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Comment This is getting old (Score 2) 58

Yes. Microsoft is shit. But their software works better than Libreoffice on all platforms. Libreoffice really only shines on Linux also called as 4% of all PCs. And that is also mostly Writer. Impress and Calc are significantly inferior and less versatile respectively.

Look, we know the free as in Libre angle, and the free as in beer angle. But it isnâ(TM)t enough and hasnâ(TM)t been for the last 20 years.

Feature parity with the industry standard is a must if your protests have to be meaningful.

Comment The comments here are missing the point (Score 2) 129

Appetite suppressing molecules are no surprise. In fact, we have one on the market called GLP-1 that works so well, it almost works too well. The big story in the TFA is that this is a "small-molecule" - a relatively simply organic compound that you could synthesize in bulk in a chemistry lab or pharmaceutical plant.

By contrast, GLP-1 is hormone - specifically, a 30-amino acid chain of amino acids called a peptide that folds into a particular tangled shape that makes it work. Peptides are much more difficult to synthesize, and are quite unstable. Our bodies also tend to get rid of peptides quickly, so they don't last very long in the bloodstream.

Just compare how the two look:
GLP1 versus p-Tyramine-O-Sulfate and it is obvious which one is the harder one to deal with.

Comment Re:hmm (Score 4, Informative) 46

There isn't one. But there IS a need to be able to edit a single document with collaboratively with multiple people, and have decent reliability in changes being preserved and getting updated asynchronously.

At the moment, only Microsoft Office and Google Docs allow that. The browser is just a side-effect/perk of using web technologies to facilitate the above, and the fact that Google does everything in the browser as far as possible.

Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 82

This has nothing to do with Excel but more to do with the fact that there exist at least three different nomenclature schemes for genes followed by the major databases such as ENSEMBL, NCBI RefSeq and UNIPROT. Then there is a "common name" and "official name" and so on.

Automatic data conversion features can be turned off in Excel for years now (your citation is from 2016).

Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 82

Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. âoe reply.

I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts. As much I hate Excel, I have repeatedly seen the Calc is crappier and especially so on MacOS.

People have different requirements and priorities. And MS Office as a whole is like 60 bucks a year. Well worth it to avoid the catastrophe that is Impress. FWIW, Writer seems the least bad component of Libreoffice for my use cases.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 3, Interesting) 92

Problem with Libreoffice is that they think a lot. I was once told that a bug is so trivial that it would take at most a couple of hours to fix - therefore I should do it myself. Two hours of my time is worth at least a 100 bucks. I offered the user the 100 bucks if they could do it for me. They didn’t accept. A subscription to MS Office for a year is worth 60 bucks.

Guess which one I took. Libreoffice is the new Mozilla in their attitude towards their users. Overtly pro-user, but in reality so out of touch that they don’t understand why they can’t beat the evil company they are competing with.

Comment AI is much better as an aid (Score 2) 211

AI works well if you know what you are doing and you use it to take away the tedium. Say coding a 500-line routine that you know how to code, know what it should do and have the ability to tell a shit result from a good one. This is like a Doctor telling a nurse exactly what drug to administer. If you are going to use it actually diagnose the problem and come up with solutions , current LLM models are pretty shit. It's too bad most people who are using LLMs think it can replace actual domain-specific knowledge just because LLMs can fake it so well.

Comment The AI is right. (Score 4, Insightful) 39

The determination of outliers is subject to specific assumptions about the underlying population distribution, and arbitrary thresholds with respect to how far a particular data point should be to be counted as an outlier. Further, statistical significance depends on another arbitrary threshold (conventionally p0.05) giving the probability of achieving that result purely by chance. Due to these arbitrary values, there is no ‘correct’ answer to these questions.

The question to ask is not whether a student is an outlier, but merely what percentile they are in. Sounds to me like AI gave the right answer, but the user asked it the wrong question.

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