Very excited about this! I used CedarDB a while back for my bioinformatics research when Clickhouse started running into OOMs, and the difference was astonishing (Some details: The main query was a join of 100 million rows against 30.000 rows, then aggregating statistics for the entire table. Clickhouse used up well over 64 GiB of RAM + 100 GiB of Swap and then crashed, while Cedar used only 15 GiBs and finished quickly).
Ever since attending the advanced database lecture of Thomas Neumann at TU Munich, who wrote Umbra, the academic predecessor of CedarDB, I've been looking forward to everyone getting their hands on it!
I believe Cedar will enable tons of projects and companies to simplify their data stack because it can basically handle everything at once (until reaching very significant scale).
> An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.
The cited Rock Paper Shotgun article doesn't support this though:
> It’s worth noting that Ramlan herself points out that “running” Doom using the cells would be an enormous undertaking due to their extremely limited ability. What she did manage to successfully do, however, is simulate using the wall of cells as a display for Doom by rendering gameplay using the illuminated E. coli.
Even if AlphaZero does play better chess, there's absolutely zero it can do in terms of explaining why it played that way.
AlphaZero is zero in terms of explainability.
Humans have to explain to themselves and to others what they do, this is key in understanding what's happening, in communicating what's happening, in human decision-making, in deciding between what works and what doesn't and how well or how bad it works.
Returning back to the original DeepMind press release, it's misinforming the public about the alleged progress, in fact no fundamental progress was made, DeepMind did not come up with an entirely new sorting algorithm, the improvement was marginal at best.
I maintain my opinion that Alphadev does not understand any of the existing sorting algorithms at all.
Even if AI comes up with a marginal improvement to something, it's incapable of explaining what it has done. Humans (unless they're a politician or a dictator) always have to explain their decisions, how they got there, they have to argue their decisions and their thought-process.
It cannot explain because (1) it is not necessary to become good and (2) it wasn't explicitly trained to explain.
But it's reasonable to imagine a later model trained to explain things. The issue is that some positions might not be explainable, as they require branching too much and a lot of edge cases, so the explanation is not understandable by the human.
It's unreasonable to give up on explanations and deem something "not understandable" when we've been doing this thing for 3000+ years called mathematics, where it's exactly explainability that we seek and the removal of doubt.
The only other entities that we know of who can't communicate or explain what they're doing are animals.
It's fine if you want to refer to Kahneman's classification [1] of instinctual and thorough thinking. Explainability is a separate topic. Also when the amount of energy and compute used are as high as they are.. the results, the return on investment really isn't that high. Hopefully there are better days ahead.
Enzymes are much too unstable and expensive to ever make sense in electricity production, especially when compared to inorganic solutions like PV.
The other way around is more sensible though, using electricity to produce hydrogen (Enzymatic electrolysis cells, EFCs), for example from distillery wastewater.
Yes, that drives cost down but even on the biggest scale, like insulin, enzymes are still orders of magnitude more expensive than inorganic catalysts (e.g. platinum for hydrogen fuel cells)
Why one way but not the other - just that pouring power onto the grid requires cooperation but producing hydrogen doesn't, or is there something more fundamental at play?
The fundamental principle would be that enzymes have an comparative advantage when utilising and producing complex organic molecules as fuel for hydrogen production (such as glucose in wastewater) while inorganic catalysts are cheaper, more stable but limited to simple reactions
Not everyone has a LinkedIn account, not everyone may know that “Naomi” is usually feminine, and the article run through a textual gender analyser does read as “masculine”.
Mis-stating gender might be careless when as you imply “their” is the always the safe bet, but it’s probably not enough to justify OP’s unduly critical response. He / she or they could have just replied with “I checked their LinkedIn and Naomi’s a girl, btw”.
This man has won the People's Honour Award for climbing the highest mountains on 5 continents and being the first man to reach the north pole solo.
So Naomi is not necessarily a dead giveaway, you guys really split hairs and raise hackles over just about nothing worthwhile. Mistaking someone's sex is not a massive deal.
I used to have on my team a guy named Joan (pronounced joe-an) who spoke really softly, so his potential new employers would call me for a reference asking about "she" and "Joan", I'd gently correct them so as not to embarass him on any phone interview in the future. Nobody needed to throw a fit over an honest mistake.
Coincidentally, that guy was the best programmer I ever employed.
Anyway, just one of many counterexamples to a non-issue.
And this is on top of calling someone else out for presuming something... and here you all are presuming that Naomi is a feminine name.
We're making a mountain out of a molehill here. This is a persistent and pernicious problem in society at large now. What is the actual point of calling out any POSSIBLE perceived remote slight that you really have to perform mental gymnastics in bad faith to even arrive at?
There was no malicious intent on the part of the original poster, and yet they are excoriated for nothing?
What a massive amount of spare time we all have to waste.
Especially when it is a unisex name.
We could be doing something to better our world, and we spend time _on this_. We do it every day on a massive scale. It's so tiring, so wasteful, and so lamentably useless when there are so many useful and actually kind things we could be doing, instead of just virtue-signalling fake empathy on the internet that amounts to nothing.
as someone who had to make the same decision, I can strongly recommend you to take CS at TUM, the program is awesome (they just hosted the largest hackathon in Europe) and quite challenging.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
