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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • AlphaFold does a couple of things. It’s capability in predicting how a single protein will be folded tends to be quite nice, but organisms often rely on complex interactions between proteins. It has a feature to calculate the folding of two or more proteins with each other, which is incredibly important to understand more complex interactions in various processes in the human body, as well as drug interactions.

    It is also easier to create a database of folding for all normal proteins in the human body. Any change in your DNA, which is somewhat more common than people think, can modify your proteins to one that has not been seen before, since many proteins can have chunks that don’t do anything but act as filler. Except, when those changes affect a bit that doesn’t act as filler or make the filler suddenly interact with other proteins or structures, like making the protein fold entirely differently or become hydrophobic where it shouldn’t be, then you’re in trouble.

    These modified proteins need to be analyzed as well and when their primary function in your body is to interact with other proteins, then this multimer functionality is critical. And that certainly needs much more research, as it is very, very far from perfect.



  • I know what events you’re referencing and misrepresenting, yes.

    The correction was entirely on point because the framing of this being an example of rampant inflation and thus a major governmental failure is misinformation propagated by the Republican party.

    While it is certainly imaginable that the erratic pricing of eggs in particular could have been handled better by the Democratic government, it’s entirely false to present it as just one example of a wide reaching problem as the price increase in this case is unique to this product. Inflation has been happening and is comparatively high, putting a lot of pressure on lower income households, but it is not effectively apocalyptic as it is presented here.

    Your response is completely unwarranted as in no way was I even attacking or talking down to you.


  • Inflation describes the decrease of the value of your money. When a currency is affected by inflation, all prices go up as you require more of that money to equal the same worth of goods.

    If eggs shot up to a price of 8 or so bucks and then went down to 2.69, you weren’t being affected by inflation as it is unheard of for a currency to suffer such insane inflation and then immediately recover from it.

    What happened in your case would have been a large shift in supply and demand, possibly brought on by the mentioned problems in the egg production, or price gouging by whoever was selling these. Possibly also just a mix of those.


  • I see many comments discrediting this somehow, but I want to put my two cents in as someone who does work with sensor based AI assisted processing in real time and safety reliant environments.

    Just because a concept can be thought of that sounds reasonable and maybe even works in simple tests, that doesn’t mean that it’s actually useful for the real use case. Many typical approaches to creating models that can solve computer vision tasks such as this can result in unstable results and no system that has a considerable false positive rate would be tolerated by any airliner. This isn’t even to speak of the false negative rate which might then still be rather high, which still leaves the system useless.

    Naturally it’s not to say that no such system could be created, but they can’t be just whipped out like some people here claim. If, as people here are already assuming, the problem happened because someone climbed onto the conveyor belt and was carried in, then this type of problem is sufficiently unthinkably rare that most companies didn’t think about it much either.

    Clearly greater security is necessary, but people are being unreasonable with how trivial they portray the solution as being.