"You have to kiss a lot of frogs, but if you keep kissing the same frog and they still don't turn into a prince, you may have a frog fetish"

He also has just 1,400 followers here. He's @per_asp3ra

Sorry, Yglesias is right here. The US flight hours requirement for commercial airline pilots is *famously* overloaded In 2013, it went from 250 hours (to obtain a commercial certificate) to 1500 hours in response to a crash where both pilots had over 1500 hours of flight time This has created a bottleneck for pilots where they have to run hundreds of hours in low-paying flight roles (instructors, running skydiving flights) trying to run up those hours.

USA vs. Europe

In other news a local McDonalds has finally backed off paper straws.

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk”: John von Neumann

Today's surreal lab moment: we're supposed to be characterizing soil, comparing what it looks like with what's in it (microbial, fungal and insect life). We all stood around and looked at it. It looks like dirt. One bit was actually a rock. Much head scratching ensued. (We're going to suspend it in solution and run it through the flow cytometer to spot nemotodes etc and do proper eDNA and barcoding. But at the macro scale, it just looks like dirt. I imagine a farmer could teach us a thing or two)

Agreed! One of the highest densities of smart people I've seen. You just couldn't go wrong with whoever you spoke to. My only regret is that I didn't go to enough sessions (due to all the aforementioned conversations)

Look at him, thats my Qual. Your what? My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.

The next @diyrobocars AI+autonomous car hackathon is on Sunday, Oct 25 at @circuitlaunch in Oakland This is a "navigate a city with AI" challenge. Show up with a running car and vibecode your way into handling signs, lights and intersections. Your car will have to make choices, like "wait for the light to change or take a right-on-red and take the longer route?" Sign up here: luma.com/jgl2tejn

The Economist published an article yesterday calling for regulations to protect against mirror life. They propose restrictions on buying mirror chemicals, including extremely normal stuff like L-Glucose or D-amino acids. What is going on, guys? Where did this come from? I think the concerns about AI designing pandemics are overblown, but at least designing viruses is a real thing that we actually know how to do. 1. To be clear: we do not have any idea today how to make an autonomous cell from scratch, mirror or not. Making a mirror cell from scratch is much, much harder than making a non-mirror cell from scratch. I am a believer in strong AI acceleration but there is a lot of hard science and manufacturing that is missing here. People have ideas about how to do it, but they have ideas in the same way we have ideas about quantum computing: we will have lots of hints that it's around the corner before you see in on a shelf at walmart! Call me when we create an autonomous non-mirror cell in the lab from scratch, and then we can chat about sensible regulations. 2. Even if they existed, mirror bacteria wouldn't be able to escape the lab: they couldn't eat anything. Good luck being a left handed organism in a world where all the food is right handed. I know, a malicious person with access to mirror life could in principle give the mirror organism a way to digest non-mirror food, and then it could wreak havoc. But the converse is also possible: if a mirror bacterium were on the loose we could just give the normal non-mirror bacteria enzymes that would allow them to eat the mirror bacteria, and drive competition. This fact is generally ignored. 3. Finally, mirror life doomers pretend we have no defense against mirror life. This is also just nonsense. We have plenty of defenses. They are called mirror antibiotics. Mirror antibiotics would work against mirror life the exact same way non-mirror antibiotics work against non-mirror life. And there are way more options for mirror antibiotics than there are for non-mirror antibiotics, because we don’t have to worry about accidentally killing the human in the process! We actually even already have a ton of mirror antibiotics, since they are usually byproducts of antibiotic manufacturing. Fosfomycin, for example, is extremely simple, easy to manufacture in bulk, and industrial quantities of mirror fosfomycin are already produced today as a byproduct of fosfomycin synthesis. D amino acid analogs, like D-cycloserine, would also be very effective. If we can figure out how to make mirror life we can definitely figure out a bunch of universal mirror antibiotics to kill it. Spare a thought for the poor scientists studying chiral biochemistry. Their requests to the models are all about to be denied as potentially dual risk. Meanwhile, want help finding a supplier for a toxin with nanogram LD-50? Sure, Claude will help you with that. I agree mirror life escaping the lab would be bad and it deserves consideration, but can we stop pretending that it is a huge danger right around the corner that deserves front page regulatory attention, and instead focus on real shit like AI cyberattacks and the fact that the poles are still literally melting?

How ARPA-H is planning to cut clinical trial times from 10+ years to <4 years: 1. 'Phaseless' clinical trials - move towards replacing phase 1 → 2 → 3 with adaptive trials that can cut failed drugs (or advance good ones) faster. 2. Simulate trial outcomes before starting, with digital twins - to reduce reliance on large control groups. 3. AI agents for trial operations. 4. Turn ordinary hospitals into reusable clinical trial sites, and gets AIs to flag eligible trials to doctors and patients.

That's my DIY incubator/shaker carousel. It has 8 slots and uses apriltags and and an embedded camera to know where each is. Cost was less than $200, mostly from Home Depot.

The bioethics circle jerks during the Human Genome Project, which were allocated 5% of the project's funding, were a total waste of time. They had countless conferences and workshops imagining bad things that could happen like punitive health insurance rates based on genetic risk, none of which actually came to pass. Meanwhile all the real issues that arose from ubiquitous DNA data, like accidentally doxing your criminal relatives with your own 23andMe data, were never imagined. It's a condemnation of the precautionary principle. Philosophers can make up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios in a vacuum but it's nothing like actually trying things and seeing all the weird second and third-order consequences that emerge and *then* dealing with the unwelcome ones.

BBQ delivery with a "meat sack" behind the wheel...

The iced coffee at a job interview discourse is perfect because some young people don’t realize that half of an entry level job interview nowadays is to see if you will begin a political power struggle and fake a disability at the slightest inconvenience

Incredibly proud of what we’ve built at @BioKEAAI. We moved into this space just 5.5 months ago—hard to believe how far we’ve come!

a.k.a. "peace dividend of the smartphone wars" by @chr1sa share.google/E9frtV7bKcjFUU4…