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phreeza

9,403 karma · joined May 21, 2010

my email is thomas.mccolgan at g[oogle]mail dot com

i intermittently blog at phonons.wordpress.com

Working on making better proteins with machine learning at cradle.bio

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tmco; my proof: https://keybase.io/tmco/sigs/P9gtvzmXYJ6NlWm18exm-PIA-JC6RWYr0qUDqxgitSs ]

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phreeza··on The Millennium Problems for Biology
I agree with you there are other much grander challenges, but apart from that I don't think the list is horrible, because as I said it's incentive-aligned with the current moment we are in. Your suggestion would definitely be a good addition to the list for sure.

I think some of the items on the list are also way less likely to be worked on (like cryogenics) than others, because they really require some heavy infrastructure to iterate. My money for which of these gets cracked with help of an AI would be rubisco, that can be quite effectively worked on in a closed loop lab fashion with a standard lab or CRO.

phreeza··on The Millennium Problems for Biology
Those don't have the property of being easily verified, which the problems proposed here do. I think that's a smart idea because it's a way to capture quick PR seeking AI-lab dollars for quite useful outcomes.
phreeza··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
Next also include sales tax in label prices.
phreeza··on New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...
phreeza··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
Funny there the date is April 1985, a lot earlier and almost my birthday!
phreeza··on Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
I think a lot of LLM progress in the last 2 years or so is really from densifying the training data to niches like this and not so much from general problem solving capability. I guess the hope is that the deluge of super specific training data will pay off through better overall competence. cf https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-sample-efficiency-black-hole
phreeza··on How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks
This is a pretty stunning result. The time series looks really convincing. Is the way the detector itself is trained orthogonal to this or could there be some "leakage" in that the pre-chatgpt text is in the (positive) training data?
phreeza··on Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks
For Switzerland, that's only true for the special tourist train panoramic carriages on the route, there are normal trains running on the same routes, too, that don't require reservations.
phreeza··on Europe's new climate in seven charts
Or solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.
phreeza··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
I think this is a complete misunderstanding of what people mean by taste in software engineering. Taste is more like the System 1 response one builds to code over time, which (ideally) captures the quality of the software beyond surface level, so things like maintainability, composability, readability, likelihood of hidden bugs. This is completely different from the question if the code fulfills the immediate task at hand, but also not the same as pure aesthetics.
phreeza··on Web Browsers on PDAS
Was just going to ask if anyone remembered the name of this one. It was amazing! 15 year old me felt very important/futuristic syncing the news before school in the morning and reading during school break!

Edit: after looking it up with plucker as a starting point I think the one I actually used was AvantGo, same idea though I think.

phreeza··on Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases
Maybe its more like the hash was a well known secure hash but someone managed to extract the salt/private key/signing certificate from the camera?
phreeza··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
I ran Claude Code on my ca 2015 ThinkPad which was having wifi issues and asked it to fix them. It diagnosed the problem and applied some obscure kernel flag which fixed the issue.
phreeza··on Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
There are plenty of expenses in this order of magnitude that are not tied to direct increases in productivity. I think it may become a serious hiring impediment for companies to be really skimpy on these budgets for example.
phreeza··on Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.
phreeza··on AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
Pretty sure op is talking about university in Spain for other subjects, not Spanish class at university.
phreeza··on Why the smart home bubble popped
I think it's just a joke/reference to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
phreeza··on A History of IDEs at Google
The most amazing thing to me about Cider-V was that Cider (without the V) actually went away after a relatively short amount of time, when virtually every other internal service that is officially EOL-ed lives on essentially forever.
phreeza··on An idiot's guide to lead optimisation for proteins
A rare breed!
phreeza··on An idiot's guide to lead optimisation for proteins
That seems possible for generating completely new proteins.

Do you think it's also the case for lead optimization where you typically have some degree of measurements around your starting point, and you are expecting to stay in that local neighborhood for the generated candidates, too?

(Disclaimer: former Cradle employee here)

phreeza··on Looking at the data behind prediction markets
Check out manifold markets, sounds like that is what you are looking for?
phreeza··on We need a federation of forges
Would you be open to sharing a version of your pitch deck? The main question in my mind is what kind of exit the VCs have in mind when they give you this money.
phreeza··on Homegrown – An interactive map of every 2025 FBS college football player
It seems like college towns have a lot of players even if they are small, what's the reason for that?
phreeza··on Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
That's definitely true for some of them, but for others it's not so clear, like the Apollo or Manhattan projects? Those of course also have lasting impact but it's more in terms of knowledge, which at least arguably we are also accruing with these data centers.
phreeza··on We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
What do you mean you heard? Are you not a member of their team? Your posts in the last hour seem quite astroturf-y.
phreeza··on Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models
Numerical issues totally exist but the reason has nothing to do with the fact that Cauchy sequences don't exist on a computer imo.
phreeza··on Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models
I understand that much, but it seems like "your naive timestep may need to be smaller than you think or you need to do some extra work" rather than the more fundamental objection from OP?
phreeza··on Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models
Doesn't continuous time basically mean "this is what we expect for sufficiently small time steps"? Very similar to how one would for example take the first order Taylor dynamics and use them for "sufficiently small" perturbations from equilibrium. Is there any other magic to continuous time systems that one would not expect to be solved by sufficiently small time steps?
phreeza··on Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
phreeza··on Please do not A/B test my workflow
Seems completely unsurprising?
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