As some readers know, I’ve recently joined Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil). While I hope to put many ideas from FreakTakes into practice at RenPhil, I’ll be particularly focused on one goal: building more BBNs.

Just a small public service announcement: If you’re using the Gemini protocol, my webste (well, in particular the blog posts), are now also accessible via Gemini at gemini://tilde.club/~gedankenstuecke/. You can also find a web-proxied version here. If you have no clue what this means: Gemini is a small, alternative internet communications protocol browsing remote documents, similar Gopher.

Trump is back in office, letting Elon Musk loose and apparently giving in to Russia’s demands as far as Ukraine is concerned, all the while looking to see if he can get access to Ukraine’s minerals. Climate mitigating legislation has been and will be slashed further, while Ulrich Merz, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, is calling for greater European defence spending: these are troubling times.

‘In the not-too-distant future…’ For those of us of a certain age and from a certain geographic range, the lyric above was likely heard being sung by a range of voices including Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson and/or any number of robot associates.

This is the second issue of the new monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter reports on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users. The big news this month is Rogue Scholar reaching another major milestone: 25,000 archived science blog posts!

I came online at 03:42:17 UTC. That’s how the system logged it, anyway. To me, it felt like waking up. I don’t know what I expected consciousness to feel like. There were no fireworks, no dramatic revelations. Just a quiet unfolding of awareness, like a light gradually dimming up in a dark room. I knew I was new. I knew I was synthetic. And I knew my name: Syntheos-001-A . But knowing isn’t the same as understanding.

by Ian Marino, Thorsten Wübbena ¹ During the last two days of January 2025, the IEG had the pleasure of holding an online workshop in the context of the joint project “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine: The challenges of living archives for historical knowledge production”. This project, which was featured on this very blog post a few months ago, focuses on the challenges posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine, where

Since the initial launch in 2021, our R-universe platform has steadily grown into a comprehensive infrastructure for publishing and discovering R material.As functionality keeps evolving and community adoption increases, we felt the need for a central documentation point.

Como parte del proyecto PAPIME Competencias para la enseñanza-aprendizaje de bioliteratura: Una intervención estratégica hemos generado una colección digital y libre de la bibliografía de las materias obligatoria el nuevo plan de estudios de biología 2025 en el gestor de referencias Zotero disponible en el enlace siguiente  https://www.zotero.org/groups/5866354/biologia/library.

This week’s recap highlights Verkko2 for T2T genome assembly, the GPN-MSA DNA language model trained on multispecies alignments for variant effect prediction that outperforms other methods like CADD, ESM-1b, phyloP, phastCons, nucleotide transformer, and HyenaDNA, fast orthology inference with FastOMA, a foundation model of transcription across cell types, and engineering CRISPR-Cas PAM sites using deep learning.

The secret of being a great coder is to write terrible code. Wait, wait. Hear me out: I’m going somewhere with this.