timschmidt

Same to you.

Yes, I'm aware. I'm also aware that Oxford Nanopore now sells a $5,150 MinION pack containing the sequencer, five full flow cells, and a sequencing kit. Admittedly it's not targeted at whole human genomes, for which Oxford sells PromethION. But I'm not going to say it couldn't be done. And for much less than the [inflation adjusted] cost of my first computer. Even starting from an empty bench you're looking at $7 - $10k.

https://www.the-odin.com/

$599 for 30x coverage sequencing of any whole genome: https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/

Or purchase the equipment you need to DIY.

I don't much care what the man does with his free time. I'm more interested in the veracity of his statements. On that front he supplies copious references to peer reviewed research by numerous others and primary sources. Character assassination is for folks who can't argue on the merits.

You still haven't offered your own credentials.

You really like to stand up incorrect assumptions to argue against. Second time you've done so in this short interaction.

Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.

What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?

Enough.

Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.

What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?

relatively few domain scientists support that claim

I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.

One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.

The lab leak people are probably wrong

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.

No idea what you're talking about. My local utility lit up 100MW of solar over the last year alone. Everywhere I look is doing the same.

The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.

However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.

Depends entirely on whether or not you think Amazon actually caring about the fine and bothering to do anything to prevent it recurring is part of the goal.

If it is, the fine must be large enough to matter against the backdrop of corporate P&L. Courts have an entire category for this type of fine: punitive damages.

True. And also amazing how complex their interactions can be! Just because immune cells are often individually motile, does not mean they're not intimately interoperating within an incredibly complex social ecology of cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell is full of surprises.

It's a very fuzzy line. But according to The Octopus Lady's video in the other comment, it's because separating them from the other zooids doesn't result in immediate death. They may die later due to lack of ability to swim, or eat, but that is a secondary cause which is considered important.

You're thinking of Siphonophores like the Portugese Man-o-war. The Octopus Lady has a wonderful video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipDpbYQdFEA

Sorry, Daniel. I know better, but the fingers typed what they typed. I seem to be sick this morning so perhaps I was already coming down with something. :-/

There's a history and a 'pattern or practice' of behavior between NSA (sometimes using other TLAs or plausibly deniable intermediaries) and standards bodies and regulatory agencies.

Demonstrating a 'pattern or practice' is the legal standard one has to meet to bust qualified immunity and shift the burden of doubt on to authorities, so I'd say it goes a fair amount past 'reasonable suspicion', which in a court is itself enough to issue search warrants.

1: We were all aware of the default change before we became aware of the payment. But the payment is old news today. And the default change was fishy before the payment was discovered. Discovery of the payment confirmed the earlier suspicion. You're arguing a detail like a lawyer while missing the message entirely. Perhaps intentionally.

2: And? You're missing a second part to this statement. Did you intend it to support some conclusion?

blind paranoia

Characterizing criticism this way, instead of listening, internalizing, and adjusting your position is exactly why DJB's references to previous NSA interference stick. Y'all don't just have technical differences, you're going for character assassination. DJB has been consistent and explicit about the technical nature of his objections. I find his prose on the matter clear and well reasoned.

Your arguments seem disjointed, unorganized, specious, and lacking, in comparison, and less credible for the way you respond.

I just don't think it is sensible to attempt to "ban" the usage of pure ML-KEM by not standardizing it. It won't work! It'll just increase the risk of non-interoperable implementations.

I think it's entirely reasonable to dissuade people from building non-hybrid systems during a transition period, and refusing to standardize them is an entirely reasonable way to signal that people shouldn't build or trust such systems during such a time, even stronger than a recommended_to_implement = N. No one has attempted to "ban" anything, so that's another gross mischaracterization.

there has been no hint of a backdoor in ML-KEM

Wanting to standardize it's use without the secondary layer of protection provided by existing algorithms over the objections of a well known cryptographer counts as a hint to me.

In the same way that paying RSA to make Dual-EC DRBG the default RNG in it's security products when it was newer and more expensive than alternatives was a hint.

I've read the emails on that list in which DJB is accused of unprofessional behavior. Dave's concerns are not only relevant and well considered, he's taken an extraordinary amount of time to outline them and the discussion around them (both pros and cons) which you can see here: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260221-structure.html

He's also responded directly to criticisms: https://nsa.2026.action.cr.yp.to/guide.html

By comparison the so-called "unprofessional behavior" cited is the sort of subjective abject procedural bureaucratic bullpucky often used to shut down inconveniently correct criticism.

Oracle v. Google found that copying API details sufficient to implement compatibility was not infringement.

Perhaps you've never maintained any serious open source software. A line-by-line source code audit for license compliance including some ripping-out and re-writing of non-compliant code was the first thing I did when taking over maintainership of Repsnapper nearly 20 years ago. Was required to get it into Fedora. I don't see how the presence of LLM generated code changes that kind of work at all.

Pi 4 and 5 both idle around 3W. But a Pi 5 can pull up to 16W with a USB peripheral, full CPU load, and decoding 4k video. The Pi 4 / 5 will run OKish without a heatsink at idle wattages, but thermal throttle quickly if you attempt to do something intensive.

These realtek 10gbe chips are more in the range of the Pi Zero class machines (0.5W idle, 2W loaded) which don't often come with heatsinks though they might benefit from them. If it has a good thermal connection to a good thick ground plane on the PCB, that's worth almost as much as a passive heatsink on the top of the chip.

usb-c < card edge < motherboard integrated in terms of how much heat can be transfered through the connection. Where the motherboard would have the largest ground plane to soak up heat from such an IC and dissipate it passively. The usb-c module is worst case by being a small enclosed box with very little thermal connection through the plastic insulating housing. An aluminum enclosure might dissipate enough heat passively to make it pleasant to use.

New chips from Realtek burn < 2W for the chip and < 3-4W for the board: https://www.servethehome.com/cheap-10gbe-realtek-rtl8127-nic...

The remedy for unintentional infringement is generally to remove the infringing code and cease distribution. That used to be a serious issue when rewriting the offending code might take years. But these days? Rewriting any offending code is a matter of specifying the interfaces and setting Claude / Codex to work. Risk of incorporating derived code might go up with accepting LLM submissions, but cost of recovering from them seems to have dropped accordingly, at least on the technical side.

Nvidia's even being sued for providing scripts which automate the downloading of said data from non-Nvidia sources. We certainly don't need copyrights that last nearly a century after the author's death (they literally cannot help the author), so here's hoping that some of the disputes over all this money changing hands can reign in some of the existing copyright sprawl. A stronger public domain would provide more useful training data for everyone, including open source models, and make criminals out of fewer AI researchers.

A lot of guitar quality signals will not show through easily in the sound. Like how easy or difficult it is to fret the strings, how well it stays in tune in a controlled environment over time, fit and finish work, etc. That kind of stuff makes the difference between a guitar that can be played, and a guitar which is fun to play.

I wish we'd stop pretending that non-ECC ram is ok on any platform.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.