Larry Hunter

@proflhunter

Knowledge based biomedical data science, artificial intelligence for discovery in molecular biomedicine, computational bioethics, theory of mattering. University of Chicago / Big Island HI

4341 Siguiendo5442 Seguidores1635 Publicaciones

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Larry Hunter@proflhunter· 17d

A bunch of volunteers out planting trees at Pu’u Wa’awa’a today

About 20 tired, dirty, happy people with a forest behind then

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· 20d

Inspired by @sazeracla.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/sazeracla.bsky.social/post/3mr7mhgnmec2v I made Đậu Sốt Cà Chua to go with Vietnamese flavored broccolini & lion’s mane over noodles.

Red tomato-covered tofu in a white bowl and noodles topped with green cilantro in a yellow bowl.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· 26d

@iscb.bsky.social does a Congressional briefing! You may never see bioinformaticians dressed this well again.

20+ ISCB members in front of the Capitol building before giving a briefing on how informatics advances health and life sciences.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jul 12

My comment on the OMB proposed rulemaking is submitted. Now time to enjoy the ISMB conference. If this rule is adopted, scientific conferences like this one will be off limits for most American scientists.

Your comment was submitted successfully!
Comment Tracking Number: mri-13tc-42rp

Your comment has been sent for review. This process is dependent on agency public submission policies/procedures and processing times. Once the agency has posted your comment, you may view it on Regulations.gov using your Comment Tracking Number.

Agency: OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET (OMB)
Document Type: Proposed Rule
Title: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance
Document ID: OMB-2026-0034-0001

Comment:
I am submitting this comment in strong opposition to the proposed revisions to 2 CFR Part 200 (Docket OMB-2026-0034). The below is a brief summary, my full comment is attached as a PDF document. The core of the proposed change is a rebellion against the long-standing government policy of deferring to experts in grant-making decisions. Instead, the proposed rule substitutes total executive authority in making all federal grants. It is so bizarre and nonsensical that it is impossible to believe the proposed rule came from a body of experts. The entire purpose of the proposed rules is to subvert expertise, and replace it with political judgment. It’s perhaps too much to call it judgment – it replaces judgment with turning the entire federal government into a way to reward political friends and punish political enemies without any regard for expertise. There is no rational basis for the proposed massive change to the way the government disperses grant funding, and that change represents a clear error in judgment. Furthermore, This proposed change does nothing but silence and intimidate independent expertise and facilitate executive corruption. I have substantial expertise in science and its government funding, that comes from decades of experience as a federal scientist, a federally funded academic researcher, and as a participant in various aspects of the federal grant-making process. I focus my comments in the attached document on scientific grant-making, but they also apply to th…

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jul 9

Home electrification’s first birthday, a tale in two charts. EV (Ioniq 5), induction stove (Impulse), and an electric drier have tripled my consumption. When the days are long (last two months) the PV/battery system covers all of it, and even in winter, my utility bills are <25% of what they were.

Bar chart showing electric consumption over the last two years. Tripled in July ’25 (and declined a bit since then).

Bar chart of utility consumption over the last two years. Drops by 2/3 in July of ’25, was near zero for the last two months. A purple line indicating solar radiation is superimposed.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jul 8

One of the things to like about the *ACL approach to reviewing is that “excitement” is one of the criteria. aclrollingreview.org/reviewform

Excitement

How exciting is this paper for you? Excitement is subjective, and does not necessarily follow what is popular in the field. We may perceive papers as transformational/innovative/surprising, e.g. because they present conceptual breakthroughs or evidence challenging common assumptions/methods/datasets/metrics. We may be excited about the possible impact of the paper on some community (not necessarily large or our own), e.g. lowering barriers, reducing costs, enabling new applications. We may be excited for papers that are relevant, inspiring, or useful for our own research. These factors may combine in different ways for different reviewers.

5 = Highly Exciting: I would recommend this paper to others and/or attend its presentation in a conference.
4.5
4 = Exciting: I would mention this paper to others and/or make an effort to attend its presentation in a conference.
3.5
3 = Interesting: I might mention some points of this paper to others and/or attend its presentation in a conference if there’s time.
2.5
2 = Potentially Interesting: this paper does not resonate with me, but it might with others in the *ACL community.
1.5
1 = Not Exciting: this paper does not resonate with me, and I don’t think it would with others in the *ACL community (e.g. it is in no way related to computational processing of language).

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 30

We are now being required to disclose any foreign gifts or contracts so the University can report them to the regime. This includes travel reimbursements and “in kind” efforts such as collaborative work.

The University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division - TO: BSD Faculty

FROM: Bess Wildman, Vice Dean of Academic Administration and Finance

SUBJECT: Action Requested: Disclosure of Foreign Gifts and Contracts to Federal Agencies

ACTION REQUESTED:
We are requesting disclosure of any gifts received from (and any contracts entered into with) foreign sources by BSD faculty during the period January 1st through June 30, 2026.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 30

Thought this was a reasonably accurate way to position me in the AI zeitgeist; U Chicago Pediatrics is leaning on me hard here, and I’m fine with that. Be curious to see other experts’ results. bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/

YOU ARE...
The Org Chart Survivor
patron saint: Ethan Mollick
Your company made you 'AI Lead' on top of your actual job. You use it, it helps sometimes, and you've stopped trying to explain to leadership what it can and can't do. You run little experiments and post the results. Just try things, you keep saying. Just try things.
Impact: +1.8 • Valence: -0.3

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 30

Brilliantly curmudgeon-y conversation with one of the greats in the philosophy of biology. My favorite bit is her takedown of Dawkins, "not important with anybody who’s serious”, served with a side of snark for Crick...

BLVR: What about ideas about replication and transmission? Could they tend towards the reductionism that I’ve seen you argue against in your work, sort of like Dawkins’s selfish gene? That we can explain everything with just a look towards what happens in DNA, without the context in which it happens, or the environment in which it is situated?

MG: That depends on your general attitude. It doesn’t depend on the double helix, though. Well, of course, Crick was a very extreme reductionist, yes. He gave a talk in Washington, I don’t remember when, and he was nothing but reductionist about genes. It was awful. But you can discover the structure of anything, and it doesn’t take it out of its context.

BLVR: It seems to fit with the “knowledge is orientation” slogan in the sense that you are always situating yourself, trying to find your way from some place. Maybe I should ask about those popular ideas, like Richard Dawkins’s and The Selfish Gene.

MG: Oh [laughing], that’s just a gimmick. I don’t take it seriously, though.

BLVR: Seems to be widely known, though. What is the gimmick?

MG: Well, it’s not important with anybody who’s serious. The gimmick is just that everything is genes, and genes are trying to perpetuate themselves and we’re just sort of by-products of that. It’s total reductionism, like we’ve been saying.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 29

Green beans and potato tonnato. That great Italian summer flavor... without the vitello.

A yellow bowl of bright green beans and white chucks of potato in a creamy-looking sauce.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 26

Vegetable Stromboli

Golden crust flecked with white Parmesan, filling of broccoli, roasted red peppers and black olives. Dish of red sauce on the side

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 26

Burmese fermented tea leaf salad

Green cabbage leaves topped with tomatoes, cucumbers, peanuts, fried yellow split peas, garlic chips, fried shallots, and sesame seeds, all topped with a mound of dark green fermented tea leaves

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 23

Baingan Bharta, Tarka Dal, Naan

Fork on a white napkin. A yellow bowl with two dishes, topped with colorful tarka. A plate with two rounds naan

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 20

Fascinating perceptual story! So grateful I get to see colors that can’t be displayed on a screen all the time at Kua Bay.

Water aggressively absorbs reds, slowly absorbs greens, and barely absorbs blues at all. This pattern pushes nearly any spectrum with blue and green in it out of the sRGB gamut almost immediately. When you look at sand in the shallow water near the coast, it traces a curve through colorspace as the depth of the water changes. The light from the sun is filtered once as it passes through the water on the way down, bounces off the sand, and filtered again as it comes back up to your eye. White or yellow sand will first shift to unrepresentable cyans, then to unrepresentable blues, and then finally converges close to the sRGB blue primary again once the water is very deep and dark.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 18

I had no idea the mcmansionhell.com person wrote more “serious" art criticism. Like the blog, really compelling (and funny)! flaminghydra.com/toward-an-un...

Adorno once wrote about the seeming futility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. Not to come off as twee, but we might call today’s version of the same idea the futility of the MFA novel after Gaza. Not because the making of the art (or the criticism) is pointless, but that there is, fundamentally, prior to art, an obligation to sit with the horrors of the world—maybe not to directly translate them into art, but to understand that this violence is the framework of the society in which we live and work.
As for what to do about it, the most optimistic maxim may come from Jean-Luc Godard, who once said that he did not wish to make political films, but to make films politically. Art made in a new and broader context, made through changes in the relationship of labor and capital via the union or the strike, through forging new and more equitable institutions, through resisting platformization and enshittification in pursuit of something better, through involvement in our communities and the broader milieu, through the principled rejection of anti-human technologies even if that comes at great social and economic costs—these are just a few examples of the way we, as artists and critics, can combat not only fascist aesthetics, but maybe even fascism itself.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 10

This paper was entertaining, and even mildly reassuring. Major effect of GenAI on cybercrime? Not effective new hacking tools or reduced barriers to entry among noobs, but that tech layoffs drive more skilled coders to crime. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545

In some ways this all suggests a more mature response from the
cybercrime ecosystem than we see in industry (possibly because of
the lack of a CEO and venture capital class). Many of the broader
economiceffectsreflectpatternsalsoobservedinlegitimatecontent
and tech economies – for saturation of overproduced low-quality
content in particular. Therefore, we conclude that generative AI
toolsarehavingdisruptiveeffectsoncybercrime, butmostlytothe
economics and political economy of major platform infrastructure
and the licit and illicit businesses that cluster around it, rather
than to cybercrime directly. Finally, we note that in recent
months anxiety over labour market disruption from these tools
is increasing precipitously. This may end up being the most
important way in which generative AI tools disrupt the cybercrime
ecosystem – mass layoffs, economic downturn and a cool job
market pushing legitimate, more skilled developers into the
underground communities of get rich quick schemes, fraud, and
cybercrime.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 8

Got to hike Kiholo with a bunch of trail archeologists for #NationalTrailsDay So beautiful, informative, and interesting!

Black lava rock in the foreground, a bit of Kiawe, a turquoise lagoon, with the blue Pacific in the background, under a bright sky with a few small clouds.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 6

Venus, Jupiter, and I think maybe Mercury.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 6

Spanish lunch, yum!

Yellow plate with green beans with almonds and Serrano on one side, spinach and chick peas on the other

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 5

University of Chicago issues guidance for commenting on the proposed regulations around federal grants, includes a link to elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division

Did you know...?

The federal government is currently accepting comments on proposed changes to the Office of Management and Budget’s Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance — guidance that controls the universal legal framework governing all grants across the federal government, not just for research, but also for civil infrastructure such as medicaid, education, and disaster recovery. Each comment becomes a matter of record that must be considered; the most impactful responses are personalized, with unique language describing how a specific section(s) of the rules would impact your research program personally.
If you need some help to get started, you can
read more about talking points for scientists and any concerned person,
review the instructions about connecting your comments to specific sections of the regulations, or
explore others’ comments.
To submit your response, anonymously or attributed, click the “comment” tab for Docket OMB-2026-0034 in regulations.gov.
Comments are due by 11:59PM EDT on July 13, 2026.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Jun 5

Hippeas? Other than having 200mg of sodium per serving, they actually are pretty healthy for a snack. Not cheap, though. hippeas.com/products/bla...

Ingredients:
Chickpea Flour, Rice Flour, Sunflower Oil, Yellow Pea Flour, Maltodextrin, Salt, Onion Powder, Cane Sugar, Citric Acid, Garlic Powder, Yeast Extract, Fruit and Vegetable Juice, Natural Flavors, Paprika Extract, Rosemary Extract

Nutrition:
1 serving per bag | Serving size 21g

Calories 100, Total Fat 4.5g, Saturated Fat 0g, Trans Fat 0g, Cholesterol Omg, Sodium 200mg, Total Carbohydrate 13g, Dietary Fiber 2g, Total Sugars <1g Incl. <1g Added Sugars, Protein 3g, Vitamin D Omcg, Calcium 10mg, Iron 0mg, Potassium 100mg

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 26

My first summer away from home (working at minimum wage for a radio station), most of my meals came from 4 cases of top ramen and a 50lb bag of carrots. I still like top ramen noodles topped with veggies. Made this last week (cilantro, sesame seeds, & preserved mustard shreds are luxury additions)

Bowl of ramen noodles topped with green beans, garnished with cilantro, sesame seeds, and Wu River preserved mustard shreds.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 21

Chickpea, greenbean, cabbage, tomato & onion masala topped with lime cilantro yogurt. Tarka dal. Naan.

A large multicolored bowl of vegetables topped with yogurt flecked with green cilantro. Lentils topped with tarka of green onions, garlic, turmeric, cumin and mustard seed. Flatbreads with a sheen of golden butter

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 19

Coral on the Big Island has suffered less than almost anywhere else on the planet but even so, the losses over the last 20 years have been significant. pubs.usgs.gov/of/2026/1061...

Graphs showing decline of coral cover and changes in dominant coral types

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 19

First picture in my library. First shot from my first digital camera, a Toshiba PDR-M70, taken on March 30, 2000.

Somewhat fuzzy picture of my son at age 3.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 10

Totally unafraid Erckel's spurfowl (francolin) at Pu'u Wa'awa'a today.

A large bird walking in grass. It has brown stripes, and a black face and bill.

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· May 10

This is fun!

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Apr 26

Dickies in Kona, doing You drive me ape you big gorilla! Teens making a mosh pit. Such a great show

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Apr 25

I have tix to see the Dickies live in Kona tonight. I saw my first Dickies show at the Whisky on the Sunset Strip in 1977. @punkrockhistory.bsky.social

Larry Hunter@proflhunter· Apr 25

Beautiful morning on Pu'u Wa'awa'a.