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ordinaryradical

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CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus.

Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.

I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.

Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time.

Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.

With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?

But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.

Describing the pope’s proposals as progressive and anti-money laundering laws as the antichrist… this is like a parody of the most blinders-on kind of libertarianism.

For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.

It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.

But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?

Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.

Christian orthodoxy begins with the assertion you cannot ever work hard enough to be made right with God but that your value is imputed by Christ’s death and never once earned.

See also: the imago dei.

What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.

Robin Hanson, the economist who’s commonly known as the godfather of modern prediction markets, thinks that using inside information to place bets like this is actually necessary for these markets to work—making “insider trading” a feature, not a bug.

“The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-predi...

Seems like you should read more about these markets.

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view.

I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.

I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.

The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

The problem with prediction markets is not purely insiders but that they interface with the real world, so they encourage bettors not just to predict an outcome but to bring it into being.

You are a poorly paid Russian commander. You open an account on polymarket or Kalshi and place a bet about specific Russian troop movements, perhaps ones that would be disastrous to your war effort even, to up the leverage. When you’ve accumulated a sufficient position, you order the troops to be moved, perhaps even out of accord with orders from above. Your front collapses, your soldiers are routed, and you get rich.

These markets are dangerous. We will learn this lesson eventually.

An all-powerful uniparty can do things like this:

    - deport or jail you without due process
    - ignore the law in service of its own ends
    - punish its enemies, pardon its allies
    - ignore the constitution
    - install loyalists in centers of power, oust dissenters
    - suppress media which challenges its hold on power
    - commit crimes
    - enrich its friends
    - declare its "plenary authority" to do the above
Brother, you are looking for the deep state under every rock and it is out in the sunshine, smiling at you.

Corruption is not merely something someone in power enacts in their choices; it is a rot that eats out the society from the inside.

As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.

More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.

Agree.

If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.

In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.

I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."

AGI is the new Marxism—a utopian dream unmoored from reality, which does not account for the nature of people, economics, states, or even nature itself. A fantasy society that will never come to pass but, if attempted by fanatics, will probably do great damage.

Libghostty is coming 10 months ago

I think you’re thinking of TigerBeetle, not Clickhouse, which is a quite performant db with a fascinating simulation-tested story and proof of performance / safety.

I think you’re right on Kimmel while being wrong about TFA.

The president does not get to dictate broadcasting licenses on the basis of whether or not they criticize him but ABC is not required to platform Kimmel.

(I think it’s a bad move to deplatform people and bad for democracy but it’s been misconstrued into an issue of constitutional guarantees and it is not one.)

Neovim Pack 11 months ago

Built a single file config with this after watching Sylvan Franklin and TJ DeVries a bit on YouTube and it has been great. Config junkies may need something more, but for a minimalist (and is minimalism not the essence of neovim?) it’s lovely.

I have the Remarkable 2 and my only gripe is being unable to use a mechanical keyboard with it. In every other regard it is truly a delight, perhaps even a perfection of certain modes of thinking.

I think that’s overanalyzing where this comment is coming from.

At the level of something like spam or cheating, it’s not really a matter of opinion whether or not someone is participating in good faith. Someone who’s only ever one email address away from exploiting your platform that way really needs to be boxed out in a more permanent way.

There are hundreds of years of art already in the public domain and society is not “universally thriving?” Why would adding a couple more recent years change that?

Seems very utopian magic thinking to me.

Why does the company get to keep on existing? Why are its owners not financially annihilated (as in, all their assets seized, etc.)?

It seems to me that if the end result of exploiting a million families/individuals for cartel rents is you get told, “Don’t do it again,” but no one who did it suffers any consequences… this is going to keep happening.

The participants in this scheme should be facing jail time and a financial reset. Oppression of the vulnerable should blow up underneath any who try it. Otherwise this country is going to explode.