samaman

This is a really cool finding, but also really sad considering all of the animals from before are now extinct. Hope future grassland and forest protection programs take this history into account!

And not tesla, seriously?

Very fun to see how trends got started! Searched quantum computing and the oldest result was Peter Schor's paper on what would become Schors algorithm

Adamatzky is a GOAT in biocomputing. Hes the sort of researcher who really makes me question why we spend so much money on developing quantum computers and other new ways of modeling biosystems when using other biosystems as analogs seems far cheaper and more fruitful.

I'd be very very worried about a protein model that just came out alphafold to be used to come up with drug targets without at least some molecular dynamics simulation of the solution within which that protein works with. There may be other glycans, ligands, or wholly different metabollites that could affect this binding.

"In 2018, I wrote in the Washington Post that startups have begun usurping the responsibilities of governments at breathtaking pace. Whether it was Uber and Lyft supplementing much of public transport in major cities or Palantir assisting in the important work of the U.S. intelligence community, it is becoming clear that government cannot meet the needs of its citizens without the tech sector’s aid. " This doesn't seem quite accurate.

You'd have thought that that Quorum blockchain would prevent such things..

"Not only that, but the decentralised utopia that Nakamoto dreamed about, namely avoiding trusted third parties, is still far out of reach. Ironically, there are now three mining pools – a type of company that builds rooms full of servers in Alaska and other locations way up above the Arctic circle – which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests). " don't think that's quite right..

Right okay makes sense...guess I am just too used to NISQ and having to run many thousands of shots for high enough fidelity..if all you wanted was one output, then yeah one classical string is easy enough, thanks

Right, but you would still get the basis states for all 127 qubits right? And that would be 2^127 output states. Yes, you could do some sort of search maybe to find highest probability outputs only, but if you needed every output value for a follow up algorithmic step (like in VQE for ground state prep wherein you keep using previous results to adjust the wavefunctions until ground is reached), then wouldn't it be a bit tough to use?

Also another problem: you now have 2^127 output values leaving the quantum processor. If you're using a hybrid quantum algorithm that requires classical processing as well (which are most algos used today), you'd need more than a yottabyte of RAM. We can get around this problem by storing all 2^127 pieces of output data into other data types that compress the total size, but if you genuinely are trying to use all 2^127 outputs, you'd still need to do some pretty intensive searching to even find meaningful outputs. I guess this is where Grovers search could come really handy, right?

Maybe you just havent been seeing the same horror I've been seeing in terms of whole families getting covid and falling quite sick in India due to the shock it caused to the healthcare system..

I just want everyone here to know that Sequoia is funded by university endowments, and yet still does not have the confidence to invest in bleeding edge technology, picking instead to invest largely in "moat oriented" software. Nothing overtly wrong with it, but I just don't trust them when they claim to finally care more about slower growth companies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-endowments-mint-bill...

As someone who was an avid swift developer, I can see how people can get attracted to building OSS for .NET or Swift, and how it might even be necessary in many cases given the lack of feature update by the companies. But, after leaving the world, I just really hope more devs see that they aren't valued by these companies for building such open source, and in continuing to validate their products through continued fixes, we are only making them stronger. Maybe I have a very pessimistic view, but I've started looking very literally at how companies make money from any open source work they do before using it so I know what they want of me in the future and to see if I support their business model or not. Its for this reason I picked using Singularity over Docker because I just know that a federal lab + contractors for scientific work will actually stress test and continue paying for the software while docker, who ultimately doesn't then a profit yet, may either get bought by one of the FAANG+ or have to start aggressively curtailing access.

If they wanted African supply of an mRNA vaccine, why didn't they just use The Odin's completely open recipe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/one-bioha..., which was based on the Moderna vaccine. But, why would they want such a vaccine in Africa in the first place? The storage would be impossible anywhere outside of really rich medical facilities, and even that is not necessarily feasible. Why not go with funding vaccines by HDT bio, which have made mRNA vaccines but with metal particles in the outer lipid layer to allow for storage at fridge temps https://pipelinereview.com/index.php/2020090175739/Vaccines/... or something else?

Thanks, how does this compare for matrix multiplication and logistical regression to other machine learning specific cores though, like a GPU or one of those Google Tensor Cores? These Alibaba chips don't seem like they'd do very well at those tasks, but are just great all purpose CPUs

I feel so bad for Sophie Zhang. Not only did she risk her job to whistleblow, but she had the limelight totally stolen from her by Frances, even though she said many of the same things already months prior. And it wasn't Frances' fault, but rather the big three media companies in the US who didn't really bother to cover Sophie's work, and then follow on publications like this one referring to Sophie as "the other".

To respond to the title: yes, yes they are, if you consider how many live in infura or an AWS geth instance and/or quorum by JPM. Doesn't mean its not a better means for data security...just that yes, the publisher of said smart contract can just replace or change to contract if they really wanted to if it were not part of the mainnet. There are many infura nodes though that are part of the mainnet, so that's unlikely unless some company just forced all users to their own ETH network.

I think that's their whole business model really, a beautiful skin and api on top of a very boring process that makes developers want to use it. Stripe itself doesn't really handle a lot of the banking work and uses Evolve Bank (like basically every fintech company in America) and Goldman Sachs to actually do that work https://stripe.com/treasury. Not saying that itself doesn't take a long time to develop in terms of relationships, but its obviously much faster than actually going to FINRA and the US Comptroller and making a new bank.

Just reminds me of Chaco Canyon and how eloquently light transforms can be used for many purposes https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/Education/SolarAstronomy/sun-dagge....

Thanks for the tip! Great site.

Agreed. While there are of course exceptions to the standard model that may end up being explained with sedenions and higher dimensionality, it's still quite robust.

Is someone going to tell them that AI/ML is just a set of regression algos, potentially on top of other regression algos, and that it is used in nearly every aspect of any online service they use to bring their service to them faster? I think this clearly shows just how far the hype terms of AI and ML have caused detriment when actually describing the technology underlying it, because it is much dumber than many people think. What is truly the problem is who is using the tech, for what reason, and how are they acquiring data to build such models. But, as we have seen with GDPR, having one jurisdiction or body say they will have new rules for data collections doesn't really lead to less tracking overall. So my question is, how do we do this? How do we once and for all stop continued, pointed tracking of all internet traffic? And is it even possible if groups like the NSA and Chinese gov already have backdoors to many sites and hardware platforms?

Take a look at Berlin's suburbs street view and you'll see the answer, which is still have places for bungalows, but dont have excessively large roads and driveways to get there

The show "The Looming Tower" on Hulu documents this well, would recommend checking it out if you want to learn more. It also documents how the CIA and NSA basically froze the FBI out of key intel. What I find super ironic is this freezing is a large reason why the attackers were not stopped earlier, but rather than solve this issue, Cheney and his lawyers gave way more power to the NSA to surveil Americans without encrypting their names or any details, further creating a siloing between the intelligence communities.

We can't even simulate all the organs in the body, let alone do it to the scale and depth needed to effectively sort out EVERY possibility for death. I would rather these billionaires pay their taxes to allow the NIH and other actually competent people in this field figure out how to build these models than continue to push overpriced vaporware that doesn't actually solve key health problems. If billionaires cared so much about being aging, they'd support local farmers and help in stopping food deserts across the country, especially as heart disease is the leading cause of death. But noooooooooo, big pills go brr

THIS this is so accurate, and the patenting offices are so bureaucratic too! Worked in one at a UC and if I worked past 5pm or came in early, people thought I was crazy. I remember I set up a linkedin tracker one week and people thought I was so fast moving. Meanwhile, the part of the office that actually helped startups had 1/5th the people and kept scaring away students who actually needed help because the students kept thinking the office would claim their idea as university property and make them pay for the rights to their own startups. This is why the UC is not the as good as Waterloo or other universities for startups, and its only getting worse as more programs have usage fees now (looking at you Skydeck). Also, did I mention that the UC gave $250m to Vivek Ranadive, owner of Sac Kings, to run a VC firm, Bow Capital, to invest in UC founders, and that company is now instead launching a SPAC to take Wework public? Yeah the UC startup ecosystem is kinda trash....

What the comment basically said is that adenovirus on it's own produced coagulation aka clotting, but that PEG wrapping decreases coagulation a lot. Therefore, a vaccine embedded in PEG, like those made by BioNTech and Moderna, should lead to less coagulation.

Ah, reminds me of the time I ran through $15k worth of compute in all of 3 weeks trying to do biological modeling. What was strange was that we were being charged for higher bandwidth even though it was not said to be any more for that same instance even if the usage stayed the same. We switched to Digital Ocean after that and that problem went away and had an all you can eat set of arguably better systems (32 CPUs vs 16) for $640 a month per device. So yeah, really do your homework, keep up with the notifications, and realize that they LOVE people like you! Why do you think cloud companies are so rich? Every startup idea gets put on there and either forgotten or blows up and ends up spending more in services. So yes, keep this in mind moving forward and dont listen to people who swear by AWS for x y of a feature because chances are they dont actually know what's going on behind the hood but have had to he trained it or heard about it in tech interviews if they are a cs person.