John F Wu
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jwuphysics.bsky.social
John F Wu
@jwuphysics.bsky.social
3.8K followers 650 following 1.2K posts
Tenure-track astronomer working on galaxies, machine learning, and AI for scientific discovery. Opinions my own. He/him.

Website: https://jwuphysics.github.io/
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jwuphysics.bsky.social
Registration closes today for the Astrophysics x NLP conference! Happening March 9-12!

www.stsci.edu/contents/eve...

#astronomy 🔭 🧪 🌌
The Langue AI in Space Sciences Workshop logo, featuring a cutout image from JWST with a "semantic space map" from the Pathfinder paper by Kartheik Iyer et al. (2024).
February 6, 2026 at 4:12 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
FWIW an LLM could never come up with a banger like this

(Reference: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXyr...)
“To LLMs! The cause of, and solution to, all of bibliographers’ problems.” (with a citation to The Simpsons, Swartzwelder and Anderson, 1997)
February 2, 2026 at 6:51 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
I agree, putting out a position or at least a disclosure is important. Here's one in a one of my recent papers (accepted to AI/NLP conference).
All of this text was written solely by the authors. The document was partially reviewed by LLMs, primarily gpt-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, in order to surface issues in clarity and prose. Some of the code in the associated repository is generated by LLMs, primarily via Claude Code. Having validated the software and results, the authors take full responsibility and ownership over the results presented here.
February 2, 2026 at 6:50 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
This was the Euro AIFS initialized yesterday; obviously an outlier as I was saying to @astromarc.bsky.social
January 20, 2026 at 6:00 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Yes.... Ha ha ha... Yes!
GFS showing major snow/ice precipitation event this weekend (early Sunday morning); with snow ranging from Texas/New Mexico all the way through Delmarva region.
January 20, 2026 at 12:54 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Also Bovino: can somebody around these parts send us a refresher on the first amendment?

www.kenklippenstein.com/p/immigratio...
ICE "legal refresher" From ICE legal refresher slide deck What is NOT a violation of 18 USC §111? - Passive resistance alone is NOT conduct under 18 USC §111 - Examples: - Noncompliance/refusal to cooperate with officer's commands - Disobeying commands without fighting back - Taking photographs or videotaping an officer or operation in public
January 13, 2026 at 3:09 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
POV when I make a cappucino in front of my Italian colleagues at 12:01 pm
meme of Italian guy 🤌 🤌 at a referee in a football
January 12, 2026 at 6:55 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Any Baltimoreans know where I can get this wallpaper? (Seen in Catalog Coffee)
Wallpaper with so many Bmore quirks: Camden Yards, cookout at M&T, Hampden Enoch Pratt library Patterson Park, Baltimore bench, Domino Sugars, man popping a wheelie in front of Bromo Seltzer Tower, black eyed susans, pair of Baltimore Orioles, legendary books.
January 9, 2026 at 2:34 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse except instead of a cat it's the fact that there exists a city in New Mexico named Truth or Consequences.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_o...
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or_Consequences,_New_Mexico The city changed its name from Hot Springs[8] to Truth or Consequences as the result of a radio show contest. In March 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of the NBC Radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced that he would air the program on its 10th anniversary from the first town that renamed itself after the show. In a special election on March 31, 1950, residents of Hot Springs voted 1294 to 295 to change the town’s name to Truth or Consequences,[9] and the program was broadcast there the following evening. Edwards visited the town during the first weekend of May for the next 50 years. This event became known as Fiesta and eventually included a beauty contest, a parade, and a stage show. The city still celebrates Fiesta each year during the first weekend of May. The parade generally features local dignitaries, last year's Miss Fiesta pageant queen, and the winner of Hatch Chile Queen pageant. Fiesta also features a dance in Ralph Edwards Park.[8]
January 6, 2026 at 5:53 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
the life and death of Stack overflow

Data from data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflo...
Graph showing Stack Overflow monthly number of questions, all time, starting from 0 in late 2008, linearly rising to about 200000 per month peaking in 2014, with a slow linear decline to about 100000 per month in 2023 (ChatGPT era), and then a rapid falloff to zero in late 2025.
January 4, 2026 at 1:40 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Apologies if I'm mistaken here, but I think that Eurosurveillance is a bona fide medical journal.
Wikipedia page: Eurosurveillance is an open-access medical journal covering epidemiology, surveillance, prevention, and control of communicable diseases with a focus on topics relevant for Europe. The journal is a non-profit publication and is published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
December 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Sorry, can't relate
December 15, 2025 at 2:28 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
First snowy day in Baltimore!
Scene of a snowy day in Baltimore. Light snow (1" dusting) in a residential neighborhood, with some trees, a street lamp, and covered sidewalk + grass
December 14, 2025 at 1:42 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2512.09174

New satellites in a compact dwarf group, discovered in HI, down to 10^6 M_HI/M_sun.

Very interesting to study these satellite systems surrounding LMC-like hosts!
Figure 3: Discovered Low Mass Satellites. The HI mor- phology of the isolated dwarf group dm1623 overlaid on a g-band optical image of the system. The HI contours are at the levels of 7.8, 10.4, 13.0, 18.2, 23.4, 28.7, 33.9, 39.1 × 1020 atoms cm −2, and the size of the restoring beam is indicated with the filled ellipse in the lower right hand corner. The arrows indicate the six dwarf group members with the let- tering scheme adopted in this work. The newly discovered low mass satellites (e and f) are easily identified via their gas content but are only barely visible in the optical image.
December 12, 2025 at 12:41 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Ever wished that galaxy spectral energy distribution fitting actually made use of galaxy morphology? See the ML4PS paper/poster led by Mikaeel Yunus at NeurIPS tomorrow!

Also check out the paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2512.05078!
Fig 3 from the paper, showing how the galaxy morphology helps break degeneracies in dust and age in SED fitting-like posterior inference.
December 5, 2025 at 4:31 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Same energy
Prompt: How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague? Response: 1/5 (radio button - not at all likely) Prompt: Please explain why you gave this score. Answer: I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another
December 4, 2025 at 3:04 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Honestly it's hard to compare because I think Lidl is actually trying to make ugly holiday sweaters.

Meanwhile Aldi is not playing around with their designs.

(My daughter was actually wearing the Aldi crewneck shown in the 2nd pic when we got groceries at Lidl today.)
Some Lidl ugly holiday sweaters for $12.99 Aldi crewneck sweater with the all caps, colorful letters "ALDI" plastered over it
December 1, 2025 at 3:34 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Ah whoops. The Light Eaters.

I so wanted to love this. But instead I felt like I was listening to the author's (uncritical) opinions which were formed through interviews with cranks...
November 28, 2025 at 4:23 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Our five year old is getting pretty good at jigsaw puzzles!
Completed custom puzzle featuring Orioles Bird in a white baseball with red laces. Lots of custom jigsaw pieces including the Orioles cursive logo and baseball players in various stances.
November 28, 2025 at 1:25 AM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
New software for astronomy visualization and outreach, where the lead dev (who is an amateur astronomer) mentions that LLM tools were used to assist development of this software.
In a first for the project, NOIRLab FITS Liberator 5 was made with the help of Claude Code and ChatGPT. “This method felt like a natural extension of the creative process we already use when visualizing the Universe,” said De Martin. “Instead of writing code line by line, I could focus on the result — the feel, the usability, the flow. It was a dialogue between human intuition and machine logic.”
November 27, 2025 at 5:40 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Beautiful shot, but worth noting:

[H]e then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo.

petapixel.com/2025/11/14/s...
Screenshot from Petapixel post, with the following text: Part of the reason the photo is so special is that McCarthy captured free-falling Brown silhouetted against the Sun’s chromosphere. To bring out that incredible light, McCarthy captures the star in hydrogen-alpha light, which reveals its fiery details that cannot be seen in normal white light. “It exceeded my expectations,” McCarthy says in an Instagram video while explaining that, after he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo. McCarthy shared a video showing the moment he told Brown to leap, the moment the photo was captured, and then the subsequent reaction of McCarthy and the team that was there with him in the desert. “I got it, dude!” McCarthy shouts excitedly in the video below.
November 25, 2025 at 2:38 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
If you're going to leave a bad review for La Maison/Cafe Dear Leon, then you better at least get your facts straight...
What struck me more, though, was the larger context. The use of the word “Sando,” a type of speak with Black American cultural influence, feels out of place when the space itself doesn’t seem to reflect or include the surrounding community. I didn’t see any Black staff during my visit, and the overall environment felt disconnected from the people who have lived in this area for generations. The word "sando" originates from Japanese. (See e.g. Wikipedia disambiguation page, Wiktionary, etc)
November 19, 2025 at 4:42 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Took a break from wrangling NSF grant application spreadsheets and instead decided to wrangle MLB team sentiment spreadsheets...
A giant matrix showing how MLB teams feel about other MLB teams. Based on survey data from Reddit's r/mlb. A block-diagonal highlights the divisional rivalries quite well.
November 12, 2025 at 3:30 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Me when my 14-month old throws up and interrupts my first full week of work since September
"that wasn't very cash money of you" meme with a dinosaur wearing shades
November 5, 2025 at 6:57 PM
jwuphysics.bsky.social
Honestly I'm just glad he shut up for a bit
"Schumer won't say who he voted for in New York City mayoral race"
November 5, 2025 at 2:51 AM