Viewing profile — alevskaya

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 ther…

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 …

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 …

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) figu…

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 m…

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 fluorospe…

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 …

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 w…

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…

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…

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 miss…

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 n…

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…

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 h…

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 …

For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend the approachable but more extensive technical introduction at https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction

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 geneti…

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 mammali…

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 - i…

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. M…

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 int…

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 lef…

Jax does actually already support a persistent compilation cache for TPU, and support for caching GPU compiles is being worked on currently.

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 resp…