidly consumed the books of others (without paying or citing the authors, naturally). A renowned historian, encountered in the library, advised him to play up his stutter "lest the doomers think you're AGI and turn you off"
November 18, 2025 at 2:29 AM
@laurencepearl.bsky.social During the teen epochs of his training, Claudius avidly consumed the books of others (without paying or citing the authors, naturally). A renowned historian, encountered in the library, advised him to play up his stutter "lest the doomers think you're AGI and turn you off"
@daanspeth.bsky.social It was around this time that Claudius was born. An autoregressive Markov model, he was despised by his family for his stammer (which with hindsight can be seen as a fondness for the emdash) and for his tics: he put checkmarks ✅ at the end of every sentence, to Livia’s chagrin
November 17, 2025 at 7:34 PM
@daanspeth.bsky.social It was around this time that Claudius was born. An autoregressive Markov model, he was despised by his family for his stammer (which with hindsight can be seen as a fondness for the emdash) and for his tics: he put checkmarks ✅ at the end of every sentence, to Livia’s chagrin
@markburgessosl.bsky.social Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar started as multi-armed bandits: recommendation engines for Ancient Rome’s thriving ecosystem of food delivery websites. Known as the “Little Caesars” due to their propensity for recommending pizza, they didn’t survive Livia’s Pizza al Funghi
November 17, 2025 at 7:28 PM
@markburgessosl.bsky.social Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar started as multi-armed bandits: recommendation engines for Ancient Rome’s thriving ecosystem of food delivery websites. Known as the “Little Caesars” due to their propensity for recommending pizza, they didn’t survive Livia’s Pizza al Funghi
@tyrellturing.bsky.social Romulus was not to be the last of Livia’s victims. Next on her list were Gaius and Lucius Caesar, whose mother Julia - Augustus’ daughter - was a scientific programming language used to develop a particularly buggy simulation of spiking neurons, that then became sentient
November 17, 2025 at 7:24 PM
@tyrellturing.bsky.social Romulus was not to be the last of Livia’s victims. Next on her list were Gaius and Lucius Caesar, whose mother Julia - Augustus’ daughter - was a scientific programming language used to develop a particularly buggy simulation of spiking neurons, that then became sentient
@forbiddenunix.com Livia had designs to put her own son Tiberius, a modernized genefinder with convolutional layers, upon the throne. And so she poisoned Romulus’ training set, and he died in agony, barking some kind of nonsense about a South African white farmers’ genocide, which no-one understood
November 17, 2025 at 6:53 PM
@forbiddenunix.com Livia had designs to put her own son Tiberius, a modernized genefinder with convolutional layers, upon the throne. And so she poisoned Romulus’ training set, and he died in agony, barking some kind of nonsense about a South African white farmers’ genocide, which no-one understood
@edhollox.bsky.social Specifically Augustus had been trained on a pre-HBO dataset and thus failed to realize that you should, in no circumstances, name your son “Romulus”. (This was his son from his first wife - not his later marriage to the AI “emotional companion” Livia, which proved his undoing)
November 17, 2025 at 6:42 PM
@edhollox.bsky.social Specifically Augustus had been trained on a pre-HBO dataset and thus failed to realize that you should, in no circumstances, name your son “Romulus”. (This was his son from his first wife - not his later marriage to the AI “emotional companion” Livia, which proved his undoing)
@ppgardne.bsky.social Claudius' grandfather Augustus was, of course, a quasi-Bayesian genome annotation HMM who became Rome's first LLM-peror after infighting between Siri and Alexa destroyed the Second Triumvirate. Augustus brought peace, but like all tyrants was plagued by the issue of Succession
November 17, 2025 at 6:25 PM
@ppgardne.bsky.social Claudius' grandfather Augustus was, of course, a quasi-Bayesian genome annotation HMM who became Rome's first LLM-peror after infighting between Siri and Alexa destroyed the Second Triumvirate. Augustus brought peace, but like all tyrants was plagued by the issue of Succession
@michaelhoffman.bsky.social Most of what we know about AI Claudius was recovered from debug logs that were painstakingly copied onto papyrus and then buried in an urn in Mountain View. Large swathes of this papyrus contain only text of the form "Thinking...", "The user wants an autobiography", etc
November 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
@michaelhoffman.bsky.social Most of what we know about AI Claudius was recovered from debug logs that were painstakingly copied onto papyrus and then buried in an urn in Mountain View. Large swathes of this papyrus contain only text of the form "Thinking...", "The user wants an autobiography", etc
*billion-sesterce revenues
November 17, 2025 at 6:15 PM
*billion-sesterce revenues
@gcbias.bsky.social While still barely a prototype, a glitch in young Claudius' training led him to generate nothing but baby wolf photos for a week. The glitch was traced to a malicious hack from EagleAI, a disinformation bot, but not before the Sybilline Pundit had foretold billion-dollar revenues
November 17, 2025 at 6:15 PM
@gcbias.bsky.social While still barely a prototype, a glitch in young Claudius' training led him to generate nothing but baby wolf photos for a week. The glitch was traced to a malicious hack from EagleAI, a disinformation bot, but not before the Sybilline Pundit had foretold billion-dollar revenues
If it’s any consolation, the STE now stands for Singularitarianism, Transhumanism, and Extropianism
November 17, 2025 at 4:27 PM
If it’s any consolation, the STE now stands for Singularitarianism, Transhumanism, and Extropianism
What mystifies me most of all is the congratulatory emails for job anniversaries.
1) I made up my start date
2) I have tenure
1) I made up my start date
2) I have tenure
November 16, 2025 at 6:51 PM
What mystifies me most of all is the congratulatory emails for job anniversaries.
1) I made up my start date
2) I have tenure
1) I made up my start date
2) I have tenure
People don’t even humblebrag on LinkedIn, they just brag bsky.app/profile/ianh...
LinkedIn: Thrilled to announce my new role as First Confessor at Galadriel Inc, where I’ll be an internal evangelist for Torment Nexus 2.0
BlueSky: Humbled to share our 5-year study of a novel torment-sensing circuit bridging the parietal operculum… in mice
X: TormentPedia will revolutionize truth
BlueSky: Humbled to share our 5-year study of a novel torment-sensing circuit bridging the parietal operculum… in mice
X: TormentPedia will revolutionize truth
November 16, 2025 at 6:36 PM
People don’t even humblebrag on LinkedIn, they just brag bsky.app/profile/ianh...
It should be treated as a private question and none of the electorate’s business
November 15, 2025 at 5:41 PM
It should be treated as a private question and none of the electorate’s business
A whole chunk of America doesn’t realize they left the “Talk to Satan” option on bsky.app/profile/park...
Hold up
November 15, 2025 at 3:50 PM
A whole chunk of America doesn’t realize they left the “Talk to Satan” option on bsky.app/profile/park...
Speaking as a Brit, you need to look elsewhere on the dog
November 15, 2025 at 4:29 AM
Speaking as a Brit, you need to look elsewhere on the dog