a_bonobo

I think you suffer from Fisher's 'capitalist realism':

>the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

Star Trek and Banks' are post-capitalist futures.

Which is funny enough, one of the main attributes Borlaug used in the green revolution: crossing Japanese dwarf wheat with modern bread wheat varieties to make the resulting wheat shorter.

and we do know that cholesterol build-up is linked with reduced mobility:

'Late endocytic vesicles loaded with cholesterol lose their dynamic properties, and become essentially immobile'

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1093/emboj/21.6.1289

we also know that blocking cholesterol in viruses leads the cholesterol-stuffed lysosomes to recruit DCTN1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50711-4

but I can't find anything that links a DCTN1 downregulation directly - as you say, this is a hypothesis a PhD student comes up with during literature review.

Thinking about it more, I think it's more complicated than just what to say - you have to act and pretend-believe that you'll send the stock to zero, changing your public actions to look like you'll act in accordance with that belief. When push comes to shove, however, you have to do what's best for the company. Kind of like any kind of 'company values' - you can't just 'accept the values', you have to always publicly state your belief and support in the values, pledge your allegiance.

Until adherence to the values may lead to a loss in share values, at which point you have to quietly abandon them. It's a tightrope to walk, especially if you're not neurotypical.

Ah boy have I been caught out by questions like that.

You're supposed to say, 'of course I'll put the mission ahead and send the stock to zero', but then when you're in the position, you can never allow that to happen, it'll make your manager look bad. The joys of corpo life

A while ago they stopped research with backpack-like trackers on magpies because the magpies figured out a way to take the trackers off each other. The first instance of magpie-cooperation that was purely altruistic! No food reward involved.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/60530212

For local LAN play, Half-Life checked the CD key only for length I believe? It would happily accept 1234-56789-0123

Autism is often associated with bottoms-up communication, start with the details, then the big picture will emerge. I.e., https://autisticphd.com/theblog/what-is-bottom-up-thinking-i...

Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.

His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.

Is it normal that peoples' last names are abbreviated in the Acknowledgments?!?

>Written by Nick G. and the source control team: S.G., R.K., Dan C., Garrett H., Ben L., Colin M., Joe P. We’re grateful to Vilas J. and Sergiu D. for supporting the source control team on this ambitious journey and Amir O. for early contributions to Antique.

Are Anthropic engineers now anonymous? Seems like a strange choice

There used to be folding@home for exactly this; pre-Alphafold days, where you could run protein folding on your machine.

It's the thing aimed at overseas; the German news here in Australia on SBS are also DW. Like you can't really get France 24 inside France, or NHK World inside of Japan, or CNN International within the US without some extra hoops

Famous past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371

>The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining (predr.ag) 1147 points by bonyt on April 1, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 325 comments

Lord Byron famously had a tame pet bear at university; he did it because the rules forbade pet dogs explicitly. The police state has been going for a while :)

There was an article posted about this earlier today but then the OP was quickly deleted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831269

This was predicted by Jack Womack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Acts_of_Senseless_Viole...

I think so, yes; anything we type here (or any other social media) will eventually turn up in the LLMs' memories and become avenues.

> I'll find that there's just dozens of open sessions over months from users

We've had the same issue with our local HPC; a few login nodes serving hundreds of users at a time, and each login node used to get swamped by these dangling SSH sessions/servers. They also wrote a script that shuts down all sessions once a day to save the login nodes.

Yep :) it's VERY non-reproducible - but I haven't asked it to look for Alu repeats in the first place, I can then go and reproduce the work it's doing

It's honestly harder - you have to do a lot of extra work to ensure your work is traceable. It's super fast in doing things you have no overview of - it makes pretty figures, it runs command line jobs etc. and I'm sure there are mistakes in there. For now I'm pretending Claude Science is an IDE, like Positron/VSCode, and I have to keep enforcing proper git usage etc. so I can reproduce this work

Edit: compared to my tools before, it generally uses the same tools in the same way, just 20x faster than me and I mostly struggle to keep up and verify what it's doing

I've been using Claude Science a lot and it is VERY good at finding patterns in the DNA around my binding sites - quite often it went 'you could put your primer here but that looks like an Alu repeat, so better not, the primer won't be specific' - it seems like the press release is one step above that pattern recognition? I.e., 'there's a recurring motif here that hasn't been described before', which is probably straightforward to pick up when your context window is 1 million tokens, i.e. within the range of entire bacterial genomes...

A while ago I read Between Silk and Cyanide, the autobiography of one of the main actors of WW2 cryptographers, Leo Marks. He had a whole unit working on 'indecipherables', too-hard-to-decrypt messages where the field-agents either misspelled words or misused the encryption keys. You can imagine how often agents misspelled, having to do all the encryption manually under great lots of stress.

(There's an interesting story on Operation North Pole, where Marks suspected that a Dutch resistance group had been overtaken by the SS, and it was actually the SS sending the encrypted messages: all the encryption and spelling was suddenly perfect)

It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.

It's really strange how close Papa New Guinea is to Australia (by territory, not people to people) and how little contact there is between the two countries, and how little interest there is. Australians couldn't tell you a thing about PNG, its people, or its politics (except those few who've gone to PNG for mining jobs). Compare with New Zealand - NZ is further away by continental distance, but closer to the main cities of Australia. Completely different relationship.

This ties back into AI, too, right?

I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

Did you see that Andrew Gelman and others just published Bayesian Workflows? https://avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Workflow/ It sounds similar to what you're after, away from describing the logic of models and the maths, instead it's about (quote from intro) 'There are all sorts of tacit knowledge in applied statistics that do not make it into published papers and textbooks. The present book is intended to put some of these ideas out in the open'

Where would your book fit into this?

Sure! I was building a workflow that assesses human gene model accuracy. Which part is supported by what evidence? Important for drug development; if we want to change $THING it better exist in the first place.

I came up with a set of rules, collated external databases, and then slowly (Claude-code assisted) built a Nextflow pipeline that gives me an automated report, which I then manually expand by 'human' assessment of the evidence.

Claude Science prompted with 'assess this gene' came up pretty much with the same rules, built a report, and did the manual assessment of evidence pitfalls for about 10% of a Claude Max subscription's tokens in about 15 minutes. Some details differ from my report - a different tool here or there - but overall, what we needed out of these reports is in the Claude Science report.

As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.

Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.

You may be thinking of one of the poems of Christian Morgenstern? He used many tricks of formatting for jokes, famous example that fits with yours is The Funnels

https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...

The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116