elcritch

The DoD tried that with Ada and largely failed. That was with defense contractors whose primary customer mandated it. That was despite Ada being proven to work in its first projects.

Congrats, that's awesome.

Now this is how companies should be using AI. Not as an excuse to fire half the devs. Less bugs, less failures, better experience for everyone.

True being limited to phase 1 would be the bigger limitation.

Another bigger impact might come by making regular researchers, lab workers, etc all more efficient by making data analysis more efficient or creating better tools. Possibly with less errors. That'd of course require big pharma to adopt them. We'll see on that point.

If you phrase it in that way it seems intractable.

However the majority of a protein’s structure is functionally inactive. Only a relatively small region tends to be active and affect rate kinetics of various chemical reactions. Alternatively similar interactions affect the mechanical properties of other proteins.

We also know many of the pathways for most key biological processes. Of course we’re no where near simulating an entire human, however we could feasibly filter drug candidate drugs for strong affects on key biological pathways.

That’s not too different in a broad since than using surrogates like mice to test for toxicity across highly conserved pathways in metabolism, reproduction, liver function, etc. It’s a much more tractable problem as well.

We have a lot of experimental data for the effect of many proteins on important chemical pathways. Presumably drug companies have more information on how many drug candidates react with or interfere with key pathways.

My conjecture would be that we wouldn’t need fine grained interactions but that even coarse grained filtering could be valuable. As in sure drug XYZ is great for binding to serotonin but it also has high affinity to key stomach proteins. That could avoid expensive studies just to find out a promising anti-depression drug causes severe gastrointestinal issues in a lot of patients.

Even better if we could use genome variations to protein structure variations which could help differentiate between subsets of patients with or without severe side effects.

For the IPO, what matters as this stage is hype. If Anthropic can make headlines assisting with drug creation that may be all they need.

> No one knows how a molecule will interact with human biology. It can't be simulated computationally to generate data (too slow),

Prior to AlphaFold that was the state of predicting protein structures. That model seemingly figured out the "language" used by biology for making protein structures from DNA. It's not unreasonable to believe there's a good chance something similar exists for protein interactions.

Even if it was coarse grained but could eliminate drugs with high likelihood of unfavorable reactions it'd still be valuable. Still not sure LLMs would be ideal for that work.

> it allows the async implementation to do the "prepare operation, suspend until completed, wake up" dance, where the threaded implementation would just run the blocking syscall directly. There are plans to add stackless coroutines

Yeah so that's a lot of hidden magic and implicit logic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Definitely stealing those hotkeys for my own terminal emulator! Was wanting similar functionality but wasn't sure of the shortcuts to use.

Certainly parts of terminals protocols are archaic, but overall it's not nearly as fragile as you make it out to be.

> Zig just takes a firm stance against implicit logic

I bought that as Zig's M.O., but then came the automatic "async/IO" colorless functions which is a huge chunk of implicit and hidden logic.

That's more implicit logic than what's in say JavaScript async AFAICT. Arbitrary int sizes with implicit casting rules, etc. More recently was the attempts of memory safety via an some sort of (optional) implicit GC mode. Personally I don't get it.

Right, much better to invest and add more features, fix more bugs, make it cheaper.

From what I've read careful programming. They also used images for buttons and other widgets. Pre-canned images look great but are also fixed in size, shape.

One of my goals with Merenda is to make a NextStep/Cocoa like GUI system but with a richer primitives - things like resizing corners dynamically with the shadows or adjusting gloss positions on skeuomorphic buttons.

Things web pages can do nowadays but in a NextStep like framework with rich MVC. Also with message passing but in Nim a more strongly typed language than ObjC.

An alternative evolution of Cocoa instead of SwiftUI.

I've been working on an attempt at a modern OpenStep/Cocoa inspired GUI called Merenda [1], but built with modern GPU based stack. The original theme was an Aqua clone but without using any images for the buttons! I used the NextSTEP OpenStep specification as part of the original specs. The workspace ideas were fascinating.

The GUI library aspect is progressing well, but getting a desktop environment going is challenging even with AI. Still I want to capture things like the document workspaces and such. Lately Ive been tempted with making a postscript like display server based on GPU accelerated vector primitives.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/merenda

I would've thought it paranoia that such things would happen in the west, but given the insanity in the UK in recent years (1) maybe it's not. Seems pretty common to get arrested in the UK for posting memes.

1: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/free-speech-dispatch/uk-teen...

Tead the article. The cost isn't mentioned anywhere. If it did the cost to run on even SOTA LLMs would be negligible in medicine, probably not even a dollar.

For me Nim hits the sweet spot since 2.0 moved to ARC/ORC. All the benefits of GC for programming but it's much easier to control allocations and memory when desired. Plus I can run it as a script or compile to JS. I'd put Swift in a similar category too. Not compiling to JS but that it gives good control over memory while being automated via its ARC.

I hate to be pedantic, but LARP stands for live action role playing.

Only mentioning it because LLMs are already taking over software development and everything online. Let's keep them out of our meet space peculiarities (1) while we can. ;)

1: https://epicarmoury.com/blogs/news/what-is-larp

I was telling a friend something similar last week.

Unless, or perhaps until, we figure out how to use LLMs effectively at the organization level we're still going to be limited to the "slime mold" level of organizational intelligence.

Will that happen? Most likely, but will it take a generation or ten? I suspect it'll be far harder for society to adapt at that level. We've had Mythical Man Month for decades yet software managers continue repeating the same mistakes.

Because of that the idea of OAI and Anthropic just moving to in-house product development makes sense.

I love the ambiguity as to whether his mom wants the rocks dropped off in her yard or not. ;)

With RA it’s better to reduce systemic inflammation than mask the pain. Though I get the desire to reduce that chronic pain.

Reminds me of the old "book the meeting on Feb 31" trick to avoid an unwanted meeting.

It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.

Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.

Paper == citations

> if we finally had an accessible consumer-accessible way to turn a network of computers on a network into a supercomputer

There's plenty of devices operating in giant supercomputer networks accessible for cheap to consumers! Unfortunately the consumers in question are spam farms, bot networks, ddos rings, and other mostly criminal types.

It would be cool if similar networks could be used for good instead. Earning credits providing compute that could redeem for spurts of fast parallel compute.

Power usage used to be more negligible back in the @home projects heydays. They had some cool screensavers too.

That's been my thinking lately. The SOTA models are good enough that they "solve" coding but still need directing. The product is still important. Products are human too, and need human attention (still).

Maybe that'll change in the future, but while AI can make awesome images without a good "director" they're pretty cookie-cutter and bland.

I've only dabbled with 3code. The author of 3code is pretty active, so he may take suggestions. I'd agree that copy/paste is important for a good agent workflow.

More than that, China funds polarization and disinformation projects in the west. Recently they've been seemingly funding anti-AI rhetoric in the US (1). There's allegations they're funding pro-Palestine protests in the UK (2).

Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.

1: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backla... 2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/13/china-funding-pr...

There's https://3code.capocasa.dev/ which is written in Nim and focuses on token efficiency.