Kurt Thorn
@ScopeKurt
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Mastodon: [email protected]. Microscopy and DS/ML. Chief Technology Officer @ArrePath. Tweets are my personal opinion. Pronouns: he/him/his.
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2016
Very good post about the economics of and investor dynamics in drug discovery/biotech/techbio startups, where the hard problems are, and the fundamental challenges in assessing outcomes and quality.
With the start of my first batch as a visiting partner at @ycombinator, this felt like a good time to write my founder story about our journey at @reverielabs. It's a bit of a long one. https://t.co/KWyMxPDdXO
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And yes, school board elections matter! Vote for parents’ #1: SUPRYIA RAY @RayforBOE, and rising education leaders like @jaimenina and @ParagGuptaSF
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Thermal expansion -> a typical problem in time-lapse microscopy at high resolution. Here I measure the axial shift of the focal plane of a Nikon 40x0.95 air objective at ~1.6um/K, or about ~1.5x the depth of field per degree C: https://t.co/ZafijhH7AX
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I believe James Earl Jones was the last surviving cast member from DR. STRANGELOVE (his first movie). What a career. RIP.
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Are you new to Cursor and looking for some tutorial videos? Here is a list of the good ones. First place to start for sure is @hive_echo list of Cursor videos: https://t.co/UYtdndVF4o More below
youtube.com
I have spent over 3000 hours learning and coding over 300 projects and share everything I have learned in these YouTube videos. I hope you will find them useful :) search all echohive videos:...
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He failed at the two problems, cache invalidation and naming things.
my friend works in fashion. i set her up with one of my tech homies. this is how it went.
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Come to San Francisco and hang with us!
Tenure-track faculty search of the @Ucsf_Biochem Department is open for applications! We are looking for creative, innovative scientists asking fundamental questions in any area of biology. Join our vibrant, collaborative, and supportive community! https://t.co/cFvlBsNa5m
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I gave the “map of every European City” by itchy feet to Claude and asked it to do one for the US. Given its drawing skills, this was pretty solid, even a couple funny bits. (yes, of course similar things exist, this didn’t seem to be pulling from them)
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Right now the advantages from AI accrue to workers, not firms. As a result, they can be hard to notice (especially if you don't try to seriously use AI yourself, which is illuminating) These two accounts by coders are instructive: https://t.co/dqxzw1mIJs
https://t.co/ryNKP7hY7H
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ePhective (San Francisco) is a newly founded #phagetherapy company started by @joeBondyDenomy (@UCSF) & Zemer Gitai (@Princeton). They are currently looking for: 2 #Phage Scientists to lead projects in phage discovery, characterization, & engineering
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PCA is surprisingly hard to beat
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It’s funny how moving from academia to industry changes your perspective. Looking for my second industry job I spent a lot of time asking questions about business strategy, to find a company that I thought would be successful. That never would have occurred to me in academia.
@ScopeKurt 💯 when I joined my current company when it was private and much smaller, the first thing I looked for was who they’d hired already - the concept was cool, but they’d also brought in many pharma veterans who knew how to get out the hammer and tongs and get sh*t done
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Agreed. There’s a reason VCs prefer an A team with a B idea over a B team with an A idea. Execution matters more than you think.
Second this. Pharma prioritizes action and decision-making. Scientific excellence is important, but execution is equally important. The work is iterative. Turn the crank, fail fast, learn from the failure, improve design, repeat. You can be scientifically excellent to a fault.
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Second this. Pharma prioritizes action and decision-making. Scientific excellence is important, but execution is equally important. The work is iterative. Turn the crank, fail fast, learn from the failure, improve design, repeat. You can be scientifically excellent to a fault.
An observation from the industry side, a lot of companies prefer not to hire academic scientists because they are prone to spending too much time in ideation as opposed to building+experimentation. I struggled in my job search early on due to this belief about phds in industry
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Pretty amazing how well SQL and python have withstood the test of time. Some of us will remember an old chestnut, "I don't know what the future of programming will look like, but will be called Fortran." Fortran is down there with COBOL and has almost fallen off the chart.
The StackOverflow 2024 survey has been released. I always find the gap between desired and admired for languages to be the most interesting. I think it is a great indicator for where the software engineering world is heading.
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🌈Behold my electromagnetic spectrum!🌈 I made the spectrum by pouring 46 bottles of nail polish & fluorescent acrylic paint.💅🎨🖌️ #FluorescenceFriday #SciArt #SciComm
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i've always loved the pair-wise ranking loss aka the weston loss @jaseweston,) and unsurprisingly it has recently become a darling for many LLM aficionados who use it to finetune LM's. (1/5)
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I stumbled across the most amazing paper today "An Abundance of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming" Authored by Katy, Kate, Katie, Kate, Katherine (@katherine1ee), Katie (@katielulula), Cathy, and Katie (@ktvank) https://t.co/GRbLrh2JsL
arxiv.org
In this paper, we study the highly competitive arena of baby naming. Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who...
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AT LAST! The Sonnet 3.5 test of The Deep Writer is here. This isn't cherry picked. This is SOTA AI. The most complex Agent system I know of, combined with Sonnet 3.5, 100s of API calls, millions of tokens of thought to write this 28 page short story! Results below:👇🧵
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