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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I just came back to Europe after a couple weeks in the US. The US was beautiful (travelled in the Rockies). I was surprised by the fact that I unironically would not be able to live there just because of the food. Everything was so drowned in cheese / sugar / unspecified ultraprocessed something that I had legitimate digestion issues the first week.

    • “I would like an omelette please”
    • “Yes sir, do you want eggs in that or just the cheese?”

    I had no idea I could miss just plain real bread as much as I did by the time I got back.


  • Yes, it’s a field. Specifically, a field containing human-readable information about what is going on in adjacent fields, much like a comment. I see no issue with putting such information in a json file.

    As for “you don’t comment by putting information in variables”: In Python, your objects have the __doc__ attribute, which is specifically used for this purpose.


  • My test suite takes quite a bit of time, not because the code base is huge, but because it consists of a variety of mathematical models that should work under a range of conditions.

    This makes it very quick to write a test that’s basically “check that every pair of models gives the same output for the same conditions” or “check that re-ordering the inputs in a certain way does not change the output”.

    If you have 10 models, with three inputs that can be ordered 6 ways, you now suddenly have 60 tests that take maybe 2-3 sec each.

    Scaling up: It becomes very easy to write automated testing for a lot of stuff, so even if each individual test is relatively quick, they suddenly take 10-15 min to run total.

    The test suite now is ≈2000 unit/integration tests, and I have experienced uncovering an obscure bug because a single one of them failed.


  • This is a very “yes but still no” thing in my experience. Typically, I find that if I write “naive” C++ code, where I make no effort to optimise anything, I’ll outperform python code that I’ve spent time optimising by a factor of 10-30 (given that the code is reasonably complex, this obviously isn’t true for a simple matrix-multiplication where you can use numpy). If I spend some time on optimisation, I’ll typically be outperforming python by a factor of 50+.

    In the end, I’ve found it’s mostly about what kind of data structures you’re working with, and how you’re passing them around. If you’re primarily working with arrays of some sort and doing simple math with them, using some numpy and scipy magic can get you speeds that will beat naive C++ code. On the other hand, when you have custom data structures that you want to avoid unnecessarily copying, just rewriting the exact same code in C++ and passing things by reference can give you massive speedups.

    When I choose C++ over python, it’s not only because of speed. It’s also because I want a more explicitly typed language (which is easier to maintain), overloaded functions, and to actually know the memory layout of what I’m working with to some degree.







  • A protein is like a really long chain of simple monomers (amino acids), that you can think of as a long string of differently coloured beads. The ordering of the beads somewhat determines how the protein functions, but the major factor that determines it is how this long string is bundled up, i.e. “folded” (think of a ball of yarn).

    A DNA sequence tells us the sequence of the amino acids in a protein, but tells us nothing about how it is folded. It is of great interest to compute how a protein will fold, given its sequence, because then we can determine how and why it works like it does, and use gene-editing techniques to design proteins to do the stuff we want. This requires huge amounts of computational power, so you get the fold@home project :)

    Thanks for contributing!




  • thebestaquaman@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlPiracy
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    4 months ago

    A professor at my university tried that, but the students quite quickly made a huge fuss, got the principals office involved, and the universities lawyers informed said professor that what she was doing was illegal, and that she should stop before she got any more trouble. She stopped.


  • Drake is fucked, because Kendrick has already dropped the Mr. Morale album, where he raps about his own shortcomings and relationship issues and how he’s worked to fix them. Whatever Drake says about him, it’s something he’s already been open about working to fix.

    Drake on the other hand is just dumbly denying that he’s done stuff everyone can see that he’s done, or just not addressing what Kendrick is saying at all.



  • Some languages - specifically Norwegian that I know of, don’t have separate words for “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. In Norwegian we have the word “kjæreste” which can be directly translated to “dearest”. To me it always feels a little weird to use “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, i guess the same could be true for other non-native english speakers.