i000

R has right assigment `1 -> x` LLMs seem to enjoy it a bit too much.

It's a question of values, the students know the world does not value the experience or education he is providing, and they don't have an intrinsic interest in it. Being able to discuss Sartre will not get them a high paying job, but somehow that type of stuff is part of the liberal arts education.

I said ‘imply’ because your response is not to an article on apples walled garden but work of open source developers. I agree with you 100% on criticizing apple but not on whether someone should put effort in making it more open.

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

I tried to dissect this paper on my recent 6h flight. Despite a decade of research in prostate cancer genomics I could not figure out what is going on. the results are both vague and at odds with established knowledge. the computational approaches complex and impenetrable. I sent it to my students as an example of computational over cooking.

Reads like a good outline for a sitcom. Disillusioned tech exec enrolls in arts school with quirky green haired genZ : ^ )

Wow, I would love to be in the meeting where this decision was made.

Let's ship this with a foot gun, but lets not mention in the JEP that it may hang - let them figure it out.

To give a concrete examples

1. The HOXD gene cluster adopts a mutually exclusive conformation. IF it "folds" to the left if results in the formation of digit bones ELIF it folds to the right of arm bones ELSE no bones etc. (very very roughly speaking): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1234167

2. Another example are olefactory receptors, each olefactory sensory neuron (the cell that "smells") chooses to activate one out of a long array of possible receptors each specific to some smells. So somehow, somewhere a XOR logical operation is "computed" to "pick" https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/4882762

It is important to note that all-trans retinoic acid is standard therapy for some types of myeloid leukemias, most notably acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) and it is also routinely used for treatment of neuroblastoma (a pediatric solid tumor). However, in both cases the cancers show an arrest in differentiation, which ATRA helps overcoming, so I am quite skeptical it will be clinically effective in tumors that develop from fully differentiated cells (like gastric cancer does).

https://www.lls.org/treatment-acute-promyelocytic-leukemia

You ToS is widely at odds with GDPR though, maybe modify it so it is more in-line?

So it looks like you have no clue really why an employer would pay? Maybe when things become tight you would consider selling some user data? Or we can just trust you 100% as you are a solid guy?

The privacy statement is brutally honest they can do with your data whatever, sell it, keep it even though you delete, ruin your life.

“Hey google recruiter would you like to know how this candidate did on previous interviews, contact us and reduce the frustration and time it takes to hire”

Little value for a massive selloff of personal information.

It is one trillion baker's dozens times the height of 1 fl oz of 200 proof ethanol in a quarter inch glass tube heated to 100F.

Agree. As a geneticist I have to say this is both scientifically vapid and ethically wrong. Mendel did not consent to this. Just like Henrietta Lacks did not know or consent to her tumor being used for research (which includes sequencing). Given how much bad publicity the biomedical research without consent has attracted this PR stunt is baffling and plain stupid. Poor Mendel.

Perhaps replacing "trans" with "black", "Jew", "Muslim" or any other marginalized minority group, would help you understand why such blanket "I cannot understand X at all" causes people to object?

Yes, calling out a group of people an "insane concept" is a form of hostility. The existence of trans people (and children) both at the social and biological (even genetic) level is quite beyond doubt. One might disagree and discuss how to help and live alongside those people, but labeling them an "insane concept" is not a worthy contribution tho this discourse.

Great thoughtful comment. I think you answer your question yourself. It is defensively written for the modern intellectual who wishes their beliefs to have a flair of objectivity. Perhaps another question is, why it is not enough for the author to trust they intuition when it comes to well-being?

Can it survive long enough to produce offspring.

OxyContin is not significantly more (or less) addictive or dangerous than other opiates. The problem with it is that it has been marketed by Purdue as 'safe', and that it is over-prescribed. I recommend the book Pharma by Gerald Posner, which goes into this in excruciating detail - but well worth a read.

> If you think people would choose living forever over having kids, you yourself are implying that people would find living forever more meaningful than having children

No, I am not saying this. Even if only a very small fraction of people decides to live forever (rather than having kids), after sufficient generations all genealogical lines will hit an immortal. Think of it as a human gene-drive. Even a small minority will change the world for everyone.

> But the relationship between population growth and technological growth seems fairly clear.

Not at all. Many of the most densly populated regions in the world are far from the most technologically developed. Many of the most innovative countries (e.g. Sweden) are also quite sparsely populated.

> Sure. And that would be a choice. I see no issue with this scenario.

I do. While not extinction in the traditional sense, the world were the last human was already born. I cannot imagine being part of it.

Not sure, again, how to respond to this. Why resort rhetorical devices?

I said "courage of people wo have no fear of dying" you said "courage in choosing death", very different.

You have not defined what type of "progress" you refer to, but let me just quote one sentence from one random article on that topic [1] "The relationship between population growth and economic growth is controversial." Care to provide a reference for your "This is pretty much a fact"?

> It would be a choice - live forever or have kids.

Wouldn't this mean that within few generations there would be no more kids, as sooner or later each genealogical line will end with an individual who decides to live forever?

> The slow deaths of billions of people, entire generations, is not an acceptable cost for faster progress.

Acceptable by whom? I understand it is not acceptable to you, and I value your perspective, but why do you write it as if it was some form of consensus.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440177360...

I find the way you summarized the discussion unhelpful, because your goal is to present very reasonable critiques to living forever in the most absurd way, and insult those who have those opinions "Man up, save your family, save yourself"? Was it really necessary to insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? I do not even where one would start to debate this.

> More people make more progress faster.

Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area?

> Stop having kids

Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives?

> If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.

What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages?

> Old people suck.

No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.

There is immense value in clinical data (all the information captured and siloed through EHR). Pharma companies pay for access to it to gather real-world evidence (RWE) how, for example, their drug performs. Molecular information is increasingly valuable too for research, biomarker development, patient cohort identification etc. The imaging data and pathology data are valuable because they are typically expertly annotated and can be used to train computer-vision algorithms etc. to solve medical problems - like diagnosis.

When I was in grad school, I joined a startup incubator and build a prototype which combined two of the tools mentioned in the article: "a query builder (by demonstration)" and "A paper recommender system", a simple companion which would help scientist to not miss relevant research to them. This was 10 years ago, before Google Scholar has similar features.

The incubator introduced me to advisors with business experience in this field. And I got told in no uncertain terms what is the gist of this article: The value lies in the molecular and clinical data. In 2021 I would add digital pathology / imaging data.

Why? The properties of water were optimized to make life possible!

The authorization is eua not because of safety concerns but unknown long term efficacy > 1 year. Does this change your assessment?

While I can definitely see the value of black box models in engineering and commercial applications (including clinical ones), I am quite troubled by the new hype of applying to deep learning to so many basic scientific problems. The 'deep' models do not tend to result in deeper insights - which idealistically ought to be the goal.

Is this assessment (reviews over papers) based on your own experience?

As a scientist I would say quite the opposity is the case, reviews are sloppy in citations, per editorial guidelines have to be written in a positive optimistic tone, and often overstate the claims of the cited articles.

Nice addition to their current technology controlling minds with computers!