elcritch

Joined 11 years ago

Karma
5,431
Submissions
2,735
Member since
Jun 28
https://github.com/elcritch/

I'm also on discord as `.elcritch` / elcritch#6389.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
True being limited to phase 1 would be the bigger limitation.

Another bigger impact might come by making regular researchers, lab workers, etc all more efficient by making data analysis more efficient or creating better tools. Possibly with less errors. That'd of course require big pharma to adopt them. We'll see on that point.

Comment · 2 days ago
If you phrase it in that way it seems intractable.

However the majority of a protein’s structure is functionally inactive. Only a relatively small region tends to be active and affect rate kinetics of various chemical reactions. Alternatively similar interactions affect the mechanical properties of other proteins.

We also know many of the pathways for most key biological processes. Of course we’re no where near simulating an entire human, however we could feasibly filter drug candidate drugs for strong affects on key biological pathways.

That’s not too different in a broad since than using surrogates like mice to test for toxicity across highly conserved pathways in metabolism, reproduction, liver function, etc. It’s a much more tractable problem as well.

We have a lot of experimental data for the effect of many proteins on important chemical pathways. Presumably drug companies have more information on how many drug candidates react with or interfere with key pathways.

My conjecture would be that we wouldn’t need fine grained interactions but that even coarse grained filtering could be valuable. As in sure drug XYZ is great for binding to serotonin but it also has high affinity to key stomach proteins. That could avoid expensive studies just to find out a promising anti-depression drug causes severe gastrointestinal issues in a lot of patients.

Even better if we could use genome variations to protein structure variations which could help differentiate between subsets of patients with or without severe side effects.

Comment · 3 days ago
For the IPO, what matters as this stage is hype. If Anthropic can make headlines assisting with drug creation that may be all they need.
Comment · 3 days ago
> No one knows how a molecule will interact with human biology. It can't be simulated computationally to generate data (too slow),

Prior to AlphaFold that was the state of predicting protein structures. That model seemingly figured out the "language" used by biology for making protein structures from DNA. It's not unreasonable to believe there's a good chance something similar exists for protein interactions.

Even if it was coarse grained but could eliminate drugs with high likelihood of unfavorable reactions it'd still be valuable. Still not sure LLMs would be ideal for that work.

Comment · 3 days ago
> it allows the async implementation to do the "prepare operation, suspend until completed, wake up" dance, where the threaded implementation would just run the blocking syscall directly. There are plans to add stackless coroutines

Yeah so that's a lot of hidden magic and implicit logic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Comment · 4 days ago
Definitely stealing those hotkeys for my own terminal emulator! Was wanting similar functionality but wasn't sure of the shortcuts to use.
Comment · 4 days ago
Certainly parts of terminals protocols are archaic, but overall it's not nearly as fragile as you make it out to be.
Comment · 4 days ago
> Zig just takes a firm stance against implicit logic

I bought that as Zig's M.O., but then came the automatic "async/IO" colorless functions which is a huge chunk of implicit and hidden logic.

That's more implicit logic than what's in say JavaScript async AFAICT. Arbitrary int sizes with implicit casting rules, etc. More recently was the attempts of memory safety via an some sort of (optional) implicit GC mode. Personally I don't get it.

Comment · 5 days ago
Right, much better to invest and add more features, fix more bugs, make it cheaper.
Comment · 5 days ago
From what I've read careful programming. They also used images for buttons and other widgets. Pre-canned images look great but are also fixed in size, shape.

One of my goals with Merenda is to make a NextStep/Cocoa like GUI system but with a richer primitives - things like resizing corners dynamically with the shadows or adjusting gloss positions on skeuomorphic buttons.

Things web pages can do nowadays but in a NextStep like framework with rich MVC. Also with message passing but in Nim a more strongly typed language than ObjC.

An alternative evolution of Cocoa instead of SwiftUI.

Comment · 5 days ago
Comment · 5 days ago
Comment · 6 days ago
Tead the article. The cost isn't mentioned anywhere. If it did the cost to run on even SOTA LLMs would be negligible in medicine, probably not even a dollar.
Comment · 6 days ago
For me Nim hits the sweet spot since 2.0 moved to ARC/ORC. All the benefits of GC for programming but it's much easier to control allocations and memory when desired. Plus I can run it as a script or compile to JS. I'd put Swift in a similar category too. Not compiling to JS but that it gives good control over memory while being automated via its ARC.
Comment · 11 days ago

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