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on Gopher (inofficial)
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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Show HN: Phage Explorer
jryb wrote 9 min ago:
This is so riddled with inaccuracies that I can spot them immediately
despite not being a phage biologist. For example, the PhiX image has a
DNA with about 20 base pairs - wildly not to scale. M13 is also wildly
scaled, and it clearly has a double stranded DNA which is labeled as
single stranded.
What the hell is this amino acid view? This is not how genes work at
all. This is biology 101 and it's completely wrong. Why did you buy a
domain name to share disinformation that you don't even understand?
None of this is displayed in a way that would be useful to working
biologists, and I don't see how this could be used as a teaching tool
even if all the errors were corrected. This simply doesn't provide any
insight into how phages work. Looking at a raw sequence is pointless
(also that color scheme is incredibly garish) - you need annotations!
The 3D structures don't have their domains labeled and you can't
connect sequence features to structural elements.
Why wouldn't you just use all of the existing tools that already do all
of this correctly? Look, I don't mean to gate keep, and it's great that
you learned something (assuming you didn't vibe code this), but this is
a lot of effort that could have been avoided if you had had a single
conversation with a biologist of any background, or asked an LLM to
critique your idea, or made a single reddit post asking if this would
be useful.
makerofthings wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
AI really loves that purple-blue style with rounded corners. I asked
chatGPT to make a few sites to see how it worked and any time I said
"make the site look nicer", it did that. I wonder why.
noduerme wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
It's rather nice looking, but it would have been so much nicer if you'd
done it yourself.
eigenvalue wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
I find this to be a bizarre sentiment. Itâs an artifact that
exists. The chances of me making this by hand are 0. This would be a
full time job for 3 years to research and build this. For 10 people.
And it would have to charge a ton of money to access in that case.
stavros wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
He did do it himself.
If you meant "without AI", then it would have never been done in the
first place, so you can choose your preference there.
Tiberium wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
Sorry, but I really wouldn't trust a website that uses Gemini's image
models for generating scientific diagrams. The website itself is also
vibe-coded. That's not an issue by itself, but there are lots of layout
issues visible, see [1] A bit offtopic: If anyone wants to check
whether a specific image is generated by Google models without using
Gemini, go to [2] , upload the image, click the "About this image"
section. It'll say "Made with Google AI" if it was generated with their
models.
URI [1]: https://i.imgur.com/SidB6pI.png
URI [2]: https://images.google.com/
noduerme wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
>> what I ended up with has taken a sickening number of tokens to
generate
I was a bit confused by this as to whether it related only to the
graphics or to the UI as well.
jurgenaut23 wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
What used to be a life time project that would inspire awe and respect
and make OP an instant hire for most managers is now a fun 1-week stunt
that makes you go âcool, how many tokens?â Of course, the result is
cool and maybe even useful (I wouldnât dare say _correct_, being
ignorant of the topic), but I cannot help but think that this would
have been tremendously better if done the old (proper?) way.
Also, I suspect that OP would have learned so much more on the topic.
eigenvalue wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Look at the commit history. Iâve been working on this essentially
every single day for over a month.
stavros wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Yeah but the choice isn't "do I spend two weeks on this, or do I
spend a lifetime?". It's "I have two weeks, do I spend them making
the whole thing with AI, or 5% of it without?".
tgv wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
I'm pretty much on the no-AI side (learning, art, decision making,
etc.), but this is the kind of thing I can appreciate. I suppose OP
didn't want to learn more about coding this kind of visualization,
but rather learn from the visualization. Any tool that can help with
that is acceptable, whether it produces code or not. That the tool
produced code has the advantage that OP can share this with us. I
only hope it doesn't contain fundamental errors, because that would
make this project a negative contribution.
jurgenaut23 wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
Sure, I donât discard the contribution altogether, but I am
dubious that it is possible to properly draw the line between what
to vibe code and what to do it âby handâ to make sure you get
the benefits of building.
noduerme wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
Errors are just nonsense that shows up in the console until you
spend more tokens to make them go bye bye, right? I think you're
talking more about the idea of true and false information, which is
such a human bias. Will it really matter to anyone in 5 years
whether this accurately depicts phages? By then AI will have solved
everything. /s
mentalgear wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
Research into phages is paramount, as they represent one of our best
hopes for combating the rapidly increasing problem of antibiotic
resistance (largely driven by the overuse of antibiotics, even
including last-resort antibiotics, in industrial animal agriculture so
industrial farms can place more animals per sq/m without them dying
from lack of space and cut-off body parts so they take even less
space).
bboydart91 wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
I really resonate with your goal of creating a more intuitive tool than
a boring textbook. Being able to visually see how complex genetic code
translates into physical geometry (3D structures) would be incredibly
helpful for students. Thank you for sharing such a wonderful
educational tool!
jadengeller wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
some quick feedback on the user interface:
- i pressed "Amino Acids", and nothing updated below the toolbar. can't
figure out what it does
- the "Tools" buttons looks like a segmented picker, but both seem to
actually initiate a modal presentation
this tool seems interesting, but it would be worth polishing some of
these ui quirks because my first impression was that it seems a bit
broken (or confused me)!
but seems like a cool project otherwise, love people building and
sharing explainers as they learn stuff!
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