I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics.

I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive.

Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races.

Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia.

I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank.

You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.

Purity tests are extremely common in left wing politics in the USA.

The number of models doesn’t seem that relevant? If anything it would make Tesla’s numbers all the more impressive being a niche market EV.

Of course its relevant as Tesla is valued to much more than the other makers despite selling in total fewer cars.

Tesla is indeed a niche maker, but their valuation does not reflect that fact.

Expected value calculations are terrible unless applied to a situation of hundreds or thousands of outcomes.

Otherwise you be stupid NOT to buy a lottery ticket each week.

The expected value of a lottery ticket is lower than its nominal value, for obvious reasons.

I agree with your point, though.

As a scientist, the two links you provided are severely lacking in utility.

The first developed a model to calculate protein function based on DNA sequence - yet provides no results of testing of the model. Until it does, it’s no better than the hundreds of predictive models thrown on the trash heap of science.

The second tested a models “ability to predict neuroscience results” (which reads really oddly). How did they test it? Pitted humans against LLMs in determining which published abstracts were correct.

Well yeah? That’s exactly what LLMs are good at - predicting language. But science is not advanced by predicting which abstracts of known science are correct.

It reminds me of my days in working with computational chemists - we had an x-ray structure of the molecule bound to the target. You can’t get much better than that at hard, objective data.

“Oh yeah, if you just add a methyl group here you’ll improve binding by an order of magnitude”.

So we went back to the lab, spent a week synthesizing the molecule, sent it to the biologists for a binding study. And the new molecule was 50% worse at binding.

And that’s not to blame the computation chemist. Biology is really damn hard. Scientists are constantly being surprised at results that are contradictory to current knowledge.

Could LLMs be used in the future to help come up with broad hypotheses in new areas? Sure! Are the hypotheses going to prove fruitless most of the time? Yes! But that’s science.

But any claim of a massive leap in scientific productivity (whether LLMs or something else) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Yup.

I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.

Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.

They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.

Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.

A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.

It’s historically incorrect though.

After the 1911 Revolution imperial possessions were a few stripes of land in Shanghai.

It was mostly civil war after that until 1937, and KMT fighting the Japanese.

Then another civil war in 1945.

Mao could be viewed as unifying the country under one government, but fighting imperialism? The CCP played a small role.

Ive never been in a US grocery store that didnt have 20-30% of floor space dedicated to fresh veggies and fruit.

Where you shoppin’?

Yeah, but everyone knows why. The IMF has called out that 40% of Ireland’s GDP isn’t real because it flows into and back out (back to the US mostly) due to tax schemes.

Unless you have better alternatives you’re not really saying much.

And I don’t think anyone relies only on GDP. Typically you’d look at employment rates, inflation, etc.

I wish I had the kind of hubris to make a bunch of predictions that all turned out not to happen (high inflation, recession, etc) then come back a year later with more predictions and a “trust me bro, I’m 100% sure this time”