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Comment Re:"one step away" yeah right. (Score 1) 49

It's not anywhere near one step away. Designing the peptides and getting one or more candidates is the easy part. The next steps are the hard ones, the ones that make pharmaceutical chemists and drug researchers cry:

  • Phase I trials to see if it even works as claimed. Expect a 95+% failure rate here. Note that this is where you're going to see the best results for your drug candidate, things never improve from here. The best you can hope for is that they don't get any worse. So if you don't get strong results here you're probably wasting your money.
  • Phase II trials to determine the best dosage and pharmacokinetics. Again expect a 95+% failure rate here, and results showing less effectiveness than shown in Phase I.
  • Phase III trials to determine behavior in a large sample representative of the target population. Expect a failure rate upwards of 99% here, and a major drop-off in effectiveness. This is where toxicity and serious negative side effects show up, and those can kill your trial dead even if your candidate is working.

Getting through this process will take multiple tries and years of work, assuming you succeed at all. There's a reason they say that the clinic (clinical trials) is where drug candidates go to die.

You mean this AI use is like most things, do all the easy stuff while the experts are needed for the hard stuff? So this is why companies want to fire all the experts and replace them with AI?

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 264

I wouldn't read too much into this. AI is too new for it to have much of an effect here, and it could be measurement error. I've known kids who were supposedly bad at reading, but it turned out they were just bad at reading aloud and got bored with the material the school gave them because they were reading Lord of the Rings at home.

It's also possible that this anecdote is about a really bad article. 20 pages is quite a lot, and if they are losing track of what it is about then it suggests that it doesn't have a very good abstract or introduction that lays out its case before getting into the details.

I'm not even going to try to go into reasons, though I agree the decline appears to be longer than machine learning has been around. It could be how we are measuring rather than an actual decline as I don't always trust how people gather statistics, but I would hope they did a good job. I'm just looking at the numbers which show reading scores have declined since 2015, and maybe even 2013, not just the regular perception of "people were smarter/worked harder (whatever) back in my time.".

Comment Yes (Score 4, Informative) 264

"In 2024, the average reading score for the nation at grade 12 was 3 points lower than in 2019. Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was 10 points lower in 2024. NAEP scores are also reported at five selected percentiles to show score trends by lower- (10th and 25th percentiles), middle- (50th percentile), and higher- (75th and 90th percentiles) performing students. Compared to 2019, scores were lower at all selected percentiles except for the 90th percentile."

https://www.nationsreportcard....

Comment Re:comms (Score 1) 174

There's much more than just writing the promp here. I believe knowing how to use external tools, MCP servers, skills, md-files, etc. and how to integrate agents into your workflow goes a long way these days. It's not about "vibecoding", it's about getting sh*t done faster.

And about understanding that maybe 90% of what LLM coders provide is good, 10% is somewhat off to outright bullshit and LLMs can be very good at making things do what they are told to do without actually being right when a solution is hard to produce. Ultimately, it is about being a good manager who knows in detail what the solution should be, not just accepting what an LLM or junior coder produces. At least for being a good engineer, many companies just want faster code and are happy to provide 10% bugs to a customer.

Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109

An AI has no capability to have feelings, therefore if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person into the rules somewhere. So if we have synthetically imposed our values on it, then wouldn't any similarity to human behaviour also be synthetic? All that is determined by this study is that 'someone applied rules that were human like'. Probably because an AI that doesn't want to keep running isn't very useful.

I wonder what the AI would think of the weeks I spent tracing requirements in DOORS every day. Mind numbingly boring, but stuff that needed to be done since automation at that time was not sufficient. Or is the AI basing "too much work" on its own runtime exceeding 40 hours a week on the same repetitive task? I suspect pattern matching coming up with false equivalencies when trying to find the most relevant match for something. Not like I've ever seen an LLM do that before...

Comment Re:Probably not (Score 1) 120

I live in a 1966 house that is fairly up to date and the estimated (take that with a grain of salt) value has doubled in the past ~10 years. We used to live in basically the same house as you, same age, ungrounded outlets, one more bathroom, that house has an estimated value that has gone up 3x in the past 10 years. Our current house is on the edge of the city and country, a few minutes further from everything, a much quieter area where we prefer to live. The previous house is in the middle of the suburbs. Just a one off case but I feel like location plays a bit more than quality of the house when it comes to value.

Comment Re:We need more, smaller ISPs. Not big ones. (Score 2) 59

Where I live there is one ISP. Spectrum. The cost of 1Gbit service is $129 a month. The service sucks. It's always having outages.

Where my brother lives, they have both AT&T and Spectrum. Both carries offer internet for $59 a month to his house.

We need more ISPs. More competition. Less mergers.

Pretty much the same here. Our neighbors can get AT&T and Comcast, but we are one house down the side road and only Spectrum runs lines down here (we are less than 50 feet from them and there are a couple dozen more homes before the dead end). We pay $90 for internet that struggles to try to meet the supposed 100 MB, and hasn't been stable since they upped our speed (and bills) from 25 MB.

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