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lolwut987

Re:The Thoughts the Civilized Keep on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @05:54PM (#28385999)
Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.
Re:The Thoughts the Civilized Keep on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @05:52PM (#28385966)
It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error.

If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen.

Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.

Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target.

You’re building things from a library of tested techniques.

Vaccines aren’t drugs.

They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing.

We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible.

We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release.

That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.

That’s absurd.

Yes, I still test my code.

But when I write it, I do it with the lessons I’ve learned over decades, and it’s usually close to working before the first test comes into the picture.

That’s where we are with vaccine production: we’ve been cranking them out for decades, and the process is so robust that failures at in the six plus nines range of outliers.

Except we’ve been studying this for well over a hundred years, and it’s not a medication, it’s only presenting something to the immune system so it can perform it’s singular task on.

So, by this point, you’re telling me I can’t understand what editing a cell in my excel spreadsheet will do without a huge test of hundreds or thousands of people all making the same edit to figure out if it’ll work.

We know it works. We know how it works. It works by handing the task to the immune system and getting the fuck out of the way.

Clinical trials are to assess if it works well enough to consider widespread use.