I love this artist so much! Please do check her out.

TLDR: Google's DeepMind has developed a new open sourced AI system called AlphaProteo, which can design novel proteins that bind to target molecules. This technology has the potential to accelerate progress in various fields, including drug development, disease understanding, and diagnosis.

AlphaProteo was trained on vast amounts of protein data and has learned the intricate ways molecules bind to each other. It can generate candidate proteins that bind to target molecules at specific locations, and its designs have been validated through experiments.

The system has shown promising results, achieving higher experimental success rates and better binding affinities than existing methods. It has also been able to design successful protein binders for challenging targets, such as VEGF-A, which is associated with cancer and complications from diabetes.

However, the system is not perfect and has limitations, such as being unable to design successful binders against certain targets. To address these limitations, DeepMind is working to improve and expand AlphaProteo's capabilities.

The development of AlphaProteo raises important questions about responsible development and biosecurity. DeepMind is working with external experts to develop best practices and is committed to sharing its work in a phased approach.

Overall, AlphaProteo has the potential to revolutionize protein design and accelerate progress in various fields, but it requires careful consideration of its limitations and potential risks.

Hey everyone!

So I'm finally moving to Canada very soon (yayy). I'm moving to Calgary specifically. I asked this question in the Calgary community too, but I'll ask it here too for a Canada wide answer.

Are there any good cooperatives that I can support and purchase from? Sayyy large home furniture coops or phone co-operatives and so on... Are there any good news cooperatives? Maybe some nice clothing cooperatives? I know that credit unions are more province specific, but still... Any good credit unions that have a good Canada wide presence? Maybe little artisan shops in say some small town in Ontario that make good stuff n ship it across Canada?

Any name drops would be appreciated!

PS: I've heard about Calgary Coop, so yeah... Anything more than this?

With all the negative stuff going on (Trump's failed assassination) and everything, it is natural to get absorbed in the doomerism. Of course, pretending that nothing scary is happening isn't the best thing to do. Scary stuff is happening, and we need to take action.

That being said, I personally trust Americans to do the right thing. Trump won't win, and America won't go fascist. This is because good people will fight and win. Same goes with other countries (France and the UK for example).

Leaving politics aside, there's a lot of hope ahead. Science and Tech is advancing, life expectancy is increasing, investment in transit is increasing, countries r going greener, etc. Many cancer therapies r coming out (see the cancer vaccines for instance). Many cities have done some much needed land rezoning, due to which affordable housing will be a thing, 15 minute cities will be more and more common and so on.

The future is looking good, exciting stuff is happening and EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT.

Again, a little fear is good. Fear is what prevented early humans from being killed by predators, and it is what will prevent bad things from happening to us in the future. However, letting it consume our lives is a little counter intuitive.

I'm using lemmy-js-client for app development. I want to render comments in the nested form (like normal people do).

The problem is, the lemmy backend spits out comment lists in a fashion that is unfriendly for nested rendering. Why? It outputs comments whose paths are like follows (for example):

0.1.2.3.4

0.1.2.1

0.1.2.3.4.5

0.1.3.1.5

0.1

Let's say the limit that I've set here is 10. Many a times, the parent comments of the comments in the page are out of the page.

For example, let's say I asked lemmy for comments for a given post. It gives me an output like above. There are many children comments here on page 1 (like 0.1.2.1, 0.1.2.3.4 and so on). Their parent (0.1.2) is NOT on this page. It is on the page that follows.

Hence, I would need to do client side bs to get the correct parent comments.

What is your approach for doing the above?

This is what I have settled for now unfortunately. I fetch all the comments under a post and then convert them in my nested form. This means, that my app doesn't paginate. This thus results in really slow loading times for posts with more comments. The more comments a post has, the slower they will load. This sucks.

I tried other ways, mind you. While implementing pagination, I simply removed orphan comments when on a given page. If the user decided to go to page 2 (simply by scrolling), suddenly, these orphan comments would not be orphans anymore due to them finding their parent comments. This in turn, fucked with my ui completely (which was obvious), thus making the list randomly scroll like crazy. This was a really shitty experience for the user.

Sooooo what have you guys done? How have you handled the situation?

Neural networks have become increasingly impressive in recent years, but there's a big catch: we don't really know what they are doing. We give them data and ways to get feedback, and somehow, they learn all kinds of tasks. It would be really useful, especially for safety purposes, to understand what they have learned and how they work after they've been trained. The ultimate goal is not only to understand in broad strokes what they're doing but to precisely reverse engineer the algorithms encoded in their parameters. This is the ambitious goal of mechanistic interpretability. As an introduction to this field, we show how researchers have been able to partly reverse-engineer how InceptionV1, a convolutional neural network, recognizes images.

HEAR ME OUT BEFORE YOU DOWNVOTE.

Disclaimer: The hyperloop is an absolutely shit idea right now. I do not support building in any form right now.

Now to the shower thought: Theoretically, a hyperloop can get you from place A to place B on the planet in less than 40 min (back of the napkin calculations assuming constant acceleration and deceleration of around 1G). Being completely underground (more on that below), it would also be a really good piece of infrastructure safe from arial/orbital bombardment.

Now to the obvious problems: We need the tube to be very very straight to achieve high speeds without killing our passengers. We would want the hyperloop to enter city centers. Building such a straight thing in city centers would require a lot of demolition. Therefore, we would have to get it underground. Bringing it on the ground again outside cities doesn't make sense because we would be introducing steep upward curves, thus reducing its maximum speed. Therefore, it makes sense to build this thing completely underground. Building underground also gives us many more benefits like not having to do much land acquisition, safety from violent attacks and so on.

Our tube would have to be incredibly airtight. It absolutely cannot have any leaks anywhere. Also, we need to be able to achieve incredibly low chamber pressures and maintain them.

If we are building this underground, we would need a shit load of energy to dig and transport the material outside the tunnel. We would also need a shit load of steel and other resources for these incredibly long tunnels.

Where do we get this energy? Where do we mine these resources without destroying the planet? Now this is where the "future" part comes in. We would need energy to be incredibly cheap. The only viable long term method (by "long term", I mean it from the civilization time scale) would be via nuclear fusion. When is nuclear fusion happening? Well, it's only 30 years away! /s Jokes aside, the energy source might be when nuclear fusion not only becomes possible, but also incredibly cheap (the nuclear reactor shouldn't cost billions lol).

About the resources? Well, we probably need to mine them on the moon, no? The moon has A LOT of them right on the surface. If we can mine them and send them back home, we solve our resources problem!

Well, you might ask- doesn't it make more sense to just have spaceships with engines propelled by nuclear fusion that exit the atmosphere, go at hypersonic speeds and then drop in? Why build expensive underground continent spanning tunnels? Well, what if we are attacked by aliens? They could easily blockade our airspace. Hell, just dropping a few million stealthy pebbles in our lower orbits would be enough to stop all hypersonic travel (the risk of ships exploding on contact with these pebbles would be too high for air travel to continue). Hypersonic spaceships would also face the problem of traditional aircrafts- you would need to build spaceports far from city centers. These spaceports would require a lot of space and cause a tremendous amount of noise pollution (constant sonic booms for every launch and landing).

Therefore, I think I have made my mind. I think I would be voting for a hyperloop proposal that possibly would be tabled in our direct democratic government a 100-150 years from now!

Most states rely on paper bureaucracy to ensure that the state can function and provide services. Paper bureaucracy has been part and parcel of how we maintain states and corporations since the Chinese invented the first paper bureaucracy systems of management 3000 years ago. But as you all probably know, bureaucracy kinda sucks. It costs a lot to maintain, and in the worst cases bureaucracy can turn a state into a labyrinthian monstrosity that can be near to impossible to navigate.

Estonia is a Baltic country that in recent years has been embarking on reform programs that are intended to change this. Estonia is a “Paperless state” meaning a state that has effectively removed all paper from it’s bureaucracy and replaced it with a digital state structure. In this short video I would like to introduce you to the digital state and argue for it.