John F Wu

@jwuphysics.bsky.social

3893 Followers 666 Following

Tenure-track astronomer working on galaxies, machine learning, and AI for scientific discovery. Opinions my own. He/him. Website: https://jwuphysics.github.io/

Ornate "The" from SpongeBob meme
Wunderground website showing the current temperature in Baltimore as 98F and with heat index of 115F. The map nearby shows stations reporting between ~97-103F degrees in Baltimore.
Basallo bat flipping like a soccer throw-in toward his own dugout after his go-ahead home run in the bottom of the 8th
Radar loop of typhoon Bavi over Taiwan, showing it spinning a few hundred km offshore but with rain bands already hitting the island and with the eye (partially open) showing up on radar.
Radar from Taiwan showing heavy rain over northern Taiwan, and multiple rain bands offshore from Typhoon Bavi.
Me holding a night market street food classic, "大腸包小腸" aka "small sausage in large sausage"
Loeb's team will report to a new White House panel focused on UFOs, now often referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. "lt's like a detective story," Loeb said in an interview. "It's a lot of fun, as long as you don't pay too much attention to the ~~critics."~~ facts Note: "critics" is crudely crossed out and replaced with "facts"
A view of the National Taiwan University from a high observation deck, overseeing the famous Drunken Moon Lake and a few other buildings, with mountains on the back.
Upward point photo shows the flags up on a tall ship and seven jets flying in formation with red white and blue colored trails.
Orioles city connect Nike air max
JOHN F. WU ASTRONOMER AND DATA SCIENTIST > 237 STRENGTH TOP 25% < CLAUDE OPUS 4.8 SAYS ASTRONOMER AT THE SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE FOCUSED ON GALAXY EVOLUTION, MACHINE LEARNING, AND APPLYING AI/DEEP LEARNING TO ASTROPHYSICAL DATA. With a bar chart showing (presumably how much each model knows about "John F. Wu" from 0-100%): GPT-5.5 0% GPT-5.4 MINI 0% CLAUDE OPUS 4.8 ~60% CLAUDE HAIKU 4.5 0% GROK 4.20 ~75% GEMIΝΙ 3.1 LITΕ 0% KIMI K2 0905 ~85% DEEPSEEK V4 ~95% LLAMA 3.3 70B 0% LLAMA 3.2 1B 0% GLM 4.7 FLASH 0% MISTRAL 3.2 24B 0% QWEN3 8B 0%
A map with block diagram arrows pointing around how Tikka Masala spread. Caption: Evolution of chicken tikka masala as a multicultural British dish.[41][4] Chicken tikka was created in Mughal India using Persian marinading of meat in yoghurt and Central Asian tandoor roasting with Indian spices.[42] In 20th century Britain, a sauce was added to meet the British liking for gravy with meat.[12] The dish has evolved further to a taco filling in the US,[36] and to a pizza topping in India.[39] Tacos originated from Mexico.[43] Pizzas originated from Italy.[44] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala#/media/File:Evolution_of_Chicken_Tikka_Masala.svg
Last two panels of the SpongeBob "Stop it Patrick you're scaring him" meme: Patrick mouthing "oooh" next to an exasperated Squidward with the text: "BALTIMORE IS A BEAUTIFUL CITY" SpongeBob worried with hands in the air: "STOP IT PATRICK YOU'RE SCARING HIM"
A couple dozen vendors and hundreds of pedestrians walking up and down N Charles St in Baltimore.
New York Post full front page showing Mamdani smiling from a bicycle, with giant text "CYCLE OF HATE" and "Zo snubs Israel parade, goes on bike ride instead"
A view of Oriole Park at Camden Yards
There are 3 "r"s in "stwawbewwy". If we break it down letter by letter: s - t - w - a - w - b - e - w - w - y ... wait, looking closely at how you spelled it: s t w a w b e w w y There are actually 0 "r"s in your exact spelling ("stwawbewwy") because they've all been replaced with "w"s! (If you meant the standard spelling, "strawberry", then there are 3 "r"s: strawberry).
How many rs are there in stwawbewwy (Google search) Response: Did you mean: How many rs are there in strawberry AI Overview There are 3 "r"s in stwawbewwy (stwawbewwy). If you spell it "strawberry," there are also 3 "r"s: strawberry!
Image of adults and kids biking, partly in a protected lane, and partly into the car lane, as they navigate around a parked car. Below it are a caption and some text from the excerpt. Caption of image: Adam Conway, right, directs the bike bus students around a truck unloading in the bike lane on the way to Roland Park Elementary/Middle School. (Jerry Jackson/The Banner) Text excerpt from article: As the kids approached a red light just blocks from school, a silver Volkswagen SUV with a shiny Virginia license plate was parked and blocking the bike lane. Parents pedaled into the car traffic lane and slowed down so the kids could go around; as they did, several of the kids loudly booed the car. The idling driver’s eyes remained glued to her phone.
12 handmade pork and chive buns
A picture of me holding the physical copy of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 63, 2025.
My 20 month old son looking like the old Indian man meme
To preview our findings, we find that AI assistance impairs independent performance and reduces persistence. Although AI assistance improves performance during assisted sessions, people’s perfor- mance drops sharply once AI is removed. More strikingly, relative to the controls, participants in the AI condition also persist less with tasks and give up more frequently. This pattern is robust and replicates across domains. These effects emerge after a brief 10–15 minute session, raising the question of what prolonged AI use does to human capability over time. Our results are notable on two fronts. First, while concern about AI-induced deskilling has grown, prior evidence has been largely correlational (Budzy ´n et al., 2025; Gerlich, 2025) or limited to small samples (Kosmyna et al., 2025; Shen & Tamkin, 2026). Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions, we provide the first large-scale causal evidence of this effect. Second, we demonstrate how AI can result in loss of motivation and persistence. A rich body of literature in cognitive science and education has shown that the capacity to regulate effort and persist through difficulty is foundational to effective learning, and is among the strongest predictors of long-term academic achievement, workforce adaptability, and resilience (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Duckworth et al., 2007; Maddux, 2009; Metcalfe, 2009; Andersson & Bergman, 2011; Bjork et al., 2011; Kapur, 2014; Guiso et al., 2016; Mooradian et al., 2016). Our results suggest that AI assistance erodes precisely these capacities. People do not merely become worse at tasks, but they also stop trying. If such effects accumulate over months and years of AI use, we may end up creating a generation of learners who have lost the disposition to struggle productively without technological support.
Example galaxy and DESI DR9 photometric catalog that "shreds" the foreground galaxy into ~10 sources.
A scene at the BWI airport showing a zoom in of the Carina nebula
NEW LOW PRICE picture of Kind bars: $7.49 -> now $7.48 (save 1 cent)
text message chain, three messages, which says: i ain't reading all that i'm happy for u tho or sorry that happened
Figure 1 of the paper, showing 112x112 HST NUV//U/B/V/I image cutouts that are used for age-dating clusters (in this case, all around ~100 Myr).
Conference banner that states the text: Language AI in Space Sciences Workshop (March 9th - 12th, 2026) imposed over what looks like a JWST image of a galaxy cluster, and the contours that specify where some astronomy literature categories live in a UMAP-ed embedding space.
Screenshot of Ed Zitron saying "Embarrassed to admit I don't know the difference!" When asked "When you say software engineers do you mean front end back end or full stack?"
ChatGPT screenshot: (Query) how many new clusters were detected by hunt and reffert (Response) In their Gaia DR3 all-sky clustering study, Emily L. Hunt and Sabine Reffert detected a substantial number of previously unreported star clusters. Specifically: They recovered 7 167 clusters overall from Gaia DR3 data. Out of those, 2 387 were candidate new objects that had no counterpart in existing literature prior to their work. Applying more stringent quality cuts yields a subset of 4 105 highly reliable clusters, of which 739 are new identifications (i.e., not previously catalogued). � arXiv +1 Thus, the number of new clusters reported by Hunt & Reffert is either 2 387 candidate new objects in the full catalogue or 739 new highly reliable clusters depending on the reliability threshold used. �
BGE website that says "Sign in to Your Account" Below that it says "Success! Your email is *undefined*."
You'll need to **drive** to the car wash! Even though 300 meters is a very short distance (about a 3-4 minute walk), you need your car to actually be at the car wash in order to get it washed. If you walked there, you'd arrive without your car. So drive over, get your car washed, and then you'll drive back home in a nice clean car. The short distance means it won't use much fuel, and you'll still get the benefit of the walk if you want to stroll somewhere else later!
Walk! At only 300 meters (about 1,000 feet or roughly 3-4 city blocks), it would take you just 3-4 minutes to walk there. Driving would actually be less efficient since you'd spend time getting in the car, starting it, driving slowly for such a short distance, parking, and then walking back home anyway after dropping off the car. Plus, your engine won't even warm up properly in that distance. The walk will take barely any time and you'll get a bit of fresh air in the process.
The Langue AI in Space Sciences Workshop logo, featuring a cutout image from JWST with a "semantic space map" from the Pathfinder paper by Kartheik Iyer et al. (2024).
“To LLMs! The cause of, and solution to, all of bibliographers’ problems.” (with a citation to The Simpsons, Swartzwelder and Anderson, 1997)
All of this text was written solely by the authors. The document was partially reviewed by LLMs, primarily gpt-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, in order to surface issues in clarity and prose. Some of the code in the associated repository is generated by LLMs, primarily via Claude Code. Having validated the software and results, the authors take full responsibility and ownership over the results presented here.
GFS showing major snow/ice precipitation event this weekend (early Sunday morning); with snow ranging from Texas/New Mexico all the way through Delmarva region.
ICE "legal refresher"
meme of Italian guy 🤌 🤌 at a referee in a football
Wallpaper with so many Bmore quirks: Camden Yards, cookout at M&T, Hampden Enoch Pratt library Patterson Park, Baltimore bench, Domino Sugars, man popping a wheelie in front of Bromo Seltzer Tower, black eyed susans, pair of Baltimore Orioles, legendary books.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or_Consequences,_New_Mexico The city changed its name from Hot Springs[8] to Truth or Consequences as the result of a radio show contest. In March 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of the NBC Radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced that he would air the program on its 10th anniversary from the first town that renamed itself after the show. In a special election on March 31, 1950, residents of Hot Springs voted 1294 to 295 to change the town’s name to Truth or Consequences,[9] and the program was broadcast there the following evening. Edwards visited the town during the first weekend of May for the next 50 years. This event became known as Fiesta and eventually included a beauty contest, a parade, and a stage show. The city still celebrates Fiesta each year during the first weekend of May. The parade generally features local dignitaries, last year's Miss Fiesta pageant queen, and the winner of Hatch Chile Queen pageant. Fiesta also features a dance in Ralph Edwards Park.[8]
Graph showing Stack Overflow monthly number of questions, all time, starting from 0 in late 2008, linearly rising to about 200000 per month peaking in 2014, with a slow linear decline to about 100000 per month in 2023 (ChatGPT era), and then a rapid falloff to zero in late 2025.
Wikipedia page: Eurosurveillance is an open-access medical journal covering epidemiology, surveillance, prevention, and control of communicable diseases with a focus on topics relevant for Europe. The journal is a non-profit publication and is published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Scene of a snowy day in Baltimore. Light snow (1" dusting) in a residential neighborhood, with some trees, a street lamp, and covered sidewalk + grass
Figure 3: Discovered Low Mass Satellites. The HI mor- phology of the isolated dwarf group dm1623 overlaid on a g-band optical image of the system. The HI contours are at the levels of 7.8, 10.4, 13.0, 18.2, 23.4, 28.7, 33.9, 39.1 × 1020 atoms cm −2, and the size of the restoring beam is indicated with the filled ellipse in the lower right hand corner. The arrows indicate the six dwarf group members with the let- tering scheme adopted in this work. The newly discovered low mass satellites (e and f) are easily identified via their gas content but are only barely visible in the optical image.
Fig 3 from the paper, showing how the galaxy morphology helps break degeneracies in dust and age in SED fitting-like posterior inference.
Prompt: How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague? Response: 1/5 (radio button - not at all likely) Prompt: Please explain why you gave this score. Answer: I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another
Some Lidl ugly holiday sweaters for $12.99
Completed custom puzzle featuring Orioles Bird in a white baseball with red laces. Lots of custom jigsaw pieces including the Orioles cursive logo and baseball players in various stances.
In a first for the project, NOIRLab FITS Liberator 5 was made with the help of Claude Code and ChatGPT. “This method felt like a natural extension of the creative process we already use when visualizing the Universe,” said De Martin. “Instead of writing code line by line, I could focus on the result — the feel, the usability, the flow. It was a dialogue between human intuition and machine logic.”
Screenshot from Petapixel post, with the following text: Part of the reason the photo is so special is that McCarthy captured free-falling Brown silhouetted against the Sun’s chromosphere. To bring out that incredible light, McCarthy captures the star in hydrogen-alpha light, which reveals its fiery details that cannot be seen in normal white light. “It exceeded my expectations,” McCarthy says in an Instagram video while explaining that, after he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo. McCarthy shared a video showing the moment he told Brown to leap, the moment the photo was captured, and then the subsequent reaction of McCarthy and the team that was there with him in the desert. “I got it, dude!” McCarthy shouts excitedly in the video below.
What struck me more, though, was the larger context. The use of the word “Sando,” a type of speak with Black American cultural influence, feels out of place when the space itself doesn’t seem to reflect or include the surrounding community. I didn’t see any Black staff during my visit, and the overall environment felt disconnected from the people who have lived in this area for generations.
A giant matrix showing how MLB teams feel about other MLB teams. Based on survey data from Reddit's r/mlb. A block-diagonal highlights the divisional rivalries quite well.
"that wasn't very cash money of you" meme with a dinosaur wearing shades