Fomite

17 ms·

271.
by Fomite 3y ago
Agreed. Whenever I'm using new statistical software, I validate it against one I know.
272.
by Fomite 3y ago
Question from another field that does a lot of simulation - why is the assertion that deterministic simulation testing, rather than something stochastic, is the gold standard.
273.
by Fomite 3y ago
Yeah. There's a place nearby where I live that's used for a lot of outdoor recreation like fishing and rafting, and the two weather stations that serve that area are a long way away.
274.
by Fomite 3y ago
Or it might be raining at the station the reading is being made at, but not where you are. Living in the west for example, a lot of weather stations are remarkably broad in the area they're expected to represent.
275.
by Fomite 3y ago
Yeah - nowcasting turns out to be remarkably difficult at times, especially at very small spatial resolutions.
276.
by Fomite 3y ago
I suspect the Bar exam. My wife went through that twice in two different states, and it's an insane amount of stress, because the consequences of failure rest entirely on the test taker.
277.
by Fomite 3y ago
It's not my field, but it doesn't feel like garbage. Interestingly, the authors do disclose they used Midjourney.
278.
by Fomite 3y ago
This has not been my experience with any of the promotion committees I've been on. But Frontiers has been off my list since Frontiers in Public Health published a number of AIDS denialism papers. And yeah, every figure in this paper is
279.
by Fomite 3y ago
I'd move "Foundation models for biological systems" to Moonshotty efforts. Foundational models for biological systems are hard , and honestly I think require a degree of patience that is at odds with VC funding.
280.
by Fomite 3y ago
Move fast and break things* *By things we mean people.
281.
by Fomite 3y ago
"My current impression of OpenAI’s multiple contradictory perspectives here is that they are genuinely interested in safety - but only insofar as that’s compatible with scaling up AI as fast as possible." I'd rewrite this as
282.
by Fomite 3y ago
It's always been a great irony to me that physics without calculus is (IMO) wildly more difficult than physics with it.
283.
by Fomite 3y ago
One of the major time series prediction models my field uses is indeed a regression model.
284.
by Fomite 3y ago
I think the most telling aspect of this is the appeal breaks down if everyone does it.
285.
by Fomite 3y ago
"Aside: I'm confused why you're saying "hospitals" -- medical providers don't synthesize things, it's researchers at universities and biotech companies" During at least two pandemics I've worked
286.
by Fomite 3y ago
This has been a thing people have been worried about for my entire career, and it has never manifested as a real threat. "Step 1" in creating a bioweapon is pretty easy, but there's a whole pathway between that and a deployab
287.
by Fomite 3y ago
To me this reads like a lot of grant applications after 9/11 where researchers scribbled out whatever they were working on and wrote about bioterrorism-related diseases instead. The number of projects I had to sit through about develop
288.
by Fomite 3y ago
Pretty much this. Having worked in biopreparedness...the instructions aren't the hard part. Both creating and deploying a biological threat are wildly more difficult.
289.
by Fomite 3y ago
In my particular rural area, Apple Maps knows the street I live on exists. Google Maps still needs a call to delivery people to explain to them that their map is lying to them.
290.
by Fomite 3y ago
"Can" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
291.
by Fomite 3y ago
I would really like a requirement for a once yearly "Hey, do you remember you're paying for this?" reminder.
292.
by Fomite 3y ago
A few that come to mind immediately: 1) Phage are highly specific - there's really no such thing as a "broad spectrum phage", which means you need fairly intensive diagnostic laboratories + an extensive library of phage. 2) T
293.
by Fomite 3y ago
In contrast, HN is probably more pro-phage than any other community I'm part of, and antibiotic resistance is literally my job.
294.
by Fomite 3y ago
Would an infectious disease epidemiologist giving you the rundown work? Basically, antibiotics are awesome, but suffer from a major problem: Bacteria are very good at evolving resistance to them, so we are running a constant race against mo
295.
by Fomite 3y ago
I studied microbiology at Trinity College in Dublin, and it always amused me that one of the most visible career paths to students in that program was to go work for Guinness.
296.
by Fomite 3y ago
One of the big problems is that infection control and antibiotic stewardship don't have billable procedures most of the time, and are thus viewed as cost centers by hospital leadership.
297.
by Fomite 3y ago
A good reminder to get back to keeping lab notebooks - they are extremely useful for being able to look back in time and go "What was I thinking and where did that number come from?"
298.
by Fomite 3y ago
We're not. Or we are. We can't tell, because all of this is hand-waved and hypothetical.
299.
by Fomite 3y ago
I mean, if you're worried about what these higher minded people are worried about, the number of employees at OpenAI is dwarfed by the number of other, more vulnerable employees threatened by this in the economy as a whole. That's
300.
by Fomite 3y ago
There's a third case: It's #1 to some, and #2 to others.

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