sigtstp

what could go wrong

I feel this makes some fundamental conceptual mistakes and is just riding the LLM wave.

"Semantics" is literally behavior under execution. This is syntactical analysis by a stochastic language model. I know the NLP literature uses "semantics" to talk about representations but that is an assertion which is contested [1].

Coming back to testing, this implicitly relies on the strong assumption of the LLM correctly associating the code (syntax) with assertions of properties under execution (semantic properties). This is a very risky assumption considering, once again, these things are stochastic in nature and cannot even guarantee syntactical correctness, let alone semantic. Being generous with the former, there is a track record of the latter often failing and producing subtle bugs [2][3][4][5]. Not to mention the observed effect of LLMs often being biased to "agree" with the premise presented to them.

It also kind of misses the point of testing, which is the engineering (not automation) task of reasoning about code and doing QC (even if said tests are later run automatically, I'm talking about their conception). I feel it's a dangerous, albeit tempting, decision to relegate that to an LLM. Fuzzing, sure. But not assertions about program behavior.

[1] A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12327 (Layers encode a mix of syntactic and semantic aspects of natural language, and it's problem-specific.)

[2] Large Language Models of Code Fail at Completing Code with Potential Bugs https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03438

[3] SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering? https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12115 (best models unable to solve the majority of coding problems)

[4] Evaluating the Code Quality of AI-Assisted Code Generation Tools: An Empirical Study on GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and ChatGPT https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10778

[5] Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow Questions https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02312v4

EDIT: Added references

That was my suspicion as well. This is outside my area of expertise, but from what I can tell the dosing isn't (multiple) orders of magnitude larger.

From the article, they mention about 4 times higher dosing than detected in humans when the MPs enter through medical supplies (including through surgery).

  - "about 12 μg of MPs [microplastics] per milliliter of blood have been detected in human blood. [prev studies mentioned above]"  (I haven't read those references, though, just going off a quick skim)
  - "We would like to bring mouse blood MPs to this level by injection."
  - "the diluted final concentration after entering the bloodstream should be blood of about 50 μg/mL" [sic]

A quick search for levels detected in humans led me to this paper [1] that gives 1.84 - 4.65 μg/mL, though with "a mean particle length of 127.99 ± 293.26 µm (7-3000 µm), and a mean particle width of 57.88 ± 88.89 µm (5-800 µm)." compared to uniform 5-μm-diameter microsphere used in the submitted article.

So the mouse dosing is (compared to humans):

  - 4 times higher than contamination through medical interventions (if i understand correctly)
  - 15 times higher than normal contamination  (only based on the one article)

So higher, for sure, but still rather close in cases with a lot of contamination. Not sure how the particle size factors into it

[1] Microplastics in human blood: Polymer types, concentrations and characterisation using μFTIR https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2024.108751

EDIT: formatting and rephrasing

Interesting! Some overlap with these Firefox add-ons:

- Tree Style Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... (more simplistic, no session saving functionality)

- Tree Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs (more complex, can also save sessions, but incompatible with some other add-ons and not evaluated for security by Mozilla)

Neither rearrange tabs in the window, just offer an alternate tree listing of open tabs.

Comissioning it is a huge conflict of interest though, esp since it's used as promotion material for their consulting.

Reminds me of the study saying "a teaspoon of honey per day is healthy" with funding from the American Honey Something Association.

Engprax being a consultancy that comissioned the study, mostly for self-promotion.

Hazardous levels of sodium with this one.

If anyone works in bioinformatics, please, please, for the love of god, generate your own unique IDs. Database identifiers are not generally unique (the same id might get reused for e.g. protein variants). Even sequences are problematic: I've found the same seq with different ids (can't remember the db now), and they can change (sequencing or human error might've occured and they get updated).

Side-note: I believe in many such cases (cancers and other serious diseases), the "placebo" is actually the existing standard treatment (not sugar pills), as it would be unethical to withhold treatment.

From the post "It appears to be a pretty standard stealer, attempting to grab cookies, passwords, wallets, etc." and by the look of the decrypted payload, it's targeting Windows.

It still largely comes down to incentives from what I've seen. A lot of times all anyone (from the researcher to the reviewer) cares about is the paper. Journals don't check that code actually works, and a lot of researchers don't spend time on preparing their code. They feel there's no need, since they now got a new article on their CV. It's true that they may not have the skills and experience to produce good code they can share (depending on the area), but often 1) there's no time to prep code since they've got 3 other projects going on and a crazy work pace 2) the code is seen as something incidental and secondary - what matters to them is the figures and results 3) some groups want to milk a topic for a few papers so they're guarding their code and data. Luckily at least plenty of journals demand access to data or even making it public.

Uh oh

Just to nitpick

> strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate (r = 0.50, p < 0.001).

That is not strong. Put differently, altitude only explains 25% of the suicide rate. I know some fields have lower thresholds for what they consider strong, but still. An effect, sure, but I'd bet on this pointing to something else.

Not familiar with the demographics vs geography here, but how do typical high-altitude places look like in terms of society? They control for median household income and population density, but what about social attitudes? (are these places more rural? more traditionalist?), number of ways people can engage socially (say, cultural events, clubs, and so on), does their diet differ? etc etc.

Also, maybe putting the year (2011) in the title might be good. There may be more recent work / reviews.

EDIT: I forgot to mention diet

Re: all the mentions of Sci-Hub, I assume the organization intends to keep a professional image and avoid legal trouble, so they won't just come out and say "just pirate it". Plenty of institutions consider the use of Sci-Hub as misconduct. (I'm just presenting the stance, not defending it, if not clear.)

Interesting! The benchmark appears to be using only random data though. Any measurements for partially sorted or reverse sorted data?

This offering seems largely educational, this stuff being what people learn in bioengineering degrees anyway. And this stuff isn't really plug-and-play :) Most beginner attempts will simply fail (e.g. dead target organism, no change to desired traits, etc.). Any serious bioengineer (incl. ill-intentioned ones) would have more advanced equipment and knowledge anyway.

Engineering arbitrary modifications is incredibly difficult, due to a myriad of factors, like working against evolutionary optimizations, lack of knowledge of the target organism, reaction pathways that don't go quite like we've sketched them, unspecific enzymes, etc. The success stories you read about are a very small fraction of all attempts. And like another user said, some things are easier than others.

It can be very difficult to step outside one's own area of expertise and see things from an outsider or beginner perspective. Things that are obvious for you aren't for others. This is true for many fields. Builders especially are "saturated" with their perspective of internals, not necessarily of the end user. There's nothing wrong with them, this is normal. And without (constructive) feedback, they're unlikely to see things differently. I know venting can feel good, but why not use the time to instead contact whoever wrote the docs and offer some (less strongly worded) feedback?

Ah, my bad. I'm on Arch and it packages cal, not ncal. Wasn't familiar with it and it looks like the flags are different. Because why not...

I see there's a -v flag for vertical layout which matches horizontal listing better.

Neat! I was thinking of hacking something for org-mode (to support creating events and gcal sync) but this is definitely good for quick lookup.

Side-note on digital calendars: What I'd really like is a continuously scrolling calendar to help with long-ish term planning (3-4 months). Most apps are stuck in the single-month page view analogy to physical calendars, which for me keeps breaking my mental flow of stringing activities across the boundary/long distances. And I get why (standard behavior/components and user expectations) but it just seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure how many want this but I suspect more would do if they were exposed to it.

A few calendar apps allow a stretch of >4 weeks and there's this POC web version: https://madebyevan.com/calendar/app/ but all I can do for now is constantly switch from a Gantt app to my calendar app (Thunderbird or Google Calendar).