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a_bonobo

6,820 karmajoined 15 yıl önce

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a_bonobo
·evvelsi gün·discuss
I mentioned Densha de GO above, they have a designated controller like that for the Nintendo Switch too :)
a_bonobo
·evvelsi gün·discuss
It wouldn't surprise me if Japan has its own market for train assets. There's a big community of train simulators! Go to the Kyoto or Tokyo train museums, they have dozens where you step into a replica of a train cab and then drive a photorealistic simulation (sometimes also just film) - the ex-keyboarder for Casiopeia runs a train simulation game company that makes those since the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya). There are some Nintendo Switch train simulators like Densha de GO that are only available in Japan.

I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
a_bonobo
·3 gün önce·discuss
Yes, this has been my experience in the Australian academic system as well: everything is broken and nobody with the power to change it, cares.

China seems to make some strides for their own academics, thinking loudly about moving away from glam publications as career incentives: https://www.ft.com/content/64a811f1-b132-4211-8a8c-2252cf964...

It's supposedly about the worry of leaking state secrets, but it will have positive outcomes apart from that.
a_bonobo
·4 gün önce·discuss
They are pretty much the same, yes! Those eDNA providers usually use a wider range of primers (12S, 16S, COI etc.) to capture a range of invertebrates, vertebrates, plants etc. For Covid, since it's only that one virus, you can target only the one gene so it's a bit easier.
a_bonobo
·4 gün önce·discuss
https://www.envirodna.com/

https://www.naturemetrics.com/species-detection

https://www.ednacollab.org/industry/

https://wilderlab.co/

These companies focus on environmental DNA - some are more on the level of local government monitoring, some are for private customers.
a_bonobo
·12 gün önce·discuss
Why would I pay 10 dollars per month for music I can AI-generate myself for free?
a_bonobo
·24 gün önce·discuss
Good move, it's crazy how many scam calls and SMS I receive in Australia. In fact, if I get an SMS or a call, I just assume it's a scam.
a_bonobo
·26 gün önce·discuss
Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.
a_bonobo
·27 gün önce·discuss
Ah, personas!

https://bufferbuffer.com/using-personas-in-technical-writing...

>In user experience (UX) design, personas are fictional characters representing the different types of users who might use a product or service. These personas are based on user research and are designed to help designers and other stakeholders understand the needs, goals, and behaviors of the different types of users.
a_bonobo
·27 gün önce·discuss
KPGM et al. are used as political ammo to push through internal changes. Those in power rely on consultancies underlying their decisions (painful redundancies, firings, etc.). Acknowledging that the arguments for these painful decisions was hallucinated will lead to many problems for powerful people, so for now it's best to just try and sweep it all under the rug.
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
Oh no, that's just coincidence. In proteomics world, a peptide is just a short protein (<50 amino-acids?).
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
I'd go even further: what happens in biology is antithetical to the way software people think.

The HN/YC crowd generally has software brain: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba..., "when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code". Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst. I've supervised PhD-students and it takes some time for people's brains to be comfortable with that squishiness, that random behaviour, that 'putting A into the system only rarely produces B and we don't really know why but we do it anyway' view of the world. Software engineers struggle, even abhor that kind of world, which is why you rarely see them being interested in it; and if they work in it, outcomes are sometimes amazing and Nobel Prize worthy, more often nonsense that silently disappears.
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
The accompanying preprint is interesting: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.03.729735v1

Modeling protein-protein binding is still a massively unsolved problem, mainly because we don't really have the data. Alphafold2 was great but didn't actually 'solve' protein-folding as all input data is from single 'state' X-ray crystallography of the proteins, not 'really' how these proteins behave in the wild. So it's still very, very had to predict what binds to what, which of course is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

I work in a pharma-field and I wish we could easily design molecular binders. We still spend millions every year finding targets that could 'smuggle' our drugs into cells.

Some other players in this field are Boltz Lab and Isomorphic Labs (the Alphafold Google spinoff led by Hasabi). None of them can predict anything complex or 'big', everything is peptide-level. OP's work is another step towards something better.

The most interesting part in the preprint is that they find no matches for their designed binders in the world-write protein database. An open question with protein-designers is whether they just regurgitate training material, which is far easier to test with English-language models.
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
At my previous work, I was collating somewhat random unconfirmed animal sightings. I also had a separate database of animal occurrence probabilities (species distribution maps). I'm not a statistician but that sounded like a clear job for Bayes theorem: given a sighting and the overall probability of that sighting in that area (species distribution map), and some other assumptions about the noise of the sighting, what is the probability that the sighting actually included that species?

Claude asked me three questions and then wrote a beautiful Python implementation that queries the map and spits out a table of adjusted probabilities. Felt immensely powerful - I can do this 'on my own' now, I don't need to wait to find the right people or learn the right thing first.
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
Ah yes, there is a gap between what our regulator wants and what the reality is. I have no qualms that they'll hover out the data if they want to, we know that since Snowden. But I have to comply with the regulator, not with reality.
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
You can use Claude and Copilot via AWS Bedrock, and there are VSCode plugins for that https://dev.to/aws-builders/setting-up-aws-bedrock-with-clau...
a_bonobo
·geçen ay·discuss
3. from my opportunity - For many (not all) LLMs, Bedrock gives you control over which country the data stays in. You have no control over that with the Claude API, for example. We do not work in the US and have strong requirements for the data to stay in our country, which Bedrock gives us control over.
a_bonobo
·2 ay önce·discuss
There has been a bit of a 'trend' to rewrite common bioinformatics/comp-bio into faster languages (Rust) via LLMs, OP's repo seems to be an early example.

Seqera Labs has a bit of a manifesto: https://rewrites.bio/

Heng Li has an overview here too: https://lh3.github.io/2026/04/17/the-ai-rewrite-dilemma

IMHO it's... OK? Bioinformatics code quality is generally poor, untrained biologists writing functioning code that is poor in scoping, but works. (Unguided) LLMs write on that level, too, so not much harm done.
a_bonobo
·2 ay önce·discuss
I really like this pattern and use it often, this 'not showing my cards'. The second I hint towards the LLM what I prefer it will become sycophantic and invent nonsense why my preferred solution is better.

I'm sure there's an interesting study on how users 'leak' their preference unintentionally to the LLM; perhaps when users list their options, they often put their prefered option first; but not showing the cards on my hand has been very useful when thinking through a problem with LLMs.
a_bonobo
·2 ay önce·discuss
Some evidence as to why Brown did not originally win the Pulitzer, instead this citation a few years too late:

>Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” series won a prestigious George Polk award. The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz, the attorney and television personality who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/julie-brown-pulit...

The rot runs deep