ebolyen

For my own edification, what is the goal of SPARQL compared to normal SQL or if you live in predicate-land, Prolog or Datalog?

The semantic web tools never seemed to have their breakout moment and seem to run in parallel to "mainstream" history of relational and logic programming, but I've never really understood why.

I recall SimTower had bomb threats for the security team to deal with.

I think people are reacting to the press-release more than the work.

I don't see why this is definitely doomed just because they discuss beta-amyloid plaques. Those exist and are real. They probably don't cause it any more than tombstones cause graveyards; very related, but not in the directly mechanistic way we wish.

> Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the accumulation of amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptides in the brain.

This can be true and still not be the specific mechanism.

You can treat a specific waste product or you can repair the waste stream. The issue may be waste, but not a specific product, or the issue may not be the waste stream at all.

This work appears to demonstrate evidence of waste stream repair via a well-known waste-product. That doesn't mean that any specific waste product is or is not the problem or that this particular stream is definitely going to remove enough of the waste (if that was the problem).

Maybe there have been a lot of drugs which have similarly attempted waste-stream repair so there's good reason to doubt it on that alone. But I don't think that mentioning beta-amyloid plaque is enough to discard this out-of-hand.

I'm not aware of any, but it wouldn't be insane to build a seekable deflate implementation by defining offsets in a zip comment. This would leave the zip file backwards compatible to usual decompression while allowing internal seeking within an individual file if the decompressor was aware of this index.

Seems we need a .zipkeep file then.

Just kidding, I don't see how the overhead of the directory entry is even remotely enough to warrant removal. Most of the magic can be left to efficient DEFLATE compatible blocks and removing entries not in the central directory in the first place (ZIP files can support concatenation of new data so long as you re-write the central directory at the end of the file).

The moxy of this is inspiring.

I'm curious to know what you would rate as the most important features to make this work? It seems like calc+if do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the new function syntax is what makes instruction lookup tractable.

No, because alignment, in the general case, is O(n^2). It is ironically one of the more tractable and well solved problems in bioinformatics.