100% scientist @BerkeleyLab, 50% artist and 0% arithmetician, https://xitter.cf/t.co/9UzFO08dzw, 🇮🇪 tweets analog

Berkeley, CA
Joined March 2009
Now that I have a captive audience…(welcome new followers!) a monster thread on what my paper says, the approximations and the caveats… (1/aleph)
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Someone smart once told me that even when it feels like you have few options and little agency, you can always decide how you show up to a situation…model the behavior you wish you’d see more of. I always find that to be an extraordinarily comforting and empowering thought
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Lol I am pretty sure someone is runing a deepseek swarm to remotely patch unpatched php boxes. Well good on them.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Where do you go next after reporting from the Strait of Hormuz? For the past three months, Citrini Research, an independent research firm, has been working with our team and an internal research model to see if they could use AI to create a new drug. What follows is an entertaining, candid, and humbling account of a group of motivated nonexperts (or “filthy casuals”, as Citrini would say) trying to tackle a real problem in human health with Claude. We landed on scorpion neurotoxins, which kill over 3,000 people a year. Of the 211 designs we produced and tested, 17 met our criteria for a binder. None of the designs bound more than one toxin and none have been tested for neutralizing a toxin. One of my favorite quotes from the piece is: “Our virtual biologist may have compressed a year's worth of work into a couple days, but biology works at the speed of life…Over two days, we watched Claude work through problems at a speed that was difficult to comprehend. For the next two months, we spent much of the time becoming familiar with laboratory turnaround times (This mostly involved sending memes in Slack).”
What is AI really capable of in bio? To separate hype from reality, we spent 3 months working firsthand with @AnthropicAI's internal research model to see if it could create an experimental scorpion antivenom. Introducing Citrini Therapeutics. citriniresearch.com/p/citrin…
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Nearly every phone and computer on Earth relies on one plain-text file to know what time it is. When a country changes its clocks with a few weeks’ notice, or Morocco pauses daylight saving for Ramadan, someone has to update that file. Since 02005, that someone has been Paul Eggert, a computer science professor at UCLA, who does it as a volunteer.  Take a look at this great data visualization to see the full story:  na2.hubs.ly/H08qtQC0
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Replying to @andrewmccalip
really enjoying the singularity rn on a personal level
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
The LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry is now the Open Scientific Intelligence Hackathon, and our next event will be Oct 21–22, 2026! As always, the event is free, hybrid, and worldwide. A change this year as the scope now includes the physical sciences and mathematics. Register here! llmhackathon.github.io
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Today, Robert E. Hall was awarded the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This is from a statement he released after the announcement:
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
10 remarks on AI and math that can be true all at once: 1. The recent progress is stunning and exciting. 2. The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis is arguably Fields-medal level. 3. Mathematics is being transformed and there is no way back. 4. OpenAI doesn't give a fuck about the future of mathematics. 5. Half-baked unreadable preprints claiming major results can effectively stall mathematical progress. 6. Some mathematicians are responding with naive, overly defensive comments. 7. The social-media wankers framing this as "OpenAI tramples gatekeeping" have no experience of mathematical research. 8. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. 9. Mathematics is a critical infrastructure of human cognition. The human need for understanding isn't obsolete and it can't be offloaded to machines. 10. We haven't "solved" mathematics and we won't get there before the Sun burns out.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
we’re releasing REMAG, a derivative GPU first implementation of SIESTA that is purpose built for magnetic materials. we’ve seen ~111x speed ups for select compounds, and we hope that this inspires folks to bring other computing packages into the GPU era project-14.us/remag/
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
1/ For decades, Collatz orbits were modeled as random walks. Now it's a theorem: pick n at random, and its orbit's fall to its minimum IS the model's Brownian motion, with the model's mean and variance, blind to where it lands. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23268…
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Can’t both things be true? Accelerating advances in math is obviously good, and wanting to curtail this process is unwise as well as untenable. But it is good to have a thriving community of people who dedicate themselves to understanding and advancing the field. The challenge of the moment is that these two goals - advances and community - used to be largely aligned, and now that alignment is fraying. That really is an existential threat to academic communities not in an intellectual sense but in a practical one in that the promise of advances is how we have long justified funding the intellectual endeavors. I do think maybe it’s a good thing that academic communities are trying to articulate in a high minded way why they exist - and maybe instead of blocking progress they’ll start to focus on the many ways that the ways they currently operate are undermining those goals.
I suppose the claims of IP theft deserve due consideration, but otherwise who fucking appointed these guys as math’s gatekeepers? Advances in the sciences always follow advances in math. Accelerating these advances is an exciting and unalloyed good.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
dropping a new material I discovered. I believe it is the first to use *all* d-block elements in a single compound. I've raised 30 bucks from my buddy connor 🚀🚀🚀
Replying to @jazzloaf @vivian39_
tell me more
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We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
A few more quick thoughts (a lot more to brainstorming dump later ...) It wud be a huge mistake to think that a one time giant data generation effort is the right strategy. There is almost no evidence this is a good strategy for optimally learning causal cell biology. 1/
This is great. Now I look forward to the specifics. The devil is in the details. This is 90% an experimental design problem & 10% an AI problem. If u get the former right, the latter will just work like magic.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Replying to @amoylan
It's not that easy unfortunately. The real world is messy and non-verifiable. Progress is fastest on perfectly verifiable domains, which is essentially anything purely symbolic. You can't just pick what this stuff is good at and bad at. You hit a vein and you mine it.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
True
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Winning a Noble Prize and celebrating it with your wife and kids who love you. Second to working on agentic payments, has to be one of the most peak human experiences possible
The most important briefings of the day. Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his kids.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
important and troubling counterpoint to the view that AI will rapidly accelerate science - some practitioners are seeing or fear a world in which the flood of outputs means "neither individual understanding nor our collective epistemic projects make *any* progress at all."
This is precisely right. As a track chair at Neurips, I am seeing cases where the papers were written by LLMs, reports likewise, rebuttals too, even in some cases Area Chairs joining the flood. It becomes a potemkin village where nobody is actually accountable for anything that they are saying, and neither individual understanding nor our collective epistemic projects make *any* progress at all.
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Sinéad Griffin retweeted
'The history of transistors is the history of solving Schrödinger's equation in various materials.' -- Leon Lederman
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