CW: Mild (sexual assault, pedophilia, death, abusive relationships)
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did. It, alongside other monoliths of literature such as Infinite Jest, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged and Worm, are daunting and enticing in equal measure, constantly hawked by those who proclaim their virtues yet so long that it is unclear whether one has the time to devote to such an undertaking, let alone if it's worth doing so.
But I am a sucker for a hefty tome, and I have been working my way up to In Search of Lost Time ever since... (read 2852 more words →)
Yeah the paper seems more like a material science paper than a biology paper. There was no test/simulations/discussion about biological function; similar to DNA computing/data storage, it's mostly interested in the properties of the material than how it interfaces with pre-existing biology.
They did optimize for foldability, and did successfully produce the folded protein in (standard bacterial) cells. So it can be produced by biological systems (at least briefly), and more complex proteins had lower yields.
Their application they looked at was hydrogels, and it seems to have improved performance there? But functioning in biological systems introduces more constraints.
It's not really that they made it have more hydrogen bonds, they made it longer and therefore more hydrogen bonds. It's like having a piece of velcro, and then using a bigger piece of velcro. Yes, the bigger velcro will be stronger. The AI was mostly used to design the scaffolding of the velcro.
They didn't test whether it's biologically functional (though that's not really important if you only care about biomechanics).
Though the tintin protein is already absurdly huge, and I'm pretty sure that the time it takes to translate it is longer than the division time of a(n average) cell. And these scientists made it even bigger (or rather, one domain of it even bigger and didn't make the rest of the protein).
Also, he has a noticeable lack of confusion about key NPCs–Oak is consistently Oak, the player character is never “the red-hatted NPC”, and he can pick out gym leader Erika from a lineup.
I'm a little lost on this front. A person who has never encountered Pokemon before would not recognize the Oak or Erika sprite on-sight; why should the AI vision model? Perhaps one could match the Oak sprite to the full size Oak picture at the beginning of the game, but Erika? Erika can really only be identified by sprite uniqueness and placement in the top center of the gym.
I would instead think the newer models are just trained on more Pokemon, and hence can better identify Pokemon images.
Minor correction on genome sizes:
DNA phage genomes have a median size of ~50kb, whereas RNA phage genomes are more around the 4kb mark.
Similarily, mammalian DNA viruses are usually >100kb, but their RNA viruses are usually <20kb.
Oddly enough the smallest known virus, porcine circovirus, is ssDNA, mammalian, and only 1.7kb
But yes, mammalian viruses are generally more difficult to culture, probably downstream of mammalian cells being more difficult to culture. Phages also typically only inject their genetic material into the cells, which bootstraps itself into a replication factory. Mammalian viruses, which generally instead sneak their way in and deliver the payload, often deliver their genetic material alongside proteins required to start the replication.
I have heard nothing about Mending Wall, so here's my impressions as a first time reader:
Mending Wall React Comment
I can't quite parse "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall". It's repeated twice, so it's obviously important. I'm projecting my ambiguity to whether we should love the wall or not.
Later: oh, "Something there is" is equivalent to "There exists something", practically, entropy; poetically, ???elves???
Classic ambiguous Frost on whether hunters actually destroy walls or not.
It's obviously a commentary on "good fences make good neighbors", the same way Dulce et Decorum Est is a commentary on the Latin phrase. This neighbor appears to be good (annual mutual wall maintenance, out-door game), but his insistence
Nothing from Savitsky? My personal favorites are Millenium's Dawn and The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of, but Hacker's Heaven gets a shout out too.
A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace by localroger (author of Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect) takes place in the same post-scarcity universe. How do you have a casino under post-scarcity?
Spoilers
"The Bugsy [currency] is backed by human misery. The one thing you can buy with a Bugsy that you can't simply ask Prime Intellect for is the suffering of another bona fide human being. Not a facsimile or a simulation or a recording, but a real live person who feels as you feel."
It seems they were literally using the nonpathogenic attenuated anthrax strain used for vaccines.
marginal bioterrorist
I'm not sure a marginal bioterrorist can train an AI model to obfuscate a DNA sequence to bypass the sequence scanning, but I concede it's definitely easier to do than recode an organism. I'm not really sure what the skillset/resources of a marginal bioterrorist are.
But we should watch out for proliferation/commercialization of recoded organisms, since recoded organisms would be easier to recode further (if they introduce a new codon, just modify the synthetase to load a different amnio acid).
A marginal bioterrorist could probably just brew up a vat of anthrax which technically counts. Advanced labs definitely have more capacity for modification, but they still need to source the pathogens.
I'm not a fan of the phage synthesis paper as there was a lot of post-generation filtering and failures going on and the AI-generated phages were basically the same. There's a couple interesting new mutations, but a lot of them are noncoding/synonymous/in nonessential genes.
Judging by your writing I think you missed a new paper red-teaming DNA synthesis screening software. They're using AI to create proteins that function the same but with different amino acids (probably conformation-based) which bypasses the DNA screening, because screening (probably) isn't translating and throwing it into Alphafold and comparing it to known toxins. Though the paper didn't test whether the AI-generated toxins are actually toxic, but we can... (read more)