Koen Hufkens, PhD
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Glendale Community College used an AI name-reader. The president was booed rightfully.
So, you graduate after all that effort, and the admins can't bother to acknowledge this by reading your name in person. Big we got our money, now fuck off to your McJobs vibes.
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Dumb-asses, they are the same people*.
[*Or, maybe that's the goal]
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Finally finished some light engineering for a bioacoustic monitoring job this summer, within the context of an agro-ecology grant. Test rig is currently running in the garden with the others in storage. Still missing some odd bits (U-bolts seem hard to source).
#ornithology #bioacoustics #offgrid #remotesensing #engineering
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USFS Bartlett Experimental Forest is closing. This was a reference site in much of my research in the US.
It has been almost 9 years since I left the US, and it is sometimes hard to admit how profoundly events in US still affect me. Parts of my life are tied up in it.
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Always surprised to read these glowing reviews, and their focus on weight. Only to notice that my 40 year old steel road bike is only 200gr heavier than the entry level bike (and I could probably get there if I upgrade my cockpit and seat post to carbon). 🤷♂️
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This is why I have hope for the US. You see politics infiltrate in other discussions and topics. You see this in Ars Technica and Wired coverage, but also this one in the bikepacking community. People don't let this slide anymore. For many this isn't just news anymore, this is personal.
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Highlighting a new phenology special issue, curated by myself, Barbara Templ, Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier and Yujie Liu. This issue looks for a diverse range of contributions. We are particularly interested in underrepresented taxa and ecosystems, less studied phenophases and seasons, and the integration of multi-source data.
#academia #phenology #climatechange #ecology #biodiversity #academicchatter
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We live in a managerocracy. Everyone wants to be a "manager", nobody wants to do the work. It's not surprising GenAI bullshit machines are so popular as you can cosplay being a manager, while "outsourcing" all the work.
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There are not enough bicycles in my timeline to make up for all the disturbing world news these days.
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Read the f-ing room.
Due to power dynamics there is no "open AI". Unlike open source, where a person could still significantly contribute, the required scale and cost of compute puts most AI* development out of reach of most.
So, no. “Just as the CC licenses helped build the open web, we believe CC signals will help shape an open AI ecosystem grounded in reciprocity.”
This is fundamentally different. This is license-washing.
(*LLM)
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This my dear friends this is a fantastic read. I'll write some thoughts on this later. But for now I'll leave you with this gem by Nic Morales.
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This is why I don't make "community contributions" to "open platforms" which don't have some very solid legal framework for governance in place.
They sell out to VC and rug pull hard on the community that provides the bulk of their data and value.
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"It seems like an oddity now but we could end up with millions of people with an allergy to meat.”
Negative climate change feedback loop you did not have on your bingo card. The lone star tick forcing people to be vegetarian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/29/lone-star-ticks-increase-climate-crisis
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First swift arrived yesterday at the colony. This one carrying one of our GPS loggers.
Mandatory, Thin Lizzy - The Boys are Back in Town song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIE5wwvicew#ornithology #migration #swifts #ecology #movementecology #logging #GPS
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The dramatic state of light pollution and sky glow in Belgium (figure for some upcoming work).
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Correcting African tree species lists with the African Plant Database to keep my mind of *waves hands wildly at the world*
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Codeberg.org is under attack by right wing trolls over diversity, equity and inclusion. This is what you get when you enable the goons. They will spoil public resources.
This is a good illustration of Popper's paradox on why one should not tolerate intolerance.
https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html
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OpenAI's Operator allows for GPT4 to browse a website on your behalf.
So, we made websites so awful with AI that we need AI to deal with the AI.
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Brilliant budget bike packing build (<$400), with ideas and instructions by Logan Watts at Bikepacking.com
Some assembly required.
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/1988-schwinn-high-sierra-build-off-logan-watts/
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Went out by bike to fetch coffee, turned around halfway as you can taste the air quality (map by iqair.com). Wood burning stoves for the kill.
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Incredible testament to the life changing ability of bicycles, and bicycle repair co-ops.
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You can protect your bike frame with tapes of all sort, but this doesn't really cut it if you want to rest your frame against poles to lock up. I covered my top bar with a spiral wrap knotting pattern to get some protection, and prevent the bike from sliding away.
video on how to knot the pattern:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=400v8D-sxjQ -
"AI offers two things, more exploitation and a veneer of objectivity" - the accountability sink.
Old by today's internet standards, but still gold. Reminds me of the "Line goes up" video on crypto that circulated a couple years ago.
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Kicked off an image registration run for 10K tables. This is part of an ML transcription pipeline. Seems like the new API runs smoothly.
#python #ML #HandwrittenTextRecognition #OCR #datascience #datarecovery #climate #weather
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Finished my Eddy Merckx Strada OS neo-retro road bike rebuilt. Got a modern carbon fork in and switch to Shimano 105 parts. The frame was in good condition but I treated it with Boeshield T-9 anyway. With the new drive train came new wheels as well. Might swap out the original commuter saddle for something more aggressive, and drop the stem a bit as well. Fun learning curve getting this all sorted, resulting in a faster bike as well.
#bicyclerepair #bicycle #BikeTooter #bikestodon #SteelIsReal
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"When given partial info, most people felt confident they knew all they needed to."
People DON'T do their own research. They think they did.
"The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions."
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This has been a long time coming, and not the end of it either. The slow squeeze of Google Earth Engine has started.
First came the commercial offerings, now they are pushing people by default to Google Cloud (i.e. have your credit card on the ready).
For those on the free tier, you will see less capacity (stronger quota). And, you will be squeezed, again and again. The market uptake is high enough, so the free ride is over.
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I'm leaving my senior research position at the University of Bern in March. I'm focusing on my consulting. I'm currently open to new environmental #datascience and #editorialservices #freelance work with a focus on #remotesensing, #macroecology, #ecosystems modelling and/or #foodsecurity.
I'm also open to remote work in a fixed-term contract setting up to 50% FTE (EU fiscal basis).
Check https://bluegreenlabs.org for past experiences and projects. Please boost.
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@edzer at the department we try to build infrastructure which is easy to deploy across scales.
What I find in lots of my work is that you want to leverage the frameworks on smaller problems as well (or those that are large in size, not in compute for #dataviz).
This means that it should work locally (small scale), as well as it would remotely (big services). #Pangeo + #OpenEo (interfacing) + #dataviz? will go a long way I think. Maybe someone as already setup a countainer?
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I wonder what the place of the #fediverse and the #SmallWeb is in #science. I feel much tooling is gravitating toward big cloud platforms, which at times can mean vendor lock in (especially when considering geospatial platforms such as #GEE or similar). Although there are efficiency gains due to economies of scale, is there space for small modular geospatial platforms, and what would this look like? #Pangeo comes near, but not quite I feel. @edzer