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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Unfortunately actually working in bio/med didn’t go well despite training for it aggressively and working her ass off given that she graduated at the perfect time to compete for entry-level positions with recently laid-off people with 5+ years of experience. Between that and chronic illness in the family will all the associated experience with the failings of our medical system I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the biohackers from a purely ideological perspective, but these people are just begging for a disaster.

    Beyond reading through and enthusiastically agreeing with everything you had, she did say that if you’re working on anything consumable or injectable using 3D printed parts at all is going to be a red flag. Your first two pieces of equipment should be an autoclave and a fume hood, at which point you’re better off working with all glass for durability and not melting reasons. Making your work space actually sterile and sufficiently free of contaminants to do any of this jnt be first place is also going to be a pain, require a lot of tape and curtains and the like, and probably not work as well as you’d want.

    Also even working in a proper university lab with a fume hood and climate controls you still get sufficiently different results that the mk1 eyeball is utterly insufficient for identification. You’ll learn worse than nothing.


  • I read through this with my wife who actually did a whole course of organic chemistry, pre-med, etc. Her reaction to your criticisms was largely “of course you would have to do that and that’d be a pain in the ass but it’s definitely doable.” And I feel like that’s probably true but at the same time as a reasonably smart dude this is the first time I’ve heard the majority of these words.

    It feels like they’re reacting to the same tendency in tech culture that I’ve complained about before where specialized knowledge and domain expertise are treated like arcane revelations from beyond. It’s not that your average person is incapable of understanding or going through the relevant processes; Cs ,as the saying goes, get degrees and I’m sure many of the labs actually doing this work at scale are staffed largely by those C students. But it’s also worth acknowledging that there is a level of investment in time and resources required to actually do it and this kind of “you have nothing to lose but your pharmacological chains” rhetoric is dramatically underselling how difficult those processes are and how bad the consequences can be if you screw it up. Anyone who wants to try should first read The Iliad, the Oedipus cycle, and at least one other epic-sized meditation on hubris. And the once you’ve forged ahead read the relevant books on actually following the process for the love of God.




  • If you think about it a bit this actually makes more sense than the alternative. Once it’s established an ecological niche there’s not nearly as much pressure on a population that leads to new adaptations and species-level changes. Like, nature has pretty much figured out how to make a platypus, and while there’s plenty of genetic variation happening within platypuses (platypi? platypodes?) most of those mutations are going to either be totally meaningless or just make a worse platypus. It would take something shaking up the ecosystem and disrupting that existing niche to reintroduce that pressure and make some of those previously-irrelevant adaptations actually impact survival in a positive way, which could eventually lead to something sufficiently distinct to be a new species rather than just a weird platypus.

    I’m pretty sure this is still wildly oversimplified, of course, but it was still fun to think through.


  • I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

    And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.






  • So the guys who have been burning almost as much VC money as they have water and electricity in the name of building AGI have announced that they’re totally gonna do it this time? Just a few more training runs man I swear this time we’re totally gonna turn everyone into paperclips just let me have a few more runs.



  • Gotta be cheaper than buying new planes which would also have new engines. Generally there needs to be a pretty substantial increase in capability before it’s worth retiring an existing platform, especially in a logistics role where you don’t get as much benefit from the bleeding edge because nobody’s supposed to be shooting at you in the first place.


  • I think the missing piece here is that B-52 isn’t just a pretty good cargo hauler, it’s a pretty good cargo hauler that we don’t need to buy a whole new airframe to get. Think of it less as “we’re commissioning these B-52s” and more as “hey look we found a way to use all these B-52s we already had” only this just keeps working forever.