Hasnain says:

This is two years since CASP-13 and this looks to be an even bigger breakthrough in technology. Wondering if these folks will get a Nobel for this (seems likely).

“All of the groups in this year’s competition improved, Moult says. But with AlphaFold, Lupas says, “The game has changed.” The organizers even worried DeepMind may have been cheating somehow. So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a species of archaea, an ancient group of microbes. For 10 years, his research team tried every trick in the book to get an x-ray crystal structure of the protein. “We couldn’t solve it.”

But AlphaFold had no trouble. It returned a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. The model enabled Lupas and his colleagues to make sense of their x-ray data; within half an hour, they had fit their experimental results to AlphaFold’s predicted structure. “It’s almost perfect,” Lupas says. “They could not possibly have cheated on this. I don’t know how they do it.””

Hasnain says:

This is so on point.

“How do I convince people I am legit?

Tell people you are open to speaking engagements. Talk about the number of trees you planted this month. Tell them someone else forced you to post on IH or HN because of how great your content is.

Act quirky on Twitter.”

Hasnain says:

I came across this story randomly on Twitter and it seemed too incredulous to believe - massive insurance fraud, pervasive through the system where people would fake accidents, have doctors be in on it to actually bill the insurance companies, and ... it gets even crazier. But this all checks out! I wonder if there’s a documentary on this somewhere (article is from 2003)

“I can't tell you their names. Or even the type of cars they were driving. If I do, someone might find them. And when you're involved with organized crime and you talk about it, you don't want to be found. What I can tell you is that the accident, which occurred in the winter of 2002, proved to be a very big deal indeed. In the months that followed, the four passengers listed on the police report were arrested. Their testimony ultimately led investigators in Suffolk County, Long Island, to uncover what may turn out to be the largest organized insurance-fraud ring in U.S. history. In mid-August, Suffolk County district attorney Thomas Spota announced that a grand jury had indicted 567 people and corporations connected with the ring, which he says is tied to more than 1,000 car accidents in the New York area. The list of indictments includes passengers; the "runners" who recruited them and orchestrated the accidents; the doctors who "diagnosed" and "treated" the victims; the medical clinics that processed their insurance claims; and the financiers the district attorney alleges are the masterminds of a vast and interconnected criminal enterprise.

Only 240 of the indictments have been made available to the public. The rest, along with many of the facts in the case, remain under seal. Over the past two months, however, FORTUNE has interviewed dozens of officials involved with the case, including insurance company investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and detectives; reviewed hundreds of pages of confidential documents; and heard the stories of people charged in the scheme, who agreed to speak on the condition that we shield their identities. The picture that emerges is of a sophisticated organized-crime syndicate that rivals any drug lord's, and that systematically bilked some of the best-known names in the insurance industry out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The losses from the case are still being tallied. State Farm has acknowledged potential exposure of $48 million, and experts involved in the case predict that when Allstate, GEICO, and others weigh in, that number could easily reach $500 million.”

Hasnain says:

“The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.””

Hasnain says:

I know this is basically an ad for a documentary but it’s still an engaging story.

“"This story sheds light on refugees in a positive way, about what happens when they're given an opportunity," she says.

"Ultimately, this is a story of a guy who came to the country with nothing, and with some hustle, and dreams, and a little luck, really made quite a charmed life for himself."

Which he then threw away.”

Hasnain says:

Sigh :/

“In a 1977 speech, Bell Burnell insisted on not feeling slighted by the Nobel committee, citing the difficulty of resolving “demarcation disputes between supervisor and student” and the belief that “it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students.” But it is hard to read such sentiments without wondering whether there might be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome of the disenfranchised at work — after all, those systematically marginalized and discriminated against by any power structure have no choice but to rationalize injustice as a coping mechanism if they are to continue operating within that ecosystem without being broken by its biases.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting technical post mortem for why half the internet was down the other day.

Hasnain says:

Oof. I don’t even know where to begin.

“One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.”

Hasnain says:

Is it time to short Intel? Or am I too late?

“For years, Intel and AMD have been playing a chess match, sniping back and forth with improvements in CPU performance, battery life, and onboard graphics. Apple appears to be playing an entirely different game on an entirely different level. The same interplay between hardware and software that has led to such huge successes on the iPhone and iPad has now come to the Mac.

The most exciting — or frightening, if you’re a traditional PC chip company — part of Apple’s new chips is that the M1 is just the starting point. It’s Apple’s first-generation processor, designed to replace the chips in Apple’s weakest, cheapest laptops and desktops. Imagine what Apple’s laptops might do if the company can replicate that success on its high-end laptops and desktops or after a few more years of maturation for the M-series lineup.

But when a $1,000 M1 laptop can outdo a maxed-out, $6,000 MacBook Pro with quadruple the RAM and Intel’s best chip, while also running cooler and quieter in a smaller and lighter form factor and with twice the battery life, where do competitors even go from here?”

Hasnain says:

"The work provides an ironclad assurance that quantum computers exist in a different computational realm than classical computers (at least relative to an oracle). Even in a world where P equals NP — one where the traveling salesman problem is as simple as finding a best-fit line on a spreadsheet — Raz and Tal’s proof demonstrates that there would still be problems only quantum computers could solve."

Interesting read/overview on quantum computing.