Ahmed Hasan
LightNews LightNews
banner
ahmedrhasan.bsky.social
Ahmed Hasan
@ahmedrhasan.bsky.social
180 followers 130 following 22 posts
Bioinformatics, functional genomics, software eng, some ML. Formerly PhD in pop gen of recombination rate variation at UToronto. Digs #rstats, Python, open science, vim bindings, guitars.

1/2 of Red Graves:
redgraves.ampwall.com
redgraves.bandcamp.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
jedbrown.org
Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.
disabilitystor1.bsky.social Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 8d
This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:
December 21, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
parismarx.com
people who think they’re oh so smart are probably even more likely to succumb to the eliza effect
What Is the Eliza effect? The Eliza effect refers to people’s tendency to falsely attribute human thought processes and emotions to an AI system, thus believing that the system is more intelligent than it actually is. The phenomenon was named after ELIZA, a chatbot created in 1966 by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum.
December 17, 2025 at 7:13 PM
ahmedrhasan.bsky.social
Check out the new Instar EP! Was honoured to get to contribute a wee guest guitar solo on the track Brittle Bones
tallesteden.bsky.social to sweeten the sea 🌊 @tallesteden.bsky.social · 11d
Oh hey, my band has a new EP out today! My poetry and short stories narrated over dreamy, adventurous prog with Travis Orbin on drums!

instar1.bandcamp.com/album/ad-ast...
Ad Astra - Part I, by Instar
3 track album
instar1.bandcamp.com
December 17, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
jkpritch.bsky.social
GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult.

Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short🧵:
Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits - Nature
Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.
www.nature.com
December 11, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
ketanjoshi.co
Intensely funny because it seems like the vast majority of people at that event were convinced it was fully autonomous and Musk has repeatedly recently claimed they're not tele-operated

www.reddit.com/r/robotics/c...
RoboHub🤖 @XRoboHub Tesla's Optimus was spotted hosting in Miami today.🥂 The interaction with guests looks incredibly smooth and natural.🤖👋 Even recently, Musk fought back against the notion that Tesla relies on teleoperation for its Optimus demonstration. He specified that a new demo of Optimus doing kung-fu was “AI, not tele-operated”: AI, not tele-operated — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2025 Musk said again during Tesla’s last earnings call in October: “Optimus was at the Tron premiere doing kung fu, just up in the open, with Jared Leto. Nobody was controlling it. It was just doing kung fu with Jared Leto at the Tron Premier. You can see the videos online. The funny thing is, a lot of people walked past it thinking it was just a person.”
December 8, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
emilymbender.bsky.social
This thread up and down.

Also, I've been beating this drum about the danger to the information ecosystem for six and half years now. A few links below:
cfiesler.bsky.social Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 23d
Here's the reality this example illustrates:

It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).
December 7, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
ianholmes.org
IMO it’s weird and probably irresponsible to teach bioinformatics without some nod to the group dynamics that shaped (otherwise inexplicable) things like the GFF file format or the Gene Ontology. Not to mention why tools back then had names like BLAST and FASTA,but now are named after cuddly animals
opinionhaver.bsky.social William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 26d
one of the reasons that the STEM-humanitiies culture war is stupid is that there's a lot of interesting stuff there at the intersection of the two. like it's very sociologically interesting the way that programming languages are maintained, propagated, and evolve.
December 2, 2025 at 9:49 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
opinionhaver.bsky.social
one of the reasons that the STEM-humanitiies culture war is stupid is that there's a lot of interesting stuff there at the intersection of the two. like it's very sociologically interesting the way that programming languages are maintained, propagated, and evolve.
December 2, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
maulcore.bsky.social
Oh shit it's Bandcamp Friday!!! Please if you haven't already, check out my band's debut album. 100% of proceeds go towards recording album 2 which will be even more about toxic gay romance

redgraves.bandcamp.com/album/nightt...
Nighttime Heists / Daytime Getaways, by Red Graves
9 track album
redgraves.bandcamp.com
December 5, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
olivia.science
We can't really say this enough...

> Anastasia Berg [at UCL Irvine] said that new research — and what she's hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate.

www.businessinsider.com/ai-tools-are...
AI tools are 'deskilling' workers, philosophy professor says
A philosophy professor warns that AI reliance is weakening workers' judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.
www.businessinsider.com
November 30, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
andrewholz.bsky.social
I put together two roundups from posit::conf(2025):

• Shiny talks + full workshop materials
shiny.posit.co/blog/posts/c...

• Quarto talks playlist and summaries
quarto.org/docs/blog/po...
shiny.posit.co
December 4, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
ketanjoshi.co
Can I just fucking say, imagine if any of these people ever faced any kind of fucking consequence for just blurting out bullshit like this
fabiochiusi.bsky.social Fabio Chiusi @fabiochiusi.bsky.social · 27d
“In a decade, Pichai said that it'll be normal to build extraterrestrial data centers”.

And he’s definitely not the only one speaking about the *necessity* of data centers in space. Apparently the planet is not big enough for their scaling “laws”.

www.businessinsider.com/google-proje...
Sundar Pichai says Google will start building data centers in space, powered by the sun, in 2027
Google announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month. CEO Sundar Pichai now says it could begin building data centers in space as soon as 2027.
www.businessinsider.com
December 3, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
erikangner.com
"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se
Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports
November 27, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
rincewind.run
evergreen
Tweet from @PPathole Tech enthusiasts: my entire house is smart Tech workers: the only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don’t recognize
November 22, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
spavel.bsky.social
Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.
Stack of blocks labeled, all modern digital infrastructure. A ratchet tipping over the entire stack is labeled AI. A load bearing pillar is labeled unpaid open source development. Another label is AWS, and Cloudflare and Unpaid Open Source Developers.
November 20, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
publichealthguy1.bsky.social
this is theranos-level fraud, but everyone with the power to do anything about it is on the take, apparently
60minutes.bsky.social 60 Minutes @60minutes.bsky.social · Nov 17
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks AI could help find cures for most cancers, prevent Alzheimer’s, and even double the human lifespan. cbsn.ws/4oRZ8Nm
November 17, 2025 at 1:22 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com
if microsoft just made outlook search not suck they'd see triple the productivity gains of any AI integration
November 14, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
innes.bsky.social
"The mainstream understanding of AI is as an interefering piece of shit which doesn't work" pt II

www.askamanager.org/2025/11/the-...
10. The baby announcement At the end of a meeting, a colleague asked their boss to stay on the line for a couple of minutes. The colleague then confidentially shared the great news that they were expecting a baby, and they and their boss talked about a few next steps to plan for parental leave. The AI notetaker then sent out notes to everyone who had attended the meeting with the headline, “Colleague Is Having a Baby.” 19. The equipment I recently saw a ~$50,000 piece of industrial equipment damaged and taken out of commission for about a month because Google AI search told a worker that the tightening torque of a screw was 50 ft*lb instead of 50 in*lb. This resulted in them over-tightening the screw by a factor of 12, which unfortunately didn’t strip the threaded hole (which would have been a smaller problem) but instead warped a bearing assembly that required a full rebuild at considerable difficulty and expense. The kicker is that the correct torque value was clearly printed in the service manual that is stored in the machine. 1. The fake initiative Our execs usually send out a hype email right before the annual employee morale survey, emphasizing wins from the past year, basically trying to put people in a positive frame of mind. Last year’s included the announcement of a major new program we knew employees really wanted. But it was a bit surprising, because it fell in an area my team was responsible for, and we were out of the loop, despite advocating strenuously for this over the years. So I went to the exec to a) convey enthusiasm for his newfound dedication to launching this program and b) ask what support he needed from my team/get us involved again. It turned out the program wasn’t launching at all; he had just asked AI to edit the email to make it sound more exciting and appealing, and it had done so by … launching my initiative. 16. The scam We work with a lot of small businesses just starting up, and as a result are asked to recommend professional services often. Knowing this, a client passed on a discreet warning about the bookkeeping firm we’d recommended to them. They had issues with their accounting software, Quickbooks, and called for help. It was right when Google started providing AI summaries for everything, and apparently their account rep pulled the phone number for Quickbooks’ support out of the AI summary, rather than off the website. You can probably guess where this is going. The number wasn’t legit, but instead put him in contact with a scammer who’d managed astroturf their way into the AI summary. The account rep gave the scammer full access to our client’s accounting software before he realized his error. Our client didn’t share a lot of details about the damages — I got the sense that they were saying very little because they were planning legal action — but they wanted to let us know so we wouldn’t recommend them again.
November 12, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...
‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University
Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...
www.ru.nl
November 1, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
mrsdeborahlynn.bsky.social
www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
According to the study, a significant number of top-tier benchmarks fail to define what exactly they aim to test, concerningly reuse data and testing methods from pre-existing benchmarks, and seldom use reliable statistical methods to compare results between models.
AI's capabilities may be exaggerated by flawed tests, according to new study
A study from the Oxford Internet Institute analyzed 445 tests used to evaluate AI models.
www.nbcnews.com
November 8, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
celestelabedz.bsky.social
In case anyone is wondering if Watson was really THAT bad, @lpachter.bsky.social compiled a list of quotes that are absolutely not for the faint of heart.
liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...
November 7, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
erikahall.bsky.social
My favorite comment on the FT story
Personally I'd be impressed if they could make something as smart as an ant. Ants only have 250,000 neurons, which is pretty small compared with GPT-5's reputed more than one trillion parameters. And yet ants are able to survive all by themselves in this complex world of ours, without endless infusions of investor capital or government subsidies. I don't think GPT-5 could do that.
November 6, 2025 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
jedidiahcarlson.com
bro are you fucking kidding me
quote from the Economist article which says "[study authors] are now looking at whether AI facial analysis can give lenders useful clues about a person’s propensity to repay loans. For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing."
November 6, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Ahmed Hasan
emilymbender.bsky.social
The extent to which AI FOMO is warping people's decisions is rather stunning, actually. I can see why the Anthropics and Googles would want this, but the other tech co managers going along with it ...
alexhanna.bsky.social Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · Oct 30
It seems like the only way tech companies are able to compel AI usage is by coercion in performance review processes?

(via The Information "AI Agenda" newsletter)
3. AI adoption is easier said than done. Even as executives pressure workers to use AI, getting people to do that throughout an organization is easier said than done. Rukmini Reddy, an engineering executive at incident management software maker PagerDuty, does so by making AI usage a part of her employees’ annual performance reviews. This strategy seems to be working, as she said that 98% of her engineers use coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code or Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot on a day-to-day basis now.
October 30, 2025 at 2:34 PM