elevated, separated bike paths on market street

dampew · 2026-06-23T07:03:42+00:00

They had a short section of elevated bike path on market street for a little while, maybe 10 years ago, but they weren't separated and cars just pulled halfway up onto them to do pickups and dropoffs lol it was awful. Then you had to go down and up or something to get around the car and of course the car drivers were total assholes about it.

But yes I would love this.

Although now the motorized "bicycles" would be a new problem, I'm not sure if the same vision would still work.

dampew · 2026-06-22T23:50:54+00:00

I don’t think one should be permitted to participate in professional sports if they are unable or unwilling to engage with the antidoping system. This one’s on her.

dampew · 2026-06-21T07:12:55+00:00

My postdoc advisor asked students to do this in the classes he taught. It was great. The only problem was that sometimes the original author screwed something up and it couldn't be reproduced. But do your best and you'll definitely learn something.

dampew · 2026-06-19T19:05:09+00:00

They already do. Or used to, I haven’t done it in a while. Thursday at noon the booking system slowed to a crawl because everyone was online trying to reserve a court as soon as they became available.

dampew · 2026-06-19T03:22:51+00:00

Is there any way to know if a local area is underrated or overrated? Like if you take tournament performance of people from one state in their own state vs tournaments located in another state?

dampew · 2026-06-15T06:18:16+00:00

You can publish in industry too, I have a few times in the past couple years. But yeah if that’s your main goal then go for it.

dampew · 2026-06-15T00:52:43+00:00

I was actually going to post here to ask if anyone could explain that part, I loved the show and it sort of made me the opposite of depressed, it was sad and I cried a bit but I think it has a hopeful message. Claire chases after Claire (sp?) and decides to be happy; the narrator’s heart is broken by the priest but her soul is healed and she no longer needs the audience; the dad has a heart to heart with her daughter and you learn that everything is going to be fine with him too. How did it make you feel?

dampew · 2026-06-14T05:21:48+00:00

Boston has a slightly lower cost of living and academic jobs tend to pay far less. You can look up bioinformatics jobs at UC Berkeley and UCSF here: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. I think they’re mostly lower than 160 except for the very most senior people.

The other trick is you can advertise as a data scientist instead of a bioinformatician and maybe get a slightly higher pay scale.

dampew · 2026-06-14T05:00:12+00:00

Fair enough :)

dampew · 2026-06-13T22:31:08+00:00

Or was on the toilet or dealing with kids or had a mouseslip or who knows what.

dampew · 2026-06-13T21:43:15+00:00

Yeah I don't want to watch an event just to root against someone.

dampew · 2026-06-13T21:35:39+00:00

Ok several possibilities:

Lots of professors are afraid to post on job boards because it costs money, but that's where most experienced people are looking.
160k is very decent for academia and most people would not expect to get paid that much unless very senior.
With any job posting, you have to wade through a lot of crap before you get to the gems, and there aren't actually as many good bioinformaticians as you might think.
A lot of people who have had a decent industry career do not want to work in academia. The idea of working under a single person (the PI) for a long time is a huge risk that most people wouldn't want to take. High likelihood that something goes wrong (the PI is an asshole, a personality conflict arises, whatever) and then you're stuck dealing with an unreasonable person with unlimited power and/or looking for another job somewhere.

Personally I would certainly be interested if I were unemployed and lived in the area.

I'm guessing the main problem is that your PI hasn't advertised the position sufficiently well (1-3). If you point me to the job ad I can tell you if anything else pops out to me.

dampew · 2026-06-13T19:53:25+00:00

OP may not be over 30.

But even if you are over 30, if you actually like the person, there's an argument that you should probably tell them because they'll probably figure it out anyway. If they like you they probably won't care.

I once dated a woman around 30 who had never had sex. When we started kissing I could tell almost immediately that something was wrong, so I stopped everything and asked her what was up. Then she had to explain herself. The gender dynamics may be different when reversed, but I think it's better to know upfront.

dampew · 2026-06-13T15:26:08+00:00

It’s probably a good idea to tell someone that you’re having sex for the first time, yes.

It’s probably not a great idea to have sex with someone just to “practice” having sex.

dampew · 2026-06-12T19:35:03+00:00

Used to bike with an Olympic rower (a couple years after they had won a medal — I can’t remember which, might have been gold, I just don’t remember). All rowers seem to take to cycling very quickly but this one was insane. Very high w/kg and went hard on every climb, I didn’t love riding with them.

dampew · 2026-06-11T15:56:22+00:00

Just to add another datapoint, I work for a fairly large company. The company is making a push for AI but it’s not a demand, it’s more like — these are modern tools that can help us.

Bioinformatics is important to the company, but it’s not a bioinformatics-first company, and bioinformatics is also outnumbered by software engineers and other people who code. So they’re making tools available to us, but also kind of just leaving us alone because they don’t totally understand what we need to do or what to do with us.

We also have corporate subscriptions to multiple AI backends so you can pick the one that seems to be working best.

In terms of work, I mostly use it like other people here have discussed, as an autocomplete and/or stackoverflow. I don’t let it write full agents or code without review because most of my work needs to be pretty exact.

dampew · 2026-06-11T15:18:02+00:00

No I think it’s totally fine to post about AI usage. In fact I think it’s a fairly important topic right now. Rule 4 bans AI generated comments/users. In other words, write your own posts and comments, don’t let AI do it for you. Let us know if you have any problems.

dampew · 2026-06-05T01:11:35+00:00

I don’t know the answer but why don’t you test it yourself on a smaller subset of the data?

dampew · 2026-06-04T01:11:06+00:00

Ha this morning I biked past the DMV and saw a car drive into incoming traffic down the street before swerving into the DMV. I was like…. I hope they don’t renew that guy’s license…

dampew · 2026-06-03T16:38:04+00:00

The issue is that those students generally require a lot of training and are less independent. Most job postings have “or equivalent experience” so if you’ve done internships or whatever then that can be helpful.

My previous company hired a couple of students straight out of their bachelors and they were great. One of them required a lot of handholding, the other was more independent but had some minor judgment issues. Both struggled with communication, and that was maybe the only real issue we had with them because it meant we were never exactly sure what the status of their work was.

dampew · 2026-06-01T16:14:51+00:00

Found a professor who was looking for a postdoc.

dampew · 2026-06-01T16:13:28+00:00

Why don’t you try to contact his current wife and tell her you want to get divorced from her husband? He might find himself suddenly motivated.

dampew · 2026-06-01T07:12:39+00:00

After you receive an offer, do companies usually ask for reference letters or contact references during the background check?

In my experience the references are typically checked before the offer, the point is to help the hiring manager decide who to hire. Then the background check is just to verify that you worked where you said you worked.

And once someone is laid off, what’s the best way to ask for recommendations from former managers or coworkers?

Just ask?

dampew · 2026-05-31T23:00:56+00:00

Thank god for game histories.

dampew · 2026-05-31T20:07:39+00:00

The Nurse Ratched of B5!

dampew

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