Recently @karinorman.bsky.social , @ctrlalttim.com @ecologyofgavin.bsky.social + I argued it's time we ecologists pay more attention to the carbon footprint of our tools. doi.org/10.1002/fee....
In this spirit: I give you the footprint of our local LLMs on NRP.ai carbon-api.nrp-nautilus.io
definitely true that most LLMs do better with SQL (though not perfect). Particularly curious to see how well open/local models do in grokking this new DSL or if they just hallucinate syntax.
🤯 @posit.co launches ggsql 🤯
- yes it is precisely what it sounds like.
- rust based stand-alone, needs vscode or jupyter (or merely wasm) to run
opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...
rustfs has `rc` S3 client?! It even matches the minio mc syntax? wow this is a good day. github.com/rustfs/cli
Because bulk S3 operations should be fast and easy. A simple R wrapper to rclone: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
supports most object stores, should be much faster paws/aws.s3 I think.
(also an alternative to minioclient since minio decided to become AIStor...)
looks like mechanism to manage credentials is essentially env vars for container, ('providers' in the docs).
But 'network policy' mechanism seems pretty neat docs.nvidia.com/openshell/la...
hmm, openshell looks pretty interesting: github.com/NVIDIA/OpenS...
basically just runs your agent in an OCI container (like we already do) but with networking etc locked down by default and controlled from an external instance.
Nice to see open innovation around hard controls instead of prompts
...and GitHub quietly removes Claude Sonnet/Opus from the its student plan mid semester... fun. 🙃
we're just about to dive into local models in 288 anyway but this is surely disruptive. If students are going to learn to use these tools they ought to know what the frontier tools are like
Wow, great time in Sacramento today with the annual inter-Agency Ecological Program. So many exciting questions and approaches, & great stories I hope to take back to my classroom. iep.ca.gov/Public-Engag...
Latest open artifacts (#19): Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 — Chinese labs' latest push of the frontier
Welcome to the year of the horse! I always learn something new doing these w Florian.
www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope...
folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense.
If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly.
If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.
Nice to see our work with NSF NAIRR pilot highlighted on their homepage: nairrpilot.org/projects/hig... It has certainly been a wild ride. Huge thanks to NSF and the fantastic team at NRP.ai for making this all possible
📣NEW in Mongabay: DSE's McKalee Steen & Magali de Bruyn share insights on how #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge and Indigenous digital sovereignty are key to creating #ResponsibleAI for achieving #conservation and environmental goals.
📰 Read the story now: bit.ly/4bqbrfG
We're hiring a full-time research software engineer for biodiversity & bioacoustics!
Position offers a strong research component with independence + research pub opportunities and real-world impact.
expected salary range $111K - $116K.
dse.berkeley.edu/news/were-hi...
Rather applaud JOSS's revised approach to deal with AI-based submissions. blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... , particularly with 'starting open' and at least 'six months developer history'. More of scholarly pub could benefit from such policies methinks.
it is kinda delightful to see that the open-source Continue.dev plugin fully supports modern MCP (resources, prompts), while GitHub Copilot plugin only supports tool docstrings. Now my continue.dev makes perfect tool calls using small/dumb open source LLMs, while CoPilot fails w/ frontier LLMs 🙃
Now @GitHub.com has postponing this to re-evaluate due to community outcry 😂
Have always considered moving to GitLab, whose k8s support is far better than GitHub's half-arsed ARC controller.
At the same time, teaching mainstream platforms has value for students...
Anyone have opinions on this?
Nope, I can’t really make students work public by default, which is why I had to set up a self-hosted runner in the first place.
Perhaps we will have to consider gitlab in future
Book cover for Reproducible Code guide. The cover has a red background with a large yellow-bodied black-headed stag beetle.
Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!
Argh! @github.com announces it will start charging even for *self-hosted* runners 😥. resources.github.com/actions/2026...
I have long relied on my self-hosted runners in my teaching to run automated 'reproducibility' checks. (The edu allocation is way too small for my large classes).
congrats, really exciting. do you do any benchmarks vs the swiss apertus models?
we released olmo 32b today! ☺️
🐟our largest & best fully open model to-date
🐠right up there w similar size weights-only models from big companies on popular benchmarks
🐡but we used way less compute & all our data, ckpts, code, recipe are free & open
made a nice plot of our post-trained results!✌️
image of gov gavin newsom and two DSE staff members smiling at the camera
Great to see you at #COP30, Governor @gavinnewsom.bsky.social!
Magali de Bruyn (R) and McKalee Steen (L) are leading several events @ COP30, including providing recommendations for how Indigenous communities can leverage tech and #DataScience to advance #EnvironmentalStewardship and #Sovereignty.
This seems important. Current AI models can't read graphs. They "see" what they expect to see, even if the data shows something else.
Excellent post! Saw this same issue in my classroom this year. Students try to replicate results from a handful of key global change papers. Some results are different, & bad NA-handling inverts one trend. frontier LLMs confidently assert they have reproduced the original results despite this.
Wow, rio-stac-io looks awesome! github.com/planetlabs/r...
Anyone have a chance to compare this to the odc-stac approach? ( @mdsumner.bsky.social 👀 ?)
Working with arm64, cuda drivers, and shared ram design can be a bit of a learning experience but overall was smoother than I expected.
The Spark is a remarkably capable machine for the price. Not just for LLMs (like gpt-oss-120b), but cuda-accel polars, & even as a shared jupyterhub
sad to be missing #jupytercon this week!
But small win, recently made my first PR to JupyterHub fancy-profiles to add support for ARM architecture.
& now I have JupyterHub running on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (via k3s).
Also have CUDA/RAPIDS based image in rocker for python+R envs, rocker/cuda:arm64
Raise your hand if you're going to #JupyterCon 🙋♀️ See you there @ucbids.bsky.social! #JupyterCon2025 #DataScience
