Posts by Ellipsis

Re: It's not clear how fully accurate AlphaFold's predictions are.

AlphaFold was already pretty good at CASP13, then blew everybody else out of the water at CASP14. CASP15 is in progress right now.

Part of the problem is that experimentally determining a protein’s folded structure is very laborious, which is why so few are actually known.

What I find impressive is that DeepMind has achieved in a few months in its own lab what Rosetta@home has got nowhere near to in fifteen years with a worldwide distributed network…

Re: A train, any train, not just the Shinkansen

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Protection rackets​Trade unions

Re: Yes/No/Cancel

Interesting perception. To me, it’s always been abundantly clear that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are definitive answers to the question posed, while ‘Cancel’ means ‘I don’t want to have to answer either way right now; take me back to where I was before’.

Of course that isn’t appropriate for all circumstances, and inevitably there are cases where the standard dialog box gets misused with a question like ‘Do you want to do A or B?’ or something entirely unanswerable by the options presented.

The new policy of avoiding ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in favour of (for instance) ‘Save’ and ‘Don’t save’ to make the outcome clearer to those who don’t read the question (and are thus susceptible to getting caught out by inconsistencies like ‘Are you sure you want to exit without saving?’ vs. ‘Do you want to save before exiting?’) is better, though.

Better still would be to ban modal dialogs outright, and force designers to come up with a UI that doesn’t need them to interrupt you to ask stupid questions in the first place…

Re: Intentional Error?

OpenStreetMap copyright traps

Re: OMG can I say SQUEE?

> You know this works in windows 10?

It didn’t in the early days – both active and inactive title bars were grey, and the shading on the active application’s taskbar button was barely perceptible, so it was impossible to tell at a glance which window was active. It’s just one example of the bigger point: Microsoft went out of their way to degrade the existing UI, which had worked brilliantly for years, solely in the pursuit of “Ooh, new! Shiny!” They may have relented now (in one or two places), but you know it was through gritted teeth.

> Microsoft give you options to customise the appearance of the OS, and get what you want

They give me a much more limited set of options than they used to, and I cannot get what I want…

Re: How rugged is it?

> Where's the Thinklight?

Gone because everything has to be razor-thin, because MacBook.

> Why on earth did they waste so much space on the palmrest?

Because the touchpad has to be vast, because MacBook.

…

OK: to be fair, the X1C is competing with the MacBook Air, so thinness is a feature. And a battery big enough to earn you a review like this one has to go somewhere.

That’s what I thought — until I realised (after two weekends of fiddling) that the i386 bootloader is hard-coded to be started from a BIOS, so getting it to boot on my UEFI-only Atom would be an enormous amount of effort…

Re: A stand-alone program to ...

> somebody thought it'd be useful. But who? And when? And more to the point, why?

One could ask the same of the vast majority of software packages and features, and never receive a satisfactory answer…

Re: We need a brave airline willing to charge a little more

That sounds like a setup for the “how to make a small fortune in aviation” gag…

Re: Is Intel guilty of negligence?

> did not include *BSD developers

Didn’t they burn their bridges by going public early with a patch for KRACK last year?