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So here's the interesting question: what did winning with cheap computers look like? The A: it looked like Walmart.

Kenny Workman Biology isn’t hard. It’s small. That’s what makes the current type of engineering biology hard. A lot of metre-scale ‘engineering biology’ was solved centuries and decades ago by agriculture. Once you go sub millimetre, it’s so much harder to do anything.

Well... "To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . ."

OK. I posted a first attempt at spelling out some of my thoughts on the new race for virtual cell models. Overall, I'm excited, but also wary that we might repeat some of the same mistakes of the past.

The past was unimaginably bleak.

The flagellum motor is biological design of the highest order. The motor hits rotational speeds >1,000 rpm. The basal disk (that purple ring) alone is built from 51 tethered subunits. The tail whips at high torques thanks to interlocking cogs, an axial driveshaft, and propeller.

A greater theory of system design: what’s wrong with modernity and post-modernity, how to survive the coming avalanche, and how to fix the major problems we are facing. Part two: Modernity as systematic accuracy

Big milestone: Centivax has closed a $45M oversubscribed Series A! Led by Steve Jurvetson @FutureVenture with NFX, BOLD, Amplify, Base4, Kendall, and others. Dr. Emilio Emini (ex-Pfizer, Merck, Gates MRI) joins our Board. Universal vaccines are coming. prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

(1/3) Excited to introduce our new GRAB sensors for a series of steroid hormones! These tools enable real-time detection of steroid hormone dynamics in vivo🐭🧠.Happy to share these sensors and welcome any feedback!Please contact [email protected] for information.

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies for dev slowdown. I'll say as a "why listen to you?" hook that I experienced a -38% AI-speedup on my assigned issues. I think transparency helps the community.

This is really great work, and I would not have predicted the outcome. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think I would have predicted 5-10% speed-up. That said, what interests me almost as much about this is how it intersects with my pet interest of how hard it is to measure personal

In Nov 2024, with IFP and Renaissance Philanthropy, we realized that slow and inefficient trials were a key barrier to medical progress & launched the "Clinical Trial Abundance Initiative" -- a key theme we highlighted was FDA transparency & publishing CRL letters via Stuart Buck's memo.

What is a specific problem in biology that would be useful to solve, and could be solved for ~$10,000?

At least for now, it feels like AI coding tools work best in a well-factored monorepo. Can easily imagine this change with the next ratchet of agentic-ness, but for now, this seems true across Cursor, CC, Codex. Am I missing something or is this just implicit in everyone's use?

One implication of Charlie Munger’s ‘seamless web of deserved trust’ is that it is important to exclude certain people from that web. With extreme prejudice.

"I am just going outside and may be some time" 😯 (Annie Dillard, ht Joe Carlsmith )

Enjoyed Superman throughout. I had high expectations, which were met and even exceeded, but I was NOT prepared for Nicholas Hoult's comic-book-accurate Lex Luthor eyebrows! The entire cast was great, but I daresay Hoult gave us the Lex equivalent of Reeve's Superman.