circles_for-day

This seems like it could be improved with ai-assisted molecular dynamics that have been in the news for drug discovery and protein folding.

This is what I needed to avoid buying a Tesla

Tim Ferriss minus Tim has long been a dream of mine

After discovering Dwarkesh, Lex and Rogan have struck me as tragic waste. At worst a laundromat for psychopathic distortions, and at best a lazy unguided exhibition of the guest’s choosing.

Don’t worry, synthetic life doesn’t work very well without evolution to tune it into a useful ecological niche. Venter already did something similar.

Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.

Its a neat headline, but its unclear what problem this is trying to solve. I hope the first viable versions it don't colonize the poor grad student.

I think these analogies miss the forest for the trees. This is a wholly different idea and approach than prior art related to insulin, synlogic's trials, or fermentation (the production of products by microbes in a reactor)

> 1) Medical insulin is already produced by engineered microbes, and has been for 40 years. So we know microbes can do this safely and effectively.

This is in a sterilized tank with defined media and careful controls, not on a human body.

> 2) Insulin is a single gene, so it's easy to engineer. We can move it around to different organisms and add different control systems to explore where and how it is expressed.

Syn bio control systems are so coarse and unreliable I would never trust my life to one. Would you?

> 3) Diabetes is a well studied disease. We know a lot about how much insulin patients need, at what times, in response to what signals. So it is a well defined engineering problem.

We do, but microbes don't

The synlogic trials are essentially for augmented digestion, something we've always relied on microbes for. That's a lot safer than a feedback-control mechanism for an essential hormone.

This is the creation of a (hopeful) symbiosis with the hope that the steady state for one organism is also the optimal steady state for the other.

This idea is also the release into the wild of an organism designed to live on or in humans with the hope it does not become a pathogen, and the hope that its host will never enter a metabolic state where it assumes the role of a pathogen.

Isn't this just gain-of-function research with another name? Feedback and control in syn-bio is coarse to say the least. Is it responsible to be developing this tech with a microbe that can live on mammals?

I must add, I am _profoundly_ pro-syn-bio. I think this field needs to take itself more seriously before something bad happens.

While full of interesting facts, this idea is so scarily bad it’s hard to justify.

If ginkgo has a theranos style meltdown this will be an article we can look back on and think “I guess they were telling us all along and we should have seen it”

TIL from these comments that many hacker news comments originate from having an axe to grind. Holy shit

This is the most confusing possible title. Why is it written this way?

Old computers suck

It pushes up housing prices and decreases supply for low income people and transfers that wealth to already well off people.

As long as the wealthy can keep housing out of reach they can influence the distort the entire market and charge as much as they like. This is why housing is such a ‘good investment’. It’s reverse Robin Hood.

I think you may have been given an official line. Uber loved claiming Lyft was using its dirty tricks in the early days too, even though Lyft was entirely incapable of that kind of thing

this post will benefit from heavy editing. Remove sentences unrelated to the main story arc. Introspection and reflection are only interesting to your self. You can remove anything resembling those too. Seems like a cool concept. I look forward to reading it.

I just switched away today. It still sucks

People have written this article for 25 years. I think it’s surprising they keep doing it.

The city is mentioned in the above list. It’s much more livable.

I’m measuring code quality by asking questions to interview candidates for a variety of positions. I ask about how their current and past jobs work, what they’d change, and how they’d architect X.

My coworkers’ opinions and previous code are another indicator.

Disclaimers- I’m not any kind of prodigy or in the upper echelons of engineering, but the standards here are so low even I can tell. This is also a fairly high profile company for the area.

People love to point out the problems in that area and say SV will evaporate. I just moved from sf to a city that’s in the top 3 for venture capital.

The job opportunities, talent, networks, and standards of code here are so much lower I wouldn’t have believed it if somebody had told me.

Maybe some startups are leaving but I’d move back if I had a startup. It’s a lot of small ponds out here