searine

They split from the Russian grid and it is causing growing pains. Generation is limited to oil and comprised of aging soviet era plants. They are upgrading but it takes time.

Great. Claude is basically useless for bioinformatics now.

I saw a really interesting talk by Katie Pollard at ISMB this year about the limitations of variant prediction.

The gist was, can existing variation provide enough context to infer impact of variation? The answer seemed to be no.

Kind of like how frontier LLMs need to ingest larger and large amounts of text to advance. We are going to need to leverage comparative data from other species, and likely tremendous amounts of laboratory mutagenesis experiments to actually make headway on variant prediction. Nature, as it stands, just doesn't have enough human variation.

I might decide to shit on your front porch every morning. It is the definition of a personal decision.

It's about protecting each other, basic empathy. Doing the bare minimum to and taking miniscule risk to protect the lives of people around you. Sorry that's hard to understand.

Because, it is always all about you...

Computation is not the hard part of discovery.

Its not just what makes the news. There is a cooling effect happening in recruiting international talent.

Science is heavily international, and if people feel like they won't get funding/wont be safe here, they won't come.

As an 'at home' science project? Totally do-able, but very expensive. I did it as part of epidemiological field with a backpack of materials, so you can definitly do it at home.

As a useful genome? Marginal. ONT will need a couple runs to get complete human genome coverage and the substitution error rate is still high compared to short reads. For a fraction of the price and effort you can get your DNA resequenced at 10 times the quality.

I guess if you are super-ultra paranoid you can do it all yourself at home, but honestly. You're not that special, and if someone really actually wanted your genome that bad they'd just take it from a used coffee cup.

>The government is going to suck at funding the right things.

The government is actually really really good at funding the right things. The grant process has been extremely successful in directing funding efficiently towards cutting edge ideas. It does this by handing off the decision making to experts who review proposals rather than having political/profit driven kingmakers.

In contrast corporate/VC money mostly only funds the latest shiny bauble that may result in exit liquidity in a few years. The minority investments in things like fusion are still only applied work and are built on decades of unprofitable basic science.

In other words. Government funding has basically funded every science/tech breakthrough of the last 80 years.

Simple, excellent data. Thanks.

Is it excessive? Expensive, certainly, but if I wanted cheap I'd go live in shack in the mountains.

Thats not true at all. If anything, they will read the figures and skip the introduction.

If it is your field, you don't need an intro, and don't want to hear whatever yarn they are spinning in the abstract/discussion. You jump straight to the figures / table to review the data yourself.

Agreed. Seeing million dollar sequencers on ebay for a few thousand bucks makes me want to reach for my wallet, but the I realize there are no reagents for it anyway.