gilleain

11 ms·

151.
by gilleain 1y ago
The film is set (but not actually entirely filmed) in my home town of Camden. It still is a bit like that here - there's a guy I see occasionally walking around in a suit with a cat lying across his shoulders. Walking past, for example
152.
by gilleain 1y ago
Not so much moving the goalposts as pointing out that playing American football is not like playing soccer (football - that is, driving in Rome) or even cricket (Mumbai). In fact, cricket doesn't even _have_ goalposts, it has wickets.
153.
by gilleain 1y ago
Perhaps the writer is a fan of Grothendieck who did almost exactly this - lived in a remote village in the Pyrenees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retirem... "Local villagers helped sustain h
154.
by gilleain 1y ago
Mostly overlapping definition of what a 'complex system' is with : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system although I understood the key part of a system being complex (as opposed to complicated) is havi
155.
by gilleain 1y ago
_It's free real estate_
156.
by gilleain 1y ago
Agreed about questions, although I have seen people have positive results by starting their question with some humility. However there is the opposite problem - usually known as 'the empty pot sounds loudest' - where those who res
157.
by gilleain 1y ago
In table form : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
158.
by gilleain 1y ago
An interesting fact I learned from this [1] youtube video was that the 'Malleus Maleficarum' (The Hammer of Witches) book was very concerned (among other things) with witches casting spells that caused male genitalia to vanish. 1
159.
by gilleain 1y ago
Related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708841
160.
by gilleain 1y ago
Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges: 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have
161.
by gilleain 1y ago
Sorry, I should have been clearer - copy/paste is of course fine, as long as you review (or get others to review). It's the lack of (human) thought going into the process that matters.
162.
by gilleain 1y ago
Agreed. To put it another way, a few years ago, you could copy/paste from a similar code example you found online or elsewhere in the same repository, tweak it a bit then commit that. Still bad. AI just makes it faster to make new bad
163.
by gilleain 1y ago
Are you not confusing 'liking' a work with 'thinking it good'. I'm not sure what criteria go into your evaluation, but perhaps those criteria are different from the ones other people are using?
164.
by gilleain 1y ago
Hah, that video was ... unexpected to say the least. I love Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brian - particularly the Third Policeman. I should read The Poor Mouth. Wonder if there are Scottish Gaelic bands like The Rubberbandits. I lik
165.
by gilleain 1y ago
Apparently is is [Pallas's cat] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas%27s_cat with an apostrophe. shrug
166.
by gilleain 1y ago
Peak ... or peep comedy ... (Peep Show, I would argue is some of the best recent comedy from us)
167.
by gilleain 2y ago
Interesting, so it looks at polymerisation of tartaric acid (TA, or O=C(O)C(O)C(O)C(=O)O in SMILES notation): > They discovered that calcium dramatically alters how TA molecules link together. Without calcium, pure left- or right-handed
168.
by gilleain 2y ago
The 'explanation' in the article is a little thin: Why is the packing fraction 55% maximum (in globular proteins)? "The answer seems to be that the packing fraction stops increasing when the protein cores jam or rigidify.&quo
169.
by gilleain 2y ago
Just in case it wasn't a typo, and you happen not to know ... that word is probably "eke" - meaning gaining (increasing, enlarging from wiktionary) - rather than "eek" which is what mice do :)
170.
by gilleain 2y ago
Oh it's completely expected that bacteria create antibiotics - it's part of the low-level chemical warfare that bacteria carry out against each other. Plants as well are chemical factories ('secondary metabolism') that p
171.
by gilleain 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250119205205/https://www.chm.b...
172.
by gilleain 2y ago
Since it is down, an alternative MOTM is the one from the PDB: https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/motm-by-date More protein oriented, however.
173.
by gilleain 2y ago
Fair, and to be totally clear, even when I was in the field (an age ago), sequence stuff was never really my thing. However, sequence comparison is a fairly fundamental tool. Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other providers
174.
by gilleain 2y ago
For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of interest against a databas
175.
by gilleain 2y ago
One neat thing I know about HCN and early chemical evolution is that some DNA bases can be created from HCN polymerisation. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31491/ Like if you look at adenine, it is 'just' N-C
176.
by gilleain 2y ago
That was one of the first ones I thought of as well. Not sure why but the line "I can't be worrying about every little thing!" stuck in my mind.
177.
by gilleain 2y ago
Good point. Also, where would the information be stored? If it was in the repo itself (as metadata) then the malicious maintainer could just not update it ...
178.
by gilleain 2y ago
So might it be useful to have some mechanism to check if the 'maintainer' (owner/principal committer/?? - what Peter Murray-Rust used to refer to as the 'Dr Who') changes? Like, when bumping the version on a de
179.
by gilleain 2y ago
Oh totally agree that would be the real-world outcome of using the data. I was just thinking out loud what the theoretical benefits could be, if done 'properly' let's say. Alternatively we could just avoid doing it at all! It
180.
by gilleain 2y ago
Apart from the obvious privacy issues, I'm not actually sure what putting DNA in an LLM would actually achieve. It seems optimistic to imagine that you could query this DNA data in combination with the other information to get meaningf

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