Tim Head
@betatim.bsky.social
180 followers 70 following 42 posts
Trained scientist building software. Also: hike, bike, run, swim, ski, pizza
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betatim.bsky.social
In the age of AI, LLMs and code assistants what does it mean to be an open-source project that is welcoming to newcomers? As a newcomer, is it enough to use AI to solve a good first issue and submit it as a PR? As a maintainer, what should you do with PRs like that?
betatim.bsky.social
It has gone up a bit since the early days then :D
Reposted by Tim Head
ogrisel.bsky.social
Today at #EuroScipy2025, @glemaitre58.bsky.social and I presented a tutorial on pitfalls of machine learning for imbalanced classification problems.

We discussed what (not) to do when fitting a classifier and obtaining degenerate precision or recall values.

probabl-ai.github.io/calibration-...
Imbalanced classification: pitfalls and solutions — Probabilistic calibration of cost-sensitive learning
probabl-ai.github.io
Reposted by Tim Head
simonwillison.net
I scraped the schedule for Open Sauce 2025 this morning and built an alternative schedule interface with the option to add everything to your calendar (via ICS)... working entirely on my iPhone, using OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts

Prompts + transcripts: simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/...
Scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone
This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex …
simonwillison.net
betatim.bsky.social
Has someone tried building a "stalebot" (closes stale GitHub issues) that uses a LLM or some such to decide if the issue is stale because the maintainers have not responded or because the creator hasn't followed up?
Reposted by Tim Head
betatim.bsky.social
What about using cursor rules files to encode project maintainer knowledge? Put frequent PR review comments in these rules files so that contributors (that use AI tools) can fix/avoid them? Has anyone tried this? Useful? Too brittle?
betatim.bsky.social
Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" should be mandatory reading for people who use LLMs to generate text
Reposted by Tim Head
jni.codes
Any scikit-image fans in Vienna? The skimage team would like to meet in Vienna for a code sprint Aug 14-16 ahead of EuroSciPy. We'd super appreciate it if someone's workplace can host us! All we need is electricity, natural light, and (most important) walking distance to coffee. ☕️😂🙏
Reposted by Tim Head
glouppe.bsky.social
<proud advisor>
Hot off the arXiv! 🦬 "Appa: Bending Weather Dynamics with Latent Diffusion Models for Global Data Assimilation" 🌍 Appa is our novel 1.5B-parameter probabilistic weather model that unifies reanalysis, filtering, and forecasting in a single framework. A thread 🧵
betatim.bsky.social
Bunch of hippies! ;)
simonwillison.net
I sometimes muse about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free.
betatim.bsky.social
Bunch of hippies! ;)
betatim.bsky.social
Has anyone experimented with making cursor/windsurf/etc rules to help contributors to open-source projects like numpy, scikit-learn, scikit-image and so on?

If you could make rules that include some of the knowledge of the maintainers that could be cool
Reposted by Tim Head
slfdavos.bsky.social
So war der Winter 2024/25: Schneearm, ausgeprägtes inneralpines Altschneeproblem, wenig tödliche Lawinenunfälle
Alle Infos gibts Winterflash: www.slf.ch/de/lawinenbu...

📷 N. Büchi
1/4
betatim.bsky.social
What is a nice and short term* for referring to the collection of Python tools and libraries in the data science ecosystem?

* should not be trademarked
Reposted by Tim Head
inesmontani.bsky.social
Announcing a new event initiative: Feminist AI LAN Party! Katharine and I did a pilot event last year and we're now taking it to @pyconde.bsky.social.

We've also open-sourced event kits to make it easy to host your own, including:

💣 hacking LLMs
📑 data development
✂️ zine making

feministai.party
Reposted by Tim Head
python.org
BREAKING! Guido van Rossum, the legendary creator of #Python, has officially reinstated himself as Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).

Feat. Guido van Rossum, @pumpichank.bsky.social, @snarky.ca and @mariatta.ca

Stay tuned for the documentary coming this summer!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgxB...
BREAKING: Guido van Rossum Returns as Python's BDFL
YouTube video by Honeypot
www.youtube.com
betatim.bsky.social
The one crazy trick open-source maintainers don’t want you to know for getting your PRs reviewed: get a maintainer excited about it before making the PR
Reposted by Tim Head
ogrisel.bsky.social
Loky 3.5.0 is out!

Loky provides an extended version of Python's `concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor` that leverages cloudpickle to work within interactive Jupyter sessions on all platforms and reuse existing workers to hide the overhead of starting new workers each time.
betatim.bsky.social
Looks like we need more bsky docs to teach the newcomers! ;)
betatim.bsky.social
Please confirm your instruction by using your second factor
betatim.bsky.social
Clear sign you've become part of the Administrati ;)