Feuilles_Mortes

i'm hesitant to say, since the "data format" was actually just a password-protected zip file. claude was actually able to find the password in the decompiled .exe to extract the data in the zip... but i'm worried if i'm public about it, they'll change the password!

claude code helped me get access to the raw files from a scientific instrument we use in the lab all the time, but which won't give us raw data (only PDF reports). claude asked me for the .exe, which it promptly decompiled and reverse engineered the data format, and then helped me write my own analysis suite for the raw data. super cool.

I like using it to make personal apps that are specific to my use-case and solve problems I've had for ages, but I like my job (scientist), and I don't want to run an app company.

Yes, was also just announced on twitter.

I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.

Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.

It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.

What I would really want is for this to be a hardware button that, without requiring input on the phone itself, starts and stops a recording on my iphone which uses my airpods as a mic.

This would actually be super helpful in the lab, dictating notes on a protocol ("I did something weird in this step") without needing to stop to write things down (sometimes protocol is quite time-sensitive).

shouldn't we expect that all of the companies are doing this optimization, though? so, back to level playing field.

Wow this would be lovely for my Drosophila lab.

But you have to know about ruff. I didn't, but I did know about uv.

for doing laboratory work in my PhD, I've found no better app than OmniFocus. It's particularly valuable in its ability to create tasks via a templating system. This is crucial, for example, for managing 10+ genetic crosses at a time. Each cross takes weeks to move to the next step, but when that next step occurs, I need to be on top of the cross 2x / day. Juggling different crosses at different stages would be impossible for my brain without a system I can rely on. Other lab work follows similar workflows.

biology is hard

C. elegans is nice for this since you can freeze stocks in glycerol. Labs routinely go and thaw out the main wild-type reference stock if the lab stock has been around for too long.

Now I'm in a fly lab and no one's really figured a good way to freeze a fly stock down for long-term storage. So we're left to just accept some degree of background mutation and generally assume that it's not impacting our experiments too much...

Before these companies like plasmidsaurus that do whole-plasmid sequencing for relatively cheap with nanopore, people generally only sequenced a region of interest using sanger sequencing. The rest of the plasmid was assumed to be mostly correct, as long as it grows on a bacterial resistance. As noted in the article, the rise of nanopore-based whole-plasmid sequencing has reduced a lot of these types of errors.