dekhn

Simple chemistry couldn't be considered intelligent- it's basically just falling down a potential energy gradient. It gets more interesting when you implement chemical logic (like transistors) and graphs of molecules that convert between each other, like autocatalytic networks.

What do you mean "prozac is fluoride"? Its chemical structure contains a trifluoro group, but it's not fluoride... and you don't end up with extra fluoride in your system.

As a side note: I take prozac and it's far better than paxil (for me and many others). Has been transformative in my life.

Going off of paxil was absolutely horrible, and at the time I did it, the psych community didn't believe that you experienced side effects during taper or discontinuing.

I have never in my life felt worse than when I was getting off paxil. Beyond the head zaps, it pervaded my intellectual with depression and anxiety.

Only after a few "head zaps" and other papers got published did the psych folks even listen to me about it, and then they were just sympathetic and tried to find me something else.

Thalidomide is still prescribed.

AlphaFold didn't solve a decades old protein folding problem. They substantially improved protein structure prediction but with important limits.

THe primary bottleneck for a drug is getting it through clinical trials. No matter how much you speed up lead detection, development, and in vivo studies, the bottleneck will still be clinical trials. Now, if we could make lead detection better at generating molecules that get through clinical trials, that's great- but it would take decades to know for sure. If we could make development less likely to produce toxic molecules that trigger the immune system, sure that's great- but again, we're talking decades before we know if it worked.

Attempting to improve clinical trials- well, those are already fairly well designed and run, but it's likely you could make improvements there too that increased efficacy. But again, you're still just dealing with the FDA, filing tons of paperwork, and tons of people looking at the paperwork. Unless you fix those systematic issues, we're not going to accelerate drug approvals.

Yes, we explicitly avoided any kind of high concurrency/parallelism. That was an intentional decision, although note we did have a global torrent network across all the workers, whose topology (node interactions) formed an extremely complex graph.

I used to work in the MPI world on supercomputer jobs and it was miserable. I also worked on other high concurrency systems at Google (helped run the Ads DB, did training and engineering of Sibyl). I continue to insist these systems are incredibly simple compared to even the most basic human cells interactin g.

Many lab experiments involve waiting for a period of time, and automating the steps before and after would be both expensive and failure prone.

I interpreted the question more broadly, replacing "diesel" with "fuel".

AlphaFold's goals were twofold (heh): demonstrate that protein structure prediction (for a subset of proteins) was solvable, and to accelerate drug discovery. As most people in the pharma field already know, PSP was never the gating step in getting drugs approved.

I've done SWE work at the highest level (I ran a job that ran a worker on almost every idle machine at Google, and the workers formed a global torrent for data distribution). If you took all of Google's data centers in the world, along with their networks, it would be roughly the complexity of a few cells in the human body. Fortunately, with my training in biology, working on such simple data centers was pretty easy.

I just have to point out: thalidomide is still prescribed as a drug for cancer and is very effective.

Robotech (the americanized version of Macross and some other anime) was broadcast on regular TV (local stations) in 1985. I watched the entire series (I was 12 at the time) with my jaw on the floor. Already The Last Unicorn had shown us what Japanese animation was capable of, and Robotech brought things up a notch (not in terms of animation quality, but in terms of story). Note that Robotech and the original Macross and other series are a bit different. We were watching akira by 1989 or 1990.

I distinctly recall that Robotech had a cross-dressing character well ahead of its time (for american audiences).