Some Thoughts on a Mysterious Universe

Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this essay—all em dashes are mine1.

Just over a week ago the long-awaited AlphaFold2 (AF2) method paper and associated code finally came out, putting to rest questions that I and many others raised about public disclosure of AF2.

The past week was a momentous occasion for protein structure prediction, structural biology at large, and in due time, may prove to be so for the whole of life sciences.

But it may well be semi-supervised.

Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary.

For over a decade now I have been working, essentially off the grid, on protein folding.

Earlier this week I found myself in Rome in the morning with about 20 minutes to spare.

For two weeks last July, I cocooned myself in a hotel in Portland, OR, living and breathing probabilistic programming as a “student” in the probabilistic programming summer school run by DARPA.

Yesterday’s news about the horrific massacre in Paris shook me really hard.

I previously blogged on my adventures in self quantification (QS).