samuell

I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.

This was/is not a controlled scientific experiment. It is a blog post.

Well, I was referring to "value" here in a very pragmatic sense, in terms of the ability to come with "novel" thoughts and ideas.

And I argue that the notion of AI models having overtaken the human mind in practically all areas, is vastly inaccurate.

I could back it up with a number of references of course, but I think this is already quite well known and accepted by most people with some insight into the field.

While I understand this is a PR talk for a startup, I think the text itself contains a number of interesting observations.

Regarding the idea of distributed models communicating with each other, I have also been thinking (and writing [1]) along those lines, where I see that the data amounts needed to fully digitalize ourselves and our society requires far too much storage if just serialized (limited by bandwidth if nothing else), while smart, updateable models are actually a much better storage medium for such information, as it can communicate only the important bits (any new information) on a higher level, with each other.

The other observation here that rings bells for me is how I think lessons from trying to develop intelligent systems should upvalue the human mind rather than devalue it, as we start to treat it less like an ad-hoc thing, and more like the finely tuned machine it is, which also benefits greatly from optimizing what data we feed it with, the architecture of solution strategies etc. All of which is an area where humans and machines can do wonders together [2].

[1] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/the-future-of-data-less...

[2] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

While this may be slightly overstated, my take on this is that AI progress should have us upgrade our view of the human brain rather than the opposite.

Wrote about it the other day:

https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

As much as I'm put away by the dependency horror I've seen in many Rust projects, this is an interesting observation.

Steve Francia (author of Hugo and a bunch of other top Go projects) wrote up some thoughts of Go's fit in the agentic era:

https://spf13.com/p/go-the-agentic-language/

Quite thought-provoking, and connecting it to a related field it seems the (relative) success of LLMs and the likes are indications that enough data can at least learn you something without always needing to interfere with the world first(?)

Is this the same guy behind https://iwantosequencemygenomeathome.com/ ?

[Edit: Apparently no. That link is by Seth Howes, who also shared the OP post though: https://x.com/SethSHowes/status/2074231119730430203 ]

As someone who has spent some time in sub-saharan Africa, I can tell you that there is lots that can be done if just seeing the possibilities.

Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.

In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.

Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.

Glad to see more languages adopt true goroutines [edit: lightweight threads or fibers] with M:N scheduling. Surprised more haven't. Among compiled language I'm only aware of Go and Crystal off the top of my mind.

No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.

As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.

Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D

I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time.

Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack?

Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

Found this previous thread about Lisette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646843

I'll second looking at KdenLive.

You might want to stay away from very recent major versions for stability, but it is a very capable editor that is also much more robust and performant than openshot.

I haven't compared with Blender VSE though.

Wanted to expand on the animation part, so will check this up for sure, thank you.

Great to hear.

Stability sounds interesting. While KdenLive has worked OKish for me, certain versions have broken my projects, and there are some long-standing bugs, like subtitles disappearing if I do a specific operation in the wrong moment. While the latter is fixed by a simple Ctrl+Z it is giving me second thoughts about using this for really large projects.

For people using Resolve, would you recommend someone already quite well-versed in KDenLive to switch, for some non-profit work on cutting together educational content with some animations, some talks etc?

Will it allow me to drastically improve my workflow (save time for some tedious tasks), increase quality of the outputs etc?

My main issue with this is I expect Mojo to become the go to tinkering language for me.

I grew up in a christian home, so got my initial belief from there.

Had a kind of pivot moment when I moved out from home though, where I immediately realized my parents will not be there forever, and the inner me needs to reach for my ultimate parent. This got me into a much closer relation with the Lord. I had (and have) many somewhat spectacular answers to prayer, and basically learned to have a really trustful relationship with him.

I know many people's faith is challenged when going to the university and learning about biology as I did (studying biotech and bioinformatics).

I had came into contact with some great apologetics material, especially around evolution etc, in Swedish, which I found super interesting.

Still, I must say my faith was even more reinforced when we started to study macro-molecular machines, and I realized that biology is a whole world of extremely advanced nano-machines, working in an extremely intricate network of interlocking interdependencies.

I've been involved in quite a bit of debates regarding evolutionism and creationism over the years, and one thing I have noticed is that scientific creationism is much closer to modern evolutionary theory than most people realize. Recent secular paradigms such as "The third way of evolution" [1] pretty much perfectly recapitulates what many creationists have said for years; Biology is shock-full of pre-programmed ability to adapt, according to pre-existing modules and adjustable parameters, in an extremely dynamic software system, with tons of generative algorithms for how animals and plants are built up through embryogenesis, which allows for powerful adjustments of a lot of parameters with often surprisingly little change in the genomic "source code".

For people interested in an introduction to what secular science has to say here, I often recommend "The Plausability of Life", by Gerhart and Kirschner [2]. Other great titles are "Evolution: A View from the 21st century" by James Shapiro [3], and a few more (the third way website lists a lot of great books).

In my view, the Genesis story in the Bible matches these findings perfectly, disagreeing mainly in the expected age of things. But these biological mechanisms actually mean that "evolution" can happen extremely fast, without even actual genomic changes just by turning on and off or regulating features, via mechanisms like Epigenetics.

Eventually I've became involved in trying to figure out the more detailed view of how the Biblical narrative could explain the bleeding edge of biology, which led me to co-organize a seminar in Sweden in 2024 with European researchers (mostly), which resulted in both a video series and a book, which is available from this web store among others (not affiliated).

This work, especially the chapters on 1) Mendelian genetics 2) Epigenetics and 3) Transposable elements (think Endogenous Retroviruses, Jumping Genes etc), together in my mind creates an extremely interesting explanatory framework for how life was pre-programmed to be extremely efficient - and fast - mind you - at adapting to varying environments.

Whether you want to call that "evolution" or "pre-programmed adaptive creation" is in my mind very much a question of definitions, and TBF, the term evolution hasn't had a very strict definition for as long as I remember.

Anyways, today I'm more fascinated than ever the more I learn about the extremely complex and ingenuous solutions out there in nature to vastly different problem areas like chemistry, metabolism, mechanics, information processing and general cognition. It fills me with awe and respect for the creator that must be there behind all this.

[1] https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/

[2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119770/the-plausibili...

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11004717-evolution

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNkVOx7YbWiDABv5nB3Ih...

[5] https://store.answersingenesis.co.uk/product/a-creation-scie...

Optimizing for local-first checking is 100% the way to go, and should be used much more widely I think.

I have done a similar thing using simple makefiles though, collecting more complex chains of tasks into a "meta rule" in Make and just calling that from whatever CI config we're using.

You might try sequencing your DNA at home :)

https://iwantosequencemygenomeathome.com/

(Well, the guy offers to do it for you too, delivering the data on an USB stick).

So it seems "Rosalind" is at least very appropriate as a name for a genomics tool such as this.

Indeed. The only argument against it might be that Rosalind is already a pretty well-known website for doing bioinformatics exercises and have them automatically graded:

https://rosalind.info

I shared this since it seems to address a somewhat similar niche that I have had hopes to one day develop, based on FlowBase [1]; A library of streaming processing components based on basic operations, that can be easily stitched together into larger pipelines in a compiled language that can run on smaller hardware too.

FlowBase or I didn't have much of ideas about how to keep data structures compact, as the linked library does, and I was mostly aiming to make it really easy to build streaming pipelines.

I haven't yet got my head around how the composability story is in rosalind though, so would be interested in any pointers or examples on how this would be done using it.

[1] https://github.com/flowbase/flowbase

Yeah, there is actually a pretty big shift towards Rust in the comp bio / bioinformatics community.

Nature even wrote a feature article about it a couple years ago:

Why scientists are turning to Rust

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03382-2

They mention the Rust-Bio [1] project by well known Snakemake author Johannes Köster & co, and there are some other widely used libraries like needletail [2] and noodles [3].

A cool smaller tool developed by performance wiz Ragnar Groot Koerkamp which was just published is Sassy [4] [5]. He has also been involved in developing some high performance SIMD based stuff (minimizers) [6].

[1] https://github.com/rust-bio/rust-bio

[2] https://github.com/onecodex/needletail

[3] https://github.com/zaeleus/noodles

[4] https://github.com/RagnarGrootKoerkamp/sassy

[5] https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/42/5/btag244...

[6] https://github.com/rust-seq/simd-minimizers

I want something like this, but completely terminal based

I'm really quite divided about Rust vs Mojo for bioinformatics in the future.

The syntax i Mojo really seems to shine a lot ... though I still wonder if the train has already left now that so much bioinfo work is already done in Rust.