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dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Dangerous_Chipmunk
@dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
57 followers 27 following 82 posts
Robert R Butler III
Senior Research Scientist @ Stanford

I do genomics stuff with neurodegeneration & therapeutics.
Formerly, genomics stuff with neuropsychiatry.
Formerly (x2), genomics stuff with microbes (& humans/food).

posts are my own, etc.
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dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Pish posh, bubble shmubble!
Nvidia has become a driving force behind the US economy. Spending on data centers, which are filled with the company's chips, accounted for 92 percent of the country's gross domestic product growth in the first half of the year, according to Jason Furman, a professor of economic policy at Harvard. Without it, the economy would have grown 0.1 percent.
October 30, 2025 at 4:10 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
This is a fascinating hypothesis that places ASD/SCZ in the context of the evolution of sapience with the rapid expansion of layer 2/3 neurons under fitness selection. That might inform an exposure risk, but I think ties that spectrum to the existence of humanity itself. 🧪🧬🖥️ doi.org/10.1093/molb...
Although our results strongly suggest natural selection for down-regulation of ASD-linked genes, the reason why this conferred fitness benefits to our ancestors remains an open question. Answering this question is difficult in part because we do not know what human-specific features of cognition, brain anatomy, and neuronal wiring gave our ancestors a fitness advantage, but we can speculate about two general classes of evolutionary scenarios. First, down-regulation of ASD-linked genes may have led to uniquely human phenotypes. For example, haploinsufficiency of many ASD-linked genes is associated with developmental delay (Zug and Uller 2022), so their down-regulation could have contributed to the slower postnatal brain development in humans compared to chimpanzees. Alternatively, capacity for speech production and comprehension is unique to or greatly expanded in humans and often impacted in ASD and SCZ (Chang et al. 2022; Vogindroukas et al. 2022). If down-regulation of ASD-linked genes conferred a fitness advantage by slowing postnatal brain development or increasing the capacity for language, that could result in the signal of positive selection we observed. On the other hand, the down-regulation we observed may have been compensatory and reduced the negative effects of some other human-specific trait or traits. For example, the ratio of excitatory and inhibitory synapses on pyramidal neurons is fairly constant between humans and rodents despite massive differences in brain and neuron size (DeFelipe et al. 2002). In addition, excitatory-inhibitory imbalance is a leading hypothesis for the circuit basis of ASD (Sohal and Rubenstein 2019). Overall, more work is needed to understand how natural selection acting on the expression of ASD-linked genes in the human lineage may have shaped human phenotypes.
October 5, 2025 at 9:44 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Nature, please stop hyping the Mechanical Turk. Humans at the AI Scientist built this non-agent (at best a workflow). They did it with full knowledge they are using works under CC-BY which means they intended to violate those terms. Central to authorship is culpability. Thus a bot can't author.
Krueger, who is at the University of Montreal in Canada, told Nature that the related works should have been cited, but that he “wouldn’t be surprised to see human researchers reinvent this and miss previous work” too. “I think this AI system and others are not capable of achieving academic standards for referencing related work,” he said, adding that the AI paper was “extremely low quality overall”. But he wasn’t sure whether the word plagiarism should be applied, because he feels that term implies that the person (or AI tool) reusing methods was aware of earlier work, but chose not to cite it.
August 20, 2025 at 4:35 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
So we chained the doctor to a radiator and fed it moldy bread & water and for some reason it had trouble focusing on work. But I think we have to be fair to our toy right? What WE decide is fair, without peer review, and hidden from our vague, toothless white paper.
microsoft.ai/new/the-path...
Of course, our research has important limitations. Although MAI-DxO excels at tackling the most complex diagnostic challenges, further testing is needed to assess its performance on more common, everyday presentations. *the bad part* Clinicians in our study worked without access to colleagues, textbooks, or even generative AI, which may feature in their normal clinical practice.  This was done to enable a fair comparison to raw human performance.
July 7, 2025 at 5:12 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
[Doctor Kiosk inside Carl's Jr restroom]: You have exceeded your $2000 limit for care on this illness please die now or deposit two McLife tokens to continue...
microsoft.ai/new/the-path...
This kind of reasoning has the potential to reshape healthcare. *the bad part* AI could empower patients to self-manage routine aspects of care and equip clinicians with advanced decision support for complex cases. Our findings also suggest that AI reduce unnecessary healthcare costs *the bad part*. U.S. health spending is nearing 20% of US GDP, with up to 25% of that estimated to be wasted – per having little influence on patient outcomes.
July 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
My favorite alignment problem:
Problem: People hate passwords IT: Ok, we will force them to be super long and complex! Problem: People hate passwords IT: Ok, we will force them to expire frequently, so they write them on post-its and re-use them across sites! Problem: People hate passwords IT: Ok, we can also force them to use a second, time-sensitive, numeric password sent to their phone or email! If they don\'t have that they can access a stored list of one-time passwords they were already supposed to have generated in advance, even though we didn\'t tell them they had to do that. Problem: People. hate. passwords. IT: Ok, we finally did away with passwords, via device-specific cryptographic passkeys that no longer require storing or changing passwords... Problem: ...Ok? IT: ...and we can then tie this unnecessarily to biometric recognition via face or fingerprint with a PIN as a fallback! Problem: So...a password?
March 3, 2025 at 11:07 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
A major problem in grading LLMs is that peer review is qualitative. Doing stats on opinions of peer-review doesn't solve that. I remember a news piece where a room of people read identical horoscopes they thought were tailored to them. Was it accurate? Most said yes.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Mixed Reviews: Around 300 researchers asked to rate a large language model's ability to provide feedback on manuscripts found comments to be helpful and in alignment with comments from human reviewers. Half also said they would use the system again. But compared with human reviewers, most researchers also thought the AI feedback was less specific and tended to be less helpful.
January 2, 2025 at 9:12 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
My friend just said "this comic is my entire career". I would like to disagree, but I have to go define differential LR scores for an arbitrary number of exp. groups with an arbitrary number of spatial slides with an arbitrary number of celltypes with arbitrary combinations of ligands & receptors...
Xkcd comic: can you pass the salt? I said-- I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. ...It's been 20 minutes! It'll save time in the long run!
November 14, 2024 at 9:02 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Wow. That's a bananas way to announce your candidacy for Most toxic PI on campus...
Jonathan Berk opinion piece: It's hard to fathom the selfishness of our graduate students. Stanford owes its graduate students a world class education, not a living wage.
November 11, 2024 at 5:27 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
By a wide margin my favorite fake AI post. OpenAI should be desperate to claim it because that's about as authentic as dev responses get.
Query: The code you sent is throwing an error, can you try to fix it? ChatGPT 4o: It works on my machine.
May 25, 2024 at 3:45 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
With lots of posts of Google's AI nonsense, remember the fundamental alignment problem: these are language models, not knowledge models. It is not "just like Wikipedia" even though corpos desperately want you to think so. And pirates were not allowed in that f'ing bar I watched that episode again!
Wildly inaccurate AI. Louie was a stand up businessman running a respectable establishment...though apparently deeded based on squatters rights.
May 24, 2024 at 4:38 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
It definitely isn't a good idea to speculate too much on such sparse data, but since they do, this kind of stands out:
It almost seems like amyloid may be a contributor to disease pathology and progression but isn't entirely causal, excepting EOAD where mutations in the amyloid processing pathway are explicit. Shocking, I know...
November 14, 2023 at 7:22 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
See there's the disconnect between someone with experiential knowledge, and a CIO who only see's shareholder $$$. And yet we know who is going to win out in the final iteration. In a year he will be saying 'maybe we can just spot check the medical field, I bet it's pretty accurate...'
Spoken like a man who has never experienced CX at his own company.
September 12, 2023 at 4:43 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Sometimes bioinformatics is like the worst RPG 🧪🧬🖥️:
"Thank You Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle"
September 11, 2023 at 7:49 PM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
You love to see it...
No Johnny Fives, or I guess we're allowed to have a limited quantity.
August 21, 2023 at 12:44 AM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
It is a discord in genomics that bodes ill for precision medicine, often more motivated by revenue than actual need (primer article below). As a large amount of funding is available for D&I in research, a serious criterion for awards should be a concrete good that will benefit the studied group. 🧬🖥
For lowly heritable traits, the need to utilize these approaches versus basic societal interventions is dubious.
August 14, 2023 at 12:34 AM
dangerouschipmunk.bsky.social
Oh good the closed-source, profit-driven LLMs will be myopic in their hallucinations. Remember folks, it doesn't matter what you say in your publication, only what the most popular algorithm thinks of the most popular papers in the last five years...
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02470-3
Because research is always helped by relying on the few loudest voices on a subject...
August 3, 2023 at 10:53 PM