natechols

12 ms·

31.
by natechols 4y ago
> Same folks that historically develop most drugs and health advances, academic and national research labs. As far as drugs are concerned, this is simply not true, not even close. I believe the actual fraction of new drug approvals deve
32.
by natechols 5y ago
It's not the meta-analysis part that's the biggest red flag, it's "a total of 113 subjects". That's the size of a Phase I trial, and the road to Phase III and clinical approval has a crazy high attrition rate.
33.
by natechols 5y ago
"Data from 7 crossover studies involving a total of 113 subjects were reanalyzed and then pooled for meta-analysis" This is a huge red flag - I've read too many of Derek Lowe's blog posts to take that kind of study very
34.
by natechols 5y ago
Nearly all of recorded human history has been rule by gangsters - the liberal democracies of the rich world are an aberration, not the norm. I think about this almost daily and it terrifies me.
35.
by natechols 5y ago
I think you may be misunderstanding how the Bayh-Dole act works. The Stanford-Roche case looks like it hinged on a very particular set of circumstances involving a signle researcher working in both academia and industry, and the dispute wa
36.
by natechols 5y ago
I obviously need to read "Worlds", but one thing I've wondered for a long time is whether LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" was also partially written in response to "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
37.
by natechols 5y ago
As a software developer, I think of bassoon fingerings as a classic example of "technical debt", and also the kind of design that if someone thought it up de novo, the only appropriate response would be "you're fired.&qu
38.
by natechols 5y ago
All of the descriptions I've seen were "viable" in the sense of "we could hypothetically accomplish this in a few decades a for around $100 trillion". At least that was the estimate for Project Daedalus, which desi
39.
by natechols 5y ago
And the story "Far Centaurus" by A.E. Van Vogt.
40.
by natechols 5y ago
The regulatory overhead to getting a drug approved by the FDA is enormous and this places a huge burden on small companies. I have no magic ideas for fixing this but it's a classic problem of regulatory capture, in many other fields b
41.
by natechols 5y ago
The ANL maintains a large research facility called the Advanced Photon Source, a giant X-ray machine that the government rents out to academics (for free) and pharma companies (for $$$). The APS is very important and has been involved in m
42.
by natechols 5y ago
If you dropped out after passing the qualifying exam, you got an MS.
43.
by natechols 5y ago
Patents are enforced by governments that have massive amounts of guns and can shut down any company that violates them. I promise you nobody in the tech industry respects patents because of any "social contract".
44.
by natechols 5y ago
A better headline would be "MO Governor makes a fool of himself repeatedly". I would feel safe betting money on the reporter's continued freedom - the more important question is how much the paper will need to spend on legal
45.
by natechols 5y ago
For most people in my program and others like it (molecular biology, US) the decision point tended to be at the end of the second year, after the qualifying exam(s). This is because the first year tends to be full of lab rotations and some
46.
by natechols 5y ago
I agree with most of the GP's points and I don't think of them as defeatist, but rather a call for realism when dealing with people (versus data, which have no ego to bruise). It's very hard to devise a system that rewards i
47.
by natechols 5y ago
Isn't approximately half of the Facebook workforce doing manual content moderation already? I was under the impression that it's an enormous time suck and morale killer that lets a ton of awful stuff through, hence the desire for
48.
by natechols 5y ago
I cannot recall any misinformation campaign as spectacularly successful as the one that has convinced many Americans that the GP post's publisher/platform distinction is actually the law. And they don't seem to have had any
49.
by natechols 5y ago
So you're telling me NFTs are exactly like an industry that exists almost entirely to service the ultra-wealthy looking for new ways to hide their assets and/or show off with conspicuous consumption? That's pretty much all I
50.
by natechols 5y ago
I like trains too (and short-haul aircraft frighten me), but it's much easier to find an unobstructed path for a small aircraft than a high-speed train. There's also more latitude for experimentation with these piecemeal private
51.
by natechols 5y ago
This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculou
52.
by natechols 5y ago
For someone used to working at nanoscale, 1µm seems enormous! There are entire free-living organisms that could fit inside that warp bubble.
53.
by natechols 5y ago
Not really - it's just consistently better than everyone else, and obviously the best solution that anyone is likely to come up with for a while. But there were already plenty of examples of near-perfect de novo structure predictions
54.
by natechols 5y ago
I still think "The Mule", AKA the second half of "Foundation and Empire", could make an excellent standalone - still one of the best sci-fi thrillers IMHO, and much more interesting characters than most of Asimov. But o
55.
by natechols 5y ago
Read more history! (Especially read what the Wilson administration did to the Socialists - the origin of the phrase "yelling fire in a crowded theater." Many of us would riot if this happened today.) Stories like this have been
56.
by natechols 5y ago
I've listened to (and occasionally played) a lot of really mediocre classical music, and this sounded exactly to me like "lesser composer tried to mimic Beethoven" and/or "sketches completed by his student". O
57.
by natechols 5y ago
I too was reading the article and wondering "why..." until I saw the mention of addiction. This is an excellent reason to write a complete operating system from scratch, congratulations to the author.
58.
by natechols 6y ago
It's a real problem, and I've been struggling with it for two decades, but even so I am legitimately impressed (and not in a good way) if they have 170,000 lines of Matlab code in their production software. That takes a really sp
59.
by natechols 6y ago
I think what bugs me the most is the common assumption that we just need better modeling tools to make a lot of the messy lab work go away. Everyone who raises this idea seems to think it's original and revolutionary and a no-brainer,
60.
by natechols 6y ago
True! Problem is, there are a lot of unreasonable readers too, many of them having strong opinions about natural versus directed processes.

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