frisco

Honestly Peter stepping down from the board was a larger signal to me. But it’s just the totality of the data points.

I increasingly believe that Facebook’s pivot to Meta will end up going down as one of the biggest misses in the history of business. The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it. Especially not with a mediocre centralized FB owned “virtual world” where they inflict heavy taxes and content moderation. Facebook has neglected its core businesses for years and seems to have real trouble shipping hardware with reasonable spending.

Now they’re scrambling to ship an iPhone alternative to get out from under Apple policy, but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market. I would be shocked if Apple, Microsoft or Google were irrelevant in 2030, but it is really possible (if not yet necessarily probable) that Facebook/Meta might actually just not exist in the same kind of way anymore then.

When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius and that there’s no way they could have been doing it without a really well considered, heavily backstopped plan… but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.

> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america

The founding of Rome involved one brother killing the other over a hill… and if you don’t think they had large scale civil war, you simply haven’t read Roman history

I get that Shackleton is an icon of persistence, but counterpoint, his voyages and business ventures mostly ended in failure, and at one point while stranded in the ice he shot the ship's cat which he thought was a 'weakling'. I get he survived harsh conditions, but I'm not sure he's a role model to look up to.

I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them. How many people could have written the Cellebrite blog post? Probably not many. The hidden pressures on Signal staff must be enormous, as likely the the world's single most valuable surveillance target.

You could check a lot more than 1B address per second.

This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?

> Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally... we are actually terrible at it

> leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity

Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.

Donuts isn't a registrar, they're a company that got setup when ICANN started allowing anyone to apply to create gTLDs, and they really innovated on setting up tons of them for profit. They own the .company TLD.

> To address risks to stablecoin users and guard against stablecoin runs, legislation should require stablecoin issuers to be insured depository institutions, which are subject to appropriate supervision and regulation, at the depository institution and the holding company level.

How does this interact with the concept of algorithmic stablecoins? Not every stablecoin is simply backed by deposits.

This seems like an interesting use for crypto-style staking. Rather than simply paying Elsevier or Springer to publish, which is a transaction that increasingly makes no sense, instead take those fees and put them in an interest-generating escrow account. If the paper is retracted within some window of time (say, 3 years), the money goes to the group that found the problems. If not, it gets returned plus interest to the authors or their organization.

This would create an economic incentive to hunt scientific fraud, and possibly even replication studies, while also over time putting the money that's currently just being gouged by legacy publishers back into science.

A library[1] small molecule drug that reverses dementia by acting on a calcium channel based on mouse data?

Press X to Doubt

[1] https://www.tocris.com/products/sak-3_6239

The point of the above posts though is that Virgil Griffith is probably going to prison because he wasn't paying attention to sanctions though? Or, the case of Meng Wanzhou who is a Chinese citizen who avoided connecting flights through the US and was arrested in Canada anyway for violating trade sanctions with Iran?

?

I mean, sure.

Everything has a name, but it is generally a “systematic” name[1] rather than a one-off descriptive name. Even DNA is a systematic name for the monomer (de-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid is one of the defined nucleic acids bound to a ribose sugar missing an oxygen at the 2-position carbon).

Biology uses an enormous space of small molecule structures (to say nothing of proteins, which have their own naming schemes) and few have names you might recognize generally, but all have useful systematic names that biologists and chemists can quickly parse.

As a twist, most systematic naming schemes don’t produce unique labels, so there’s often multiple ways to say the same thing, and different discipline subcultures have different biases in this regard.

Edit: re-reading OP, another interpretation is that they’re asking what percent of molecules in the body aren’t involved in biology. The answer to that is probably something that approximates 0%. At the end of the day, the combined interaction of all of this chemistry is what biology is, and everything is more or less everywhere. (…concentration is everything.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_name#In_chemistry

Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, DJI, SenseTime, ZTE? At least back in ~2015 when I visited, it was definitely a major startup hub.

Sure, that’s fair.

An API driven vivarium as a service with instrumented cages was tried to tens of $M by Vium. That didn’t take off, though there are lots of vendors of sophisticated cage instrumentation now, including based on computer vision. DeepLabCut is amazing and open source.

In terms of general progress in experimental tools, there has been tons. The modern super resolution confocals; affordable femtosecond light sources like the Coherent Monaco enables all kinds of awesome stuff; or newer methods like MERFISH and PatchSeq (or hell, just the total commodification of sequencing generally).

Microfludics are now widely used and super valuable as “ASICs”, though I think the lack of a general purpose “CPU” lab of a chip has misled people not in the field.

In terms of molecular tools, it’s just night and day from 10 years ago. iPSCs, CRISPR, expansion microscopy, tons of new labels and stains etc.

Ginkgo and Zymergen have enormous scale, invest heavily in software and robotics, and are working “in vivo.” Recursion also invests heavily in automation, and while I don’t think they run animals in house, it’s not clear what Transistor is proposing that would outperform them.

Lots of companies run lots of studies in tons of different species all the time. Less so in academia, but I don’t think saying “well everyone else is working in vitro and we will work in vivo” is the kind of arbitrage opportunity Transistor seems to think it is. Where there are bottlenecks that I think could be improved, they are either unsexy (an easy Stripe-product-quality 3rd party IACUC would be super useful) or hinge on showing up with an enormous bucket of money so you can do things like set up your own breeding colonies.

And of course scientists really do care about being right and finding lasting results that are big effects. It is so much harder than it looks to do that well, but the people working in it are super smart and, at least outside of academia, generally have good incentives.

Edit: I clicked through to their “Business” page, which reads in part:

> Transistor will instead build a system designed with speed and scale in mind from the beginning: an automated wet lab with an API interface. Current CROs require bureaucratic back and forth which can extend into the months and are extraordinarily expensive for results that one crosses their fingers and hopes are correct.

May I point them to a company I founded 9 years ago, which raised a $56M series B last week: https://strateos.com/

Does this mean an opportunity exists? Maybe. But I think Transistor has some education to do on where the true problems that would be valuable to solve lie.

As someone who used to think a lot of the stuff in here, and definitely no longer does, I can say that this is not someone who is a practitioner.

Adam, if you’re reading this, I would definitely encourage you to take a step back and go deep on how you might prove that the problems are where you think they are. The stuff you’re describing has all been done many times at this point and just either hasn’t turned out to be valuable to solve, or now has big effective companies doing it, or is extremely difficult for non-obvious reasons. Your characterization of total doom in modern experimentation is inaccurate.

Yes definitely. Here the "space" doesn't refer to physical space, but an abstract vector space that neuron's tuning represents. For example, there is a famous paper[1] that showed neurons could be responsive to abstract concepts -- for example, one might fire for "Bill Clinton" regardless of whether the stimulus is a photo of him, his name written as letters, or even (with weaker activation) photos/text of other members of his family or other concepts adjacent to him. The neuron's activity gives a vector in this high dimensional concept space, and that's the "space" GP is referring to.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03687

No basis to sue here: you are perfectly allowed to lend money without interest, you just have to pay gift taxes on it. (If it is really a loan, the gift taxes only apply to the forgone interest. But, keep in mind that if they can’t repay it, they will owe income taxes on the whole amount!)

On the plus side, this means we are much more likely now to get actually awesome prosumer/consumer-grade AR systems with many of the current issues worked out in the next N years. It's starting to get to a point where, though it's still kind of lame, you can see how it would be awesome, but still needs $B of R&D so... I'll take it.

Oh but this doesn't actually disable remote access on the UDM side, does it? It's just a flag that the cloud host can choose to respect?

How? I have been looking for this setting but haven't been able to find it.

My impression is that it's pretty easy to get a Part 107 Remote Pilot license; I think it's essentially just a knowledge test. Even if all you learn getting it is how the airspace system works and how to coordinate your use of it, that's a significant base of knowledge that is essential to flying responsibly in the US. There are serious civil and criminal penalties in the Federal Aviation Regulations for lots of complex rules that really do matter, so it makes sense that they at least just want commercial operators to understand what they are on the hook for.

As a pilot, the dynamics of flying for money are very different than flying for fun or personal reasons. The pressure to make the flight in marginal conditions, or push separation to get the shot, or otherwise just generally fly closer to the limits is real and significant. Adding money (and presumably third parties) totally changes the nature of the operation.

All these systems are just too complicated. We keep adding features on features to software without a second thought, because it's invisible and you can't immediately tell from looking at it how insane it is, in a way that you wouldn't be able to ignore if these were mechanical systems.

Also, not that it would have prevented this attack, but as a community we desperately need a fully open source FPGA-based ultra simple firewall appliance. The absolute minimum set of configuration options, the simplest possible hardware architecture; something you could actually trust with your life. Right now I have zero confidence that any of the commercially available security appliances are actually secure against nation-states.

Per the figures, it looks like 16 hours had the largest effect, even larger than 24 hour fasts. But this is mouse data and should all be taken with a huge grain of salt.

I keep being surprised that anyone takes Gary Marcus seriously. As far as I know he hasn’t contributed anything meaningful to deep learning (or any other modern AI methods) but is always somehow there to criticize, waving his arms and shouting “but it’s not actually reasoning!” Baffling.

Edit: removed reference to Gary being a psychologist. It was distracting from the actual point.

> the tech was not doing anything particularly novel

Where are all these people apparently doing long term, low latency wireless 1024 channel ephys with stim capability?