Viewing profile — brofallon

To use RLHF you need a dataset that includes instructions with good & bad answers - do many of those exist? I know there are a few datasets of just plain instructions-with-response…

I agree - LangChain is totally awesome and unlocks amazing new capabilities of LLMs (easily!), but the code itself is pretty awkward. No logging framework, for instance, and the st…

Somewhat OT, but I feel like this is such an underappreciated aspect of recent LLMs: Not just their ability to generate text - but their apparent effectiveness in making use of arb…

There's a special place in my heart for any project in which the Readme says "Warning: The code is fucking awful"

I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energ…

Most of the discussion here seems to assume bioinformatics / genomics jobs are academic, but I work for a clinical testing lab where production-quality code is a must. We're probab…

Just to clarify, exons are the portions of genes that code for protein sequence (they are expressed). Introns span the distance between exons and may contain regulatory or splicing…

It continues to annoy me that fusion companies make claims like "enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity.". Current, broadly used technologies such as wind and solar alr…

I'm honestly not sure why there seems to be so much interest in fusion these days. Wind and solar seem to offer a limitless, carbon-free energy supply with relatively cheap, well u…

In response to your final question: To my ear using "men" as a substitute for "all people" doesn't flow better, I found it rather jarring and antiquated and, yeah, a little insensi…

So curious to see what happens to salaries, and where people live, if WFH is common in many sectors. Will salaries go up or down on average if employers must compete nationally to …

I'm wondering how hard it would be to reverse-engineer the FLoC algorithm that assigns ids based on browsing history.. could one just have a bunch of headless browsers randomly vis…

This is a common misconception - "averaging out" errors only works if the errors are pretty rare at any given site. This is true for some types of errors & sequencing technologies,…

I guess I don't understand what the fundamental disagreement is here. Most astronomers believe the probability that Oumuamua was an alien visitor is very small. Loeb's argument is …

Trail runs are different for a few reasons. First, long endurance runs take way more time, maybe 16-18 hours for top-tier athletes to do 100 miles, while a fast marathon isn't much…

Many folks, especially those in academia, really seem to value academic positions, but I'm not really sure where that comes from. Teaching isn't often the greatest part (though I r…

As someone who loves to read but has no formal background in Literature, I'm very intrigued by the ways in which people rank authors so as to find the one most deserving of some aw…

As a full-time bioinformatician I'm totally excited about Julia for bioinformatics. Currently BioJulia needs some pretty serious work before it can be used for routine bioinformati…

Here's a good example, take a look at the recently published articles in PloS Computational Biology: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/ Just scanning through them... there are…

Sometimes I wonder if the discussion about p > 0.05). Whether or not statistical significance is a useful concept at all is a separate question, but I suspect the discussion of whe…