Computational biology and genomics
I started learning about bioinformatics back in the days when a lot of bioinformatics was done in Perl. Nowadays I don’t see much Perl used in new tools, which are mostly written in Python or R or both. Perl was dominant back in the day because you could get work done quickly. Perl is a…
Like many people who work in bioinformatics, my background was in biology and had nothing to do with computers. As I worked longer in this field, my responsibilities grew from writing code and performing analyses to setting up and maintaining servers (and the many unofficial tasks that an IT help desk are supposed to do,…
When I hear the word organic, two thoughts immediately come up: organic search and organic chemistry. The latter comes up because it is ingrained in me that organic chemistry is one of the hardest subjects in university. The former is because of my blog and how Google made my website quite popular many years ago….
ChatGPT came out in November 2022 and it has completely changed the Internet. In my post Learning about ChatGPT via ChatGPT I had prompted: "Will ChatGPT replace Google?" to which the model back then outputted: No, it is unlikely that ChatGPT will replace Google or other search engines in the near future. While ChatGPT is…
It has been 15 years since I started this blog! As typical with many of my anniversary posts, I reflect on things that I have started to do and/or have learned since the last time I wrote an anniversary post. Here’s the full collection of anniversary posts from past years: https://davetang.org/muse/2014/10/01/4th-anniversary/ https://davetang.org/muse/2015/10/02/5th-anniversary/ https://davetang.org/muse/2016/09/30/6th-anniversary/ https://davetang.org/muse/2017/10/01/7th-anniversary/ https://davetang.org/muse/2020/10/01/ten-years/…
I’m a huge fan of Conan O’Brien; there’s just something about his demeanour, humour, and wittiness that I admire. I discovered him on YouTube around 2012 and was quite oblivious to who he was, what he believed in, and what he had done; for example, I never realised that he produced and/or wrote some of…
As you may have already heard, GitHub just got less independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation. What does this mean? Well, I guess nobody knows for certain but it probably will mean that GitHub would degrade as a service. As a business, profit and growth are the main focus of Microsoft, so everything else becomes…
gpt-oss is OpenAI’s open-weight models designed for powerful reasoning, agentic tasks, and versatile developer use cases. You can easily use it via Ollama and read more about it in their blog post. Let’s see how long it takes to generate some output using the same prompt on some of my computers at home. For this…
Back in February I learned about Open WebUI and have been wanting to test it out with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). I’ll follow the tutorial available on Open WebUI’s site. The goal of RAG is to provide Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific information with the goal of improving the output. My main interest in RAG…
I have been adding one tip per day to my daily tips GitHub repo for the past month. It’s a simple setup: I manually add tips to a YAML file I use a Python script to convert YAML to Markdown A helper script appends the Markdown file, README.md, with today’s tip I’ve also set up…