alevskaya

8 ms·

1.
by alevskaya 7d ago
"they can be small molecules that inactivate essential molecular targets in humans" - aka a poison. I mean we deal with the reality of poisons plenty fine right? This isn't x-risk stuff. I was an experimental synbio person
2.
by alevskaya 7d ago
Because fatality and virulence stand in fundamental tension with each other when it comes to epidemiology. You can't magic that tension away or just invent other incompatible properties of a hypothetical virus (stealth, latency, virul
3.
by alevskaya 7d ago
I worked in immuno-oncology: cancer vaccines work in melanoma where many things work because of the neoantigen abundance, they've generally been very mixed in efficacy. And even BionTech's BNT111 failed in melanoma! We have hope
4.
by alevskaya 7d ago
You can read up on the synthesis of sarin on wikipedia.
5.
by alevskaya 7d ago
I was a biophysicist and experimental biologist for decades, I designed viral vectors and cell therapies, etc. What protects us here isn't our ignorance vs an "ASI". It's the fact that the complexity of molecular physic
6.
by alevskaya 2mo ago
I was a genetic engineer for ~20 years and have worked on frontier LLMs for the last 8. I used to engineer viral vectors and studied how to evade human immune systems for gene therapies... The biorisk scenarios that the AI safety folks flo
7.
by alevskaya 9mo ago
I do think it's a lot simpler than the problem Itanium was trying to solve. Neural nets are just way more regular in nature, even with block sparsity, compared to generic consumer pointer-hopping code. I wouldn't call it "e
8.
by alevskaya 2y ago
Nothing fancy. I made these with some pretty simple hand written scripts in javascript rendering to canvas: lots of fiddly little boxes moving around are simpler to script than to hand animate. (If I were to do much more of this I might r
9.
by alevskaya 2y ago
Quantum mechanics is needed to explain any microscopic phenomena in chemistry and biology - that is not at all in dispute. The odd set of claims is that somehow biology has 1) figured out how to preserve long-range entanglement and coherent
10.
by alevskaya 2y ago
This referenced paper seems like primarily a theoretical modelling paper (almost all of its figures are simulations?) that contains as far as I can read 3 (!) actual experimental measurements in bulk on a fluorospectrophotometer. The claim
11.
by alevskaya 2y ago
This seems like a theoretical modelling paper (all of its figures are simulations?) that contains as far as I can read 3 (!) actual experimental measurements in bulk on a fluorospectrophotometer. The claim is that the increased fluorescent
12.
by alevskaya 3y ago
The static shape of a protein doesn't automatically give you a prediction of its functional properties. There's a hell of a lot more biophysics going on that we have no predictive models for that are needed to understand catalysi
13.
by alevskaya 3y ago
Yeah we used to use this in our older models years ago... I don't recall the details exactly, but I don't think it ever did very much. I certainly don't think it will help at all with stability. Things like Q/K layernor
14.
by alevskaya 4y ago
This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed. As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unn
15.
by alevskaya 4y ago
You don't need access to a proprietary database to refute that sars-cov-2 wasn't copy-pasted at these restriction sites. We have public sequences of the closely related coronavirus strains. The unnatural SNP pattern would be abs
16.
by alevskaya 4y ago
I'm pretty tired of debating people who don't know biology here. Using seamless cloning methods is super common - but they don't work like the paper authors suggest they do. I misspent my youth doing reactions and workflows
17.
by alevskaya 4y ago
As someone who was a genetic engineer for a long while, watching HN talk about dodgy papers like this is painful. This paper posits a completely crazy cloning strategy that makes no sense (ie doing something far more convoluted than typical
18.
by alevskaya 4y ago
There's a big difference between not caring about stability, and being willing to trade precision for better memory bandwidth for an application that doesn't benefit from increased precision. When doing large training jobs on TPU
19.
TensorStore for High-Performance, Scalable Array Storage(ai.googleblog.com)
13 points by alevskaya 4y ago|0 comments
20.
by alevskaya 4y ago
To add to this comment (from someone who used to engineer proteins, and long ago DFT as well): DFT is only really decent at ground state predictions, computational chemists often have to resort to even more expensive methods to capture &quo
21.
by alevskaya 4y ago
In the absence of any concrete scientific evidence for a lab leak (and an enormous amount of real, arguably dispositive, evidence against it), I see this doubling-down of articles attacking the character of anyone peripherally involved in w
22.
by alevskaya 5y ago
For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend the approachable but more extensive technical introduction at https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction
23.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Sorry? I was a genetic engineer for two decades who has done plenty of mammalian cell engineering and viral design work. There's simply nothing about the original SARS-COV-2 genetic sequence that looks artificial.
24.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Alina chan's original "evidence" put ridiculous weight on a few SNPs before we really had a lot of data or understanding of sars-cov-2 evolution (esp. it's enormously broad mammalian host range). It looks ridiculous in
25.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Occam's razor does not mean every coincidence is meaningful - that's just pareidolia. The simplest scenario is that this viral pandemic is like every other one in known history - including the last coronavirus pandemic - a zoonot
26.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Yeah, I used to engineer viruses and immune cells, etc. I've read that grant a few times. Again, a rejected _American_ grant for work to be done in Baric's lab in North Carolina. Most of the work outlined in it involved chimeri
27.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Sigh. As I've said in other posts, if any experiment of this sort were the source of sars-cov-2, it would be -blindingly- obvious. The synthetic metagenomic experiments looking into spike, etc. leave completely obvious traces, number
28.
by alevskaya 5y ago
I was a genetic engineer for two decades: - Clear signs of molecular manipulation in the sars-cov-2 sequence. There are none. Almost all of the alleged manipulations would have left unmistakeable, damning evidence in a recognizable vector
29.
by alevskaya 5y ago
Jax does actually already support a persistent compilation cache for TPU, and support for caching GPU compiles is being worked on currently.
30.
by alevskaya 5y ago
I used to work in immunology - this is not accurate. We know that e.g. mRNA vaccines elicit quite a good T-cell immune response. e.g. for one of many studies looking at T-cell responses to the recent sars-cov-2 vaccines: https:/&#x2F

More ›