Peter Falkingham
@peterfalkingham
Palaeontologist specialising in locomotion in the fossil record, #dinosaur footprints, #photogrammetry and #simulation. (Full) Professor of Palaeobiology
I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies for dev slowdown. I'll say as a "why listen to you?" hook that I experienced a -38% AI-speedup on my assigned issues. I think transparency helps the community.
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
The new focus stack + pixel shift on the new @UKNikon Z8 firmware is awesome! Those numbers are mm. 25 focus positions, with 32 pixel shift images at each position, totaling 64GB of RAW images before merge and stack. Nikkor MC 105mm.
I think cases of LLM-overuse can happen because it's easy to optimize for perceived enjoyment rather than time-to-solution while working. Me pressing tab in cursor for 5 hours instead of debugging for 1:
Probably gonna have to downsample that 1.5 billion triangle mesh:
New paper led by Tash Prescott - we applied equations for speed, etc that are commonly used on dinosaur tracks to tracks made by birds we could watch and time. TLDR: equations aren't even nearly close. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…
I tested out the new @RealityCapture_ RealityScan 2.0 on my usual dataset: peterfalkingham.com/2025/06/19/rea…
Sparrows feeding in slow motion (available in 4k on my youtubes: youtu.be/YTVgpIOIxrE)
FYI for those doing #XROMM, we've now moved everything over to github: github.com/XROMMPackages
Modern image formats – which is best? Experimenting with .AVIF and .JXL Despite having a terabyte of OneDrive storage, it's nearly full, so I looked into shrinking down my photos (and #photogrammetry datasets) with JXL and AVIF: peterfalkingham.com/2025/06/13/mod…
What sort of twisted world do we live in where a Linux development environment is more comfortable to use under Windows (WSL) because you don't have to deal with platform maintenance as much and playing Windows games works better on Linux because OSS devs understand performance?
Lots more videos like this on my animals in motion youtube playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=… Great for biologists and animators
Wanna see a Goldfinch eating dandelion seeds in slow motion? Of course you do: youtube.com/watch?v=9hKnN6…
Wanna see a Goldfinch eating dandelion seeds in slow motion? Of course you do: youtube.com/watch?v=9hKnN6…
Was at the park photographing birds, got this video of ducks being bastards: (CW: Ducks mating) youtu.be/PKfe6MfNJQE
New #openaccess paper in JVP on more #machinelearning for classifying #dinosaur footprints tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
