engineering physicist, writes about deep tech, physics, energy, sci fi and whatever. founder @hyperstition_x produces @deeptechweek
San Francisco
- Tweets 17,319
- Following 1,818
- Followers 133,491
- Likes 43,354
Andrew Côté retweeted
The easiest way to spot a sociopath or narcissist is that their life is filled with conflict in which they are always the victim.
60
297
2,386
77,425
I have a feeling plants might be the most fantastically tuned sensing network imaginable
1/ Today we’re unveiling Bombadil, @electricplantco's foundation model that reads the electrical signals of living plants and turns them into a continuous view of their physiology.
Trained on 7M+ hours of plant electrical signal across 125+ species. That makes Bombadil the most species-diverse model of directly recorded electrical biosignals in existence. The animal equivalent would be one model that reads the brainwaves of blue whales, horseshoe crabs and fruit flies.
9
10
169
7,427
I don't think intensity or valence of qualia is a good way to weigh interspecies morality, because it implies the wrong intuition that qualia is an extensive cumulative property that can "add up" to one another.
A better model is cardinality - any number of countably finite sets is together still countably finite because that's a property of the entire equivalence class that can be mapped to that thing.
Or complexity - you can't beat the minimum program size for a function by adding up less complex programs.
More generally the integrals of density functions that don't share the same measure are not elements of the same ordered field, and internal complexities can be of different measure and non relatable despite being produced by a biophysical morphology that is extensive and relatable across scales in neuronal density etc.
And so there's no amount of countable infinities that can add up to uncountable infinity, and no number of shrimp have the moral weight of a human.
A few years ago, Effective Altruists decided to place "moral weights" on human lives.
They say that humans are worth about two pigs or three chickens.
These are the kind of models that will guide the distribution of funds through Anthropic's "public good" operation.
3
2
11
2,446
People aren't psychologically or emotionally prepared for just how smoothly biotech and biology in general will become nanotech, programmable matter, living things interoperable with the machine world.
Can we design proteins that cut other proteins? Our de novo cysteine protease paper is out in Nature! We designed new folds that cleave peptide backbones, with activity demonstrated in mammalian cells. Paper and code 👇
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
10
48
385
9,778
In Middle Earth the Orcs are tortured Elves, turned evil and wicked in their hearts by Morgoth but on Earth it's the opposite
On Earth the starting condition is Orc, and every country, society, people have to work their way up to civilization, rule of law, liberty, and Elfhood.
Unfortunately a large amount of the world lives in and believes in absolute barbarity, and the mandate of Western civilization is not just to eliminate this from our societies but banish barbarism from the face of the earth forever.
2
2
102
4,370
I take it quite personally that our imagination for the future so often falls so short of the splendor of the past
5
1
88
3,911
If any frontier labs want to sponsor this I will gladly setup an open source agentic sandbox where we can see which AI model designs the best fusion reactor.
Or teams of agents, or agentic harness.
Fusion Bench, the AI benchmark quest for 1 cent per MWh electricity.
Has anyone put a team of ~10,000 agents on fusion reactor design, especially for something like a stellerator?
Feels like the kind of optimization problem they would excel at. Clear metrics, can be iterated on purely in simulation
16
7
115
5,204
Unfortunately a large amount of the world lives in and believes in absolute barbarity, and the mandate of Western civilization is not just to eliminate this from our societies but banish barbarism from the face of the earth forever.
99% of women and girls in Somalia have been mutilated in the following way: the clitoris is cut off, along with the inner labia. Then the inner flesh of the outer labia is removed before both sides are sewn tightly together, leaving a hole no bigger than a matchstick for urine and menses to trickle through.
All of this is done in childhood, and without any form of anesthesia whatsoever. Sometimes the little girl is given a scrap of leather or a stick to bite down on. The cutters use old razor blades, or sometimes a piece of broken glass.
This is only the beginning of a girl’s pain.
Most wedding nights in Somalia are aided by “the little knife” — that is, the new husband slices his bride open so that he can penetrate her now cut and bleeding scar tissue. Some men, however, simply batter their way through, tearing that tiny hole open by sheer force. When a woman goes into labor, she’s cut open more widely, then sewn back up afterwards so that when sex resumes she will have to be cut open yet again.
This practice leads to countless deaths from infection and a drastic increase in maternal mortality, but Somali men still refuse to marry uncut women, forcing mothers to have their daughters cut or face social stigma. Uncut girls are seen as dirty; the term for clitoris is a playground taunt in Somalia, and girls who are not cut are usually ostracized by their peers.
The Somali government recently debated the legality of this appalling custom, and the parliament largely split along gender lines. Female MPs roundly condemned FGM, while male MPs insisted that having a clitoris made a woman more difficult to penetrate, and quoted the hadith in which Muhammad condoned the practice. These are educated men who nevertheless claim that cutting a girl is necessary in order to control her sexuality, and that an uncut woman will be promiscuous and untrustworthy.
In spite of the Somali government’s continued support for FGM, foreign aid continues to flow into Somalia unobstructed. The West should refuse to give the Somali government so much as a single dollar until they outlaw FGM and take positive steps to combat the problem.
One tactic that has been highly successful involves showing Somali men a video of a girl being mutilated. Because FGM is seen as women’s business, most men have no idea what it entails. Men who watch this video are horrified, and the most common reaction has been “Not my daughter!” This proves that FGM is not hopelessly entrenched in Somali culture. Western pressure and resources could make an enormous difference in the lives of Somali women and girls, and put a stop to this barbaric practice.
7
14
172
12,951
I think the age of garage biohacking is finally here
You can design the next Ozempic for free on challenge.ligandai.com and get your designs submitted for wet lab validation via the @adaptyvbio x @AnthropicAI @proteinbase competition.
10
67
810
27,940
Nothing has changed history more than the end of a bayonet charge, for the the Modern West was not written into existence but rather wrested from the hands of feudal tyrants by people willing to die for the dream of a nation founded on liberty, equality, and fraternity.
What the West stands for is respect for the individual and their right to self-determination, the freedom of speech and the press from censure, the rule of law and the respect for property and privacy.
The people rioting in France and UK and committing gross crimes and depravity across the EU do not believe in these principles because they have not built a civilization able to defend and embody them, they do not respect The West, they do not understand what it stands for, they hate it, they resent it, they want to defraud it, to rape and pillage it, to see it burn.
The wealth and prosperity of the nations these people want to invade, pillage and conquer is downstream of the institutions of democratic republics, enshrined with Christian values of charity, empathy, and forgiveness. They cannot produce that material wealth themselves because they cannot understand that their willingness to steal, cheat, kill, and rape is what will keep them forever poor, their societies forever destitute, their countries eternally impoverished and perpetually misery stricken.
Individual liberty exists only where it is defended by violence from the barbarous past.
Premières tensions sur la place de la Bastille.
Charge de la police après de nombreux jets de projectiles.
#blocuslycees #blocusuniversites #Paris #8octobre
2
4
45
4,218
Andrew Côté retweeted
Thank you to everyone who creates modern AI.
Making computers perform highly context-specific mental tasks (without specific preprogramming) is one of the greatest achievements ever.
Your achievement will eliminate so much mental drudgery and unleash so much creativity and joy.
6
23
212
8,265
Andrew Côté retweeted
Finished Hyperion & I cannot recommend it enough. A jewel of American sci fi. Dan Simmons was a giant & I regret discovering him on the year of his passing.
Even in a year where I have read Dune, Starship Troopers, Canticle for Leibowitz & Shadow of the Torturer-it stands tall!
324
164
4,206
186,081
Star Wars is a love letter to Northern California written by exactly the kind of anti-capitalist rebel that opposes the economic and technological progress needed to make the science fiction future, where the Sierra Club teddy bears fight the meanies with flying cars and lasers
2
5
51
4,434
Compared to the present, any person off the street from the mid-century past would be a character study in antiques, heirlooms, hand-me-downs, and unique ornamentation.
The abundance of mass production is endless flip-flops, basketball shorts, and hoodies.
6
6
249
25,893
Andrew Côté retweeted
Bees are magnetic. But are social bees more magnetic?
Such a cool @ScienceMagazine paper looked across 96 bee species and found something unexpected: magnetic properties varied with social behavior. Eusocial bees showed stronger signatures in some measures of ferromagnetism than solitary bees.
Even more interesting, magnetoreception appears to predate bees altogether, suggesting evolution may have tuned an ancient sensory system differently as species became more social.
A beautiful example of how a physical property of an organism might intersect with collective behavior.
Full read here: science.org/doi/10.1126/scia…
6
21
116
4,696
