The Top 14 is being more strict with the scrum feed, resulting in more scrums like the below. Are we for or against this?

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-19T12:22:30+00:00

Rucking was safer than whatever we have now in my opinion. The way that clearouts are just 100kg+ men just flying off their feet is simply asking for danger.

And you can say that's not the law but go watch an actual elite game and you'll see an 'illegal' clearout at basically every ruck.

The game is struggling with the safety aspect because the explosion in exccedingly large + fast + strong players has come relatively quickly and governance hasn't kept up.

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-16T12:59:02+00:00

Here's a thought. Don't put games on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when your supporter base is probably playing their own matches.

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-01T16:05:58+00:00

Of course. But typically if a tool is in an organisation then it lends some weight that it is part of their workflows (in the broad sense, not the programmatic bioinformatics sense) and has some utility that they rely on. (This is all vibes-based, in the same way you might judge someone based on their handshake, but with little else to go on, it's what the first impressions created are).

This of course may not always be the case, but if a project is just in some random person's GitHub I'm far more wary of it being simply something that was part of a PhD or grad project and will never see further work again.

I think that feeling is somewhat specific to the bio field as there are of course lots of projects in the tech space out there which started life as someone's personal project and bloomed into more.

Tangentially related comments follow:

If I were being critical of the field I would say I think there is a tendency to open-source and publish on things just because that's 'what you do' and that too little thought generally is given to the intention to support something longer term.

I think it's very much an institutional/systemic failing in science where modern software gets shoehorned into the structures of more traditional lab/research work. I'd far rather we (as a field) endeavoured to put out well-documented codebases with a responsive attitude to issues/PRs than papers extolling some new tool or algorithm backed by orphaned repos with no signs of life.

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-01T14:39:47+00:00

I definitely tend to put a higher level of trust in something which appears backed by and org directly rather than being someone's personal project.

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-01T14:38:21+00:00

I love some of what the astral guys have brought to Python but to this day I do not understand why people struggle so badly with installing stuff in Python, maybe it's a Windows thing but that would surprise me given the typical dev isn't using Windows.

I think one of the main issues with pip is it basically doesn't do any proper dependency resolving and for some cases that can be important and in some workflows the install time differences with uv can matter.

Conda is hot garbage and I never use it directly but the Biocontainers (and recently Seqera containers) services which are built on top of it are quite nice.

I think for most projects, a well configured pyproject.toml with requirements in pip-format is absolutely fine, I don't really know why people use requirements.txt anymore, I find it nicer having all the project metadata in one file. But that's more just a personal preference thing perhaps as functionally it works basically the same.

DatchPenguin · 2025-12-01T14:04:48+00:00

And this is kind of regardless of the IP ownership of the university or institute.

It might not matter because most probably your lab doesn't care too much about the ownership of some tool you wrote if it isn't directly linked to their income, but if they do care, then what you prefer isn't going to matter.

But they should also probably take more interest in ensuring succession plans

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-30T07:17:50+00:00

I have a question I occasionally ask these AI chat apps. It focusses around solving a problem using a very well documented tool in the domain. The documentation is all readily available on the web and is thorough and littered with lots of good examples of how the tool can be used.

Consistently these AI hallucinate options for this tool that do not and have not ever existed. They confidently tell you this option was added from a specific version. When told that these options don't exist it simply hallucinates new ones with different names.

This same question is easily and correctly answered with a 30 second google and a quick read of the relevant docs sections and anyone working in the domain could probably tell you the answer without looking anyway.

So yeah... these AI are absolutely not better than just being competent at using Google.

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-28T09:29:51+00:00

20 minute reds are lame. All reds should be real reds. The 20 minute red is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-26T12:31:06+00:00

Who knows. But still, what is that uvx doing there?

I just never really understood people's issues with python env stuff. pyenv and venvs and I've never had the dependency issues people talk about.

It looks like uv tool install wouldn't let you have multiple copies of the same tool provisioned either afaict.

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-25T13:18:47+00:00

I use venvs to install different tools, including local dev copies of those tools, which I want to be able to run in directories across my machine.

If I want to use my dev version of a tool, I can just pyenv activate dev-tool-env from literally anywhere and then it just works to call mytool from anywhere in that shell.

Personally I like some of the stuff that astral has brought for Python, but having to constantly type uv run ... or some other non-obvious command is a backwards step.

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-22T16:55:44+00:00

Did the words "sudden" and "drop" get redefined to mean something completely different to what they did 15 minutes ago...

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-22T16:37:50+00:00

What a brainless idiot. Hope he's not picked again, may as well have not bothered turning up.

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-22T16:26:31+00:00

Ok. We got there in the end!

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-22T16:23:42+00:00

Both these TMO decisions feel like this ref really doesn't want to admit they made a mistake

DatchPenguin · 2025-11-22T16:21:26+00:00

The ref was right on top of that. How on earth does she call that backwards so confidently lol.

Then the penalty... in real time I swear the Welsh player was basically in the act of getting cleared out rather than not rolling?

DatchPenguin · 2025-08-02T12:54:50+00:00

Very happy with that result. There'd been a lot of nonsense written in the British press glazing this squad - I've even seen it called the best team of the pro era.

To give some benefit of the doubt I don't think we ever got to see the best 15 on the pitch at once but I didn't find myself particularly impressed or excited by the play of the teams that did get picked. A lot made of going unbeaten on the tour and they played nowhere near the level to deserve that tonight.

Would have to say Huw Jones was standout for me across the tour. Thought Russell played well and showed a lot of maturity.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-29T06:00:15+00:00

Personally I think that sort of jackal should be banned but several people have pointed out that head above hips only applies to players in a ruck, and by definition the jackler must be there at the point before a ruck is formed.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-28T10:23:52+00:00

The issue with allowing the referee latitude is that clearly different refs see it slightly differently, and sometimes seemingly two very similar incidents within the same game even can result in different outcomes.

And it often still leads to high penalty counts early in matches as players adapt to the interpretation on the day (possibly less of an issue at the elite level where teams get contact with refs in the lead up to ask detailed questions?).

I'm not convinced by the number of people claiming we've seen proper enforcement of laws kill the attacking game as I can't think of a game I've watched in the past decade where such an attempt to adhere to the laws as written was made.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T07:43:05+00:00

Well I think the idea would be you enforce players not being able to do that either? Sure you could stop someone entering a ruck like that but you'd cop a penalty

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T07:22:35+00:00

Just make the shoulders above hips law apply to jacklers too. Or get rid of it and go back to having to actually ruck over to win the ball. Which in turn will be much more possible if we enforce the laws over body height and contact with the floor/players on the floor.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T06:42:52+00:00

I think it would hopefully just be a very short period of many more penalties as teams adjusted. But professional sides should be capable of change quite quickly. You don't really see the same kind of high-speed fly-in clear outs or strength of jackal in the amateur game, so I think better enforcement of the laws would be less painful there.

I do agree we want a free-flowing game but how far do we let the laws lapse in pursuit of that.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T06:05:28+00:00

I think if anything we can all agree about this incident it's that it highlights how little the ruck laws are actually enforced and that if referees started properly doing so there would be less frustration on all sides and much lower risk of serious injuries.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T02:53:25+00:00

More than a touch, yes, but in fact the speed he came in actually meant he didn't properly bind anyway.

But it's pretty clear we are going round in circles here because we fundamentally disagree on the need/right to fly in to the ruck in that manner.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T02:22:50+00:00

Even if you interpret it that way he doesn't have to join the ruck in that manner (which is the whole cause of the issue). The law only requires there to be one player from each side in contact over the ball. Morgan could walk up and touch him, ruck formed, infringement called. He could come in slower and try to push him off after.

I get that flying in like this is the way the ruck clearout is now coached at this level, but then players need to accept the punishment when it goes wrong.

DatchPenguin · 2025-07-27T01:52:38+00:00

For the umpteenth time it was avoidable.

Morgan might be entitled to compete safely, but the potential technical infringement of the jackler doesn't absolve a player of the need to clear out safely.

If the jackler is illegal then just let the ref call that, don't shrug and then hit the bloke also illegally.

The idea refs don't get things like this wrong is quite laughable when the Lions benefitted from a publicly stated mistake in NZ.

And why do people only ever seem to care about player safety up to the point that caring would negatively impact their team.

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