← Feed

Posts

• View post

  New blog post: "Conviviality in computational science" https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html "Conviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools."

• View post

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/116505775795882237 An interesting view on software use in science. What this means is - gain in efficiency: less software to maintain, less friction in collaborations, etc. - fewer but more critical points of failure - potentially offset by improvements in funding and governance, but I am probably dreaming - reduced epistemic diversity: the chosen few software packages determine which scientific methods become consensual

• View post

  "HyperDoc - a hypermedia substrate for knowledge workers" My contribution to yesterday's "Substrates 2026" workshop. http://hyperdoc.wiki.khinsen.net/view/welcome-visitors/view/substrates-2026-workshop/view/hyperdoc---a-hypermedia-substrate-for-knowledge-workers

• View post

  Interesting remark by @k9ox in the FedWiki Matrix room: "I don't mind wiki being unreliable but I want to know why it isn't." This looks like a good framing for reproducibility issues in science as well. If something is not reproducible but it is generally understood why, that's OK - not nice, perhaps, but it's possible to work around it. But if you can't reproduce a result that everybody believes to be reproducible, that's a pro...

• View post

  @deech I expect FLOSS projects to move into one of two categories: those that attract the Jeff Dean archetype and those who reject it.

• View post

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116488267530388091 All I knew about Zig before reading this post is that it's a programming language in the C/C++/Rust subspace. I have no opinion at all about the language. But this post almost makes me want to use it, just because of its credible long-time plan to become and remain community-managed technology.

• View post

  @aartaka If you launch a petition, I'll sign it! For foreigners learning Russian, putting the dots on the ё is a big help. What's the point of having a near-perfect correspondence between phonetics and spelling but leaving out the final touch? The only excuse I would accept is wabi-sabi. 😉

• View post

  @flomaraninchi Et juste quelque pouets plus tard, je vois cet excellent exemple: https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/116448938967012441

• View post

  Lettre ouverte : Arrêtons l’adoption naïve des technologies de l’IA dans le milieu universitaire https://aeporreca.org/blog/lettre-ouverte-adoption-ia/ Traduction française d'une lettre ouverte internationale (par @olivia et al.) que vous pouvez signer dans l'original en anglais ici; https://openletter.earth/open-letter-stop-the-uncritical-adoption-of-ai-technologies-in-academia-b65bba1e

• View post

  @yaxu In many disciplines, LaTeX is the worst except for everything else. For my PhD thesis, I don't know any other tools that would have done the job. I needed not just standard mathematics, but non-standard math notation. That required writing TeX macros (not LaTeX), which is another circle of hell. But it was possible. If Markdown is good enough for you, consider yourself lucky!

• View post

  @screwlisp Unix interoperability is at a very low level: character streams. Every programming system support character streams. CL conditions are standard CL, but CL-only. Much less interoperable than character streams. And then, even inside the CL universe, I think your scheme requires interoperable programs to use the same conditions, i.e. have a common dependency. Maybe I got that wrong though. @dougmerritt

• View post

  @screwlisp It all depends on what you consider the key features of Unix pipes to be. Chaining operations is something you can do with function calls. Is that already "the same as Unix pipes"? For me, Unix pipes are about just-in-time composability between independently written programs. You don't get that with your condition hack because there needs to be a prior agreement on the conditions in all candidate components. @dougmerritt

• View post

  You can now sign up for the next session of the MOOC "Reproducible Research II: Practices and tools for managing computations and data" which opens on May 5th. https://www.fun-mooc.fr/en/courses/reproducible-research-ii-practices-and-tools-for-managing-comput/

• View post

  @brembs I'd say they are more than distractors, as they actively exploit the weaknesses of the ever more failing reviewing system.

• View post

  "Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers." Does this still surprise anyone? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

• View post

  Formation "Construction et animation d'une communauté autour du développement d'un logiciel libre" 30 juin - 2 juillet à Autrans La formation est ouverte et gratuite à tous les membres des laboratoires de recherche académique en France. https://animeopensource.sciencesconf.org/

• View post

  "Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences" A collection of four (paywalled) articles on reproducibility and replicability in the April 2 issue of Nature: https://www.nature.com/collections/idajfifcfg

• View post

  "Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?" http://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z After lots of technicalities: "In some cases, hallucinated citations might serve as a sign that the entire paper is fabricated, whether by an individual or a paper mill, a business that sells authorship slots. But the extent to which fabricated papers are contributing to the fake-citation problem is unclear."