great_tankard

It really is. Inspired me to be a biologist.

>The only way to break the system is to overload it until it doesn't work, so I can only hope for this.

This is a joke, right?

This feels like a retcon of OpenAI. Their vision from back then is unrecognizable because they had to completely pivot after they saw the value of transformers. They kicked off the LLM arms race in 2022 because they thought they were competing with Google.

i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing

The question is about how much permanent damage the administration will have done by 2029. They're obviously trying very hard to kill academia in this country, and the answer is not going to be zero, but I don't understand who else is going to put up the resources to really compete with us. There are midwestern state universities with research budgets that rival those of Cambridge and Oxford.

Here's another example: I regularly read quality publications in my field from researchers at the University of North Texas. In 2024, UNT ranked 170th in the country by R&D expenditure. Until I start seeing excellent work from other countries' 170th-ranked universities, I'm not worried about them poaching a few researchers from us now.

We don't appreciate how good the research ecosystem is in the U.S. The arsonists in power are trying to set fire to the house, and everyone will be poorer for it in the future, but we can still mitigate the damage.

Bought my wife a pair of Klein bottle earrings. They arrived with pictures Cliff had taken of them in his garden. Lovely man.

I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't understand where this notion that Starlink is an acceptable alternative to fiber comes from.

Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.

This is an absurdly irresponsible way to report this work. Doesn't think to mention that they're working with phage (viruses that infect bacteria, NOT humans) until halfway down the story.

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat justifiable moral and aesthetic objections to LLMs and especially the companies peddling them.

The problem is that Zitron has charm, an authoritative voice and a very aggressive online presence. That's a difficult combination to compete against.

This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopped engaging with it.

We need better critics of the industry.

This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse consequences of our behavior into the cost of doing business. Hurricanes are stronger, flooding is worse in coastal cities, fires are worse in arid areas. Fish don't magically make mercury; a significant portion of that comes from burning coal and mining activities.

All of these things are firmly within our control.

>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

Very cool. Are you a dancer yourself?

"YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE: I have now joined the club everyone assumed I was already a member of."

This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it stays up. Even though I'm a proponent of strict moderation on social media, it's ultimately a bad thing to hand over that kind of agency to the platforms.

You might want to look into why "journalism is dying" and whether Google (and Facebook) had anything to do with it.

About time. Any organization or person actively posting on that platform is just lending it undue credibility.

I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"

This is an awesome writeup that really helped me understand what's going on under the hood. I didn't know, for example, that for the limited number of PTMs AF3 can handle it has to treat every single atom, including those of the main and side chain, as an individual token (presumably because PTMs are very underrepresented in the PDB?)

Thank you for translating the paper into something this structural biologist can grasp.

It's true that Science is very invested in this bad (for everyone else) publishing model, and I suppose if somehow, by omission, they managed to convince the population that open access is inherently scammy, that's all the more convenient for them. I wouldn't necessarily group Derek in with that, though, and he's not wrong about this.

This topic has broken the brains of so many otherwise reasonable people. Is a lab leak possible? Of course it is. But the purported evidence for it is so weak, repeated by the same cranks who seem to have made up their minds.

Also, it's not like the authors of the Nature Medicine paper thought one thing and wrote another. Read their correspondences! Their thoughts evolved over time. It's almost as if that's how science is supposed to work.

From the original paper:

"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to disprove the other theories of its origin described here."

And

"More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

I don't see the issue here.

Agreed on all counts, though it's important to note that this protein has bacterial homologs that almost definitely have the same function (5'-3' RNA ligase activity).

>Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings one way or another about the economic fates of career writers) but in the sense of being incoherent.

It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is not something that ChatGPT can understand.

Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-efficient economy for?

Make sense. Plastics are notorious for absorbing in the UV range- for most useful spectroscopy experiments below ~400 nm we have to go straight to quartz cuvettes.

You're right! I didn't like what she had to say because the thing she said was transphobic.

The "trans issue" itself is not a weird topic. But there are certain ideas that seem to have taken hold ("the MASSIVE risk of fentanyl candy", "the HUGE threat of trans women using the bathroom", etc) that are objectively weird and, in the grand scheme of things, non-issues. For a regular person off the street, I might ascribe having an idea like that to ignorance. For people like Rowling, Adichie, etc I can only attribute it to bad intentions.

Yes, you've gotten exactly to the heart of what I was trying to say. Of course there are people who get unfairly maligned for saying the "wrong" thing (or when the things they say have been taken out of context).

But people pushing back on what someone says is a normal, healthy part of discourse and it absolutely should scale with the power and influence of the person voicing that opinion (Kanye is the perfect example).

I don't typically question a person's motivation for asking questions! But the "great trans bathroom debate" has blown up far out of proportion, and its such a weird topic to wade into unprompted, that I have a hard time ascribing anything but bad intentions to anyone who does.

People have weird opinions all the time. I'm sure I have many myself. The difference is that she's an influential author with a wide reach who can reasonably be expected to think just a little more before she voices an opinion on something that affects a marginalized community.

Ok I guess I have to spell this out explicitly: the self-censorship thing obviously applies doubly to the trolls and doxxers and "virtual vigilantes." Nobody deserves that kind of treatment.