aastronaut

> If you had a list of all the genomes of all the people in the world, and all their phenotypes (height, eye color, hair type, etc), you could take all their genomes as input variables and treat all their phenotypes as output variables, and make embeddings or other models that mapped from genomes to phenotypes. The result would be a predictive model that could take a human genome, and spit out a prediction of what that person looks like and other details around them (up to the limits of heritability).

Would such a predictive model really be possible? As far as I'm aware there is contradicting research whether a specific phenotype distinctly originates from a SNP/genotype.

> HTML/CSS/JS are successful because of the same reason electron exists. The success of the web means there’s a huge developer base that knows how to work with HTML/CSS/JS

The actual reason is a different one IMHO. The implementation of web standards enabled cross-platform engines that provide every UI customization one could possibly need for a SaaS product. This decision included many benefits for businesses and developers alike, such as:

- User data stays in the walled garden

- Users most probably already have a web-browser installed

- Responsibility to keep the runtime (web-browser) up-to-date is on the user side

- Automated updates (POV user)

- No installation instructions

I think it as much as a business decision as it was the decision from developers to bet on HTML/CSS/JS instead of GTK, QT, etc.

> [...], written in TypeScript and accelerated with C++ bindings to BLAS and LAPACK

C++ addons for Node.js are not part of the JavaScript runtime.

> my gut is screaming no

seems like you already made up your mind, so why bother?

TypeScript is helpful (or at least meant to be) for teams as it aims to block the cleverness of its individual contributors. Especially people only familiar with dynamic type systems are rather fighting a static type checker at first and "it's not helping them". A "strong" type checker should enforce everyone to write stuff in a simpler form and that gets in the way of productivity for some people.

If you can maintain your mindset and write your code in a simple form that could easily satisfy a type checker (coming from rust), then why bother with additional tooling if it won't provide more value to you? Or to phrase it differently: if you can maintain a strong mindset with confidence, bringing in additional tooling for that project later on, when it will be become plausible, won't be that hard. But if you doubt your mindset, it might be a helpful choice to let a type checker look over your shoulder from the beginning.