iskander

As someone with ambivalent interest in crypto, it seems like a Tether meltdown might be healthy for the space.

It would wash out a lot of the accumulated speculative value and hopefully lead to a much more confident regulatory framework for the interface between blockchain money and real world money. It would also long-term strengthen fully decentralized aspects of the crypto ecosystem while flushing out those that don't really function independently of traditional finance but instead accumulate speculative valuation based on an unsafe interface with fiat and the financial sector.

Winners all around (except for crypto speculators)?

Wow, you're right, USDT is much more prevalent in the largest markets than I would have suspected. Is this a first mover effect? As far as I can tell USDT is the shakiest and least compelling stable.

>a majority of exchange trading pairs are between currencies and USDT. (not financial advice)

Is that actually true? In my (limited) experience I have seen ETH and USDC much more frequently than USDT.

There also seems to be a recent migration to algorithmic stablecoins like RAI which aren't pegged to the dollar but are (supposedly) designed to limit fluctuation in value. I suspect that without regulatory action against both USDC and decentralize stable tokens that crypto would recover from a Tether collapse.

They use a shrinking pool of non-KYC off-ramps, recently they have been having worse luck at staying anonymous and their centralized exchanges are getting shut down. The era of crypto for ransomware is ending, the anonymity of the blockchain is a fading peculiarity of its early days. In practice, your transactions are even more traceable once enough of the centralized exchanges are brought into a regulatory framework and the bad actors are shut down (all happening now).

Recent news: * https://www.voanews.com/a/us-treasury-slaps-sanctions-on-cry...

* https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/politics/colonial-pipeline-ra...

"designed so that there can be never be criminal justice consequences for any financial action"

I don't see why that's true at all, cryptocurrencies are public ledgers with mostly KYC'd on/off ramps. You can pursue criminals, but it's harder to create collusion-based regulatory monopolies. Users of financial products have more choices through self custody and the diversity of decentralized financial products. The merger of decentralized finance with a better regulatory/taxation framework (+ a few safety features) will significantly dis-intermediate mainstream finance and deal a major blow to Wall Street. It's going to be great.

>If we had an ethereum based loan system, in the ideal, home owners could not get relief for the most abusive contract and those who made those contracts could remain anonymous and inherently immune to consequences.

Smaller scale crimes may be harder to track down but large scale institutional crimes will be easier to prosecute since e.g. Aave will never have the regulatory clout of Bank of America. Decentralized finance institutions adding systemic hazard to our financial system will be more vulnerable to governmental actions and individuals will have more choices to not participate in an opaquely corrupt system of finance that manages to ensnare everyone through savings and retirement funds.

I don't want the money I save to be funneled to the investment banking arm of a mega-corp which then destabilizes the entire country with impunity.

Personally, if not for the real world resource usage, I would be extremely supportive of cryptocurrencies replacing the traditional financial system for reasons that overlap with your reasons for opposing crypto.

Essentially, the financial sector has succeeded so wildly in regulatory capture that we have lost any semblance of democratic control over banks and are unable to dispense punitive consequences for large scale criminal behavior in finance. There have still been no consequences for large banks issuing known bad mortgages in the early 2000s and then reselling those mortgages in bundles with artificially inflated default rate claims. This "trick" was deployed by most major banks and lead to disastrous consequences for people far removed from finance. Having a route to opt out of traditional finance for e.g. savings accounts, loans, and basic investments, feels like it actually improves the health of our democracy.

>If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research,

That's not how science has worked, especially in this pandemic. Most of what we know about SARS-CoV-2 came to us through biorxiv preprints and posts on forums like virological.org; the added value of peer review has typically been minimal (but often adding 3-12 months of delay in disseminating information). Even the role of peer review as a gate keeper has been wanting, lots of garbage studies about Covid-19 with glaring confounders keep getting published in peer reviewed journals. You could probably find a few hundred trials with systematic age differences between treatment groups that have been published in respectable venues. Some of these studies even contribute significantly to misinformation about the efficacy of sham treatments like hydroxycholoroquine and ivermectin.

There is unfortunately no short-cut to the development of individual scientific literacy, no trusted tier of experts which can safeguard us from misunderstanding and falsehood. We're all more or less on our own.

The article is a good read but the comments here are below what I remember being the quality standards of news.yc; has this place declined?

>A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops.

That's not really right, my wife is a painter without gallery representation who sells in $5k-$12k range. Through her I've met many other people in this "middle tier". A well connected gallery can get collector eyes on your art at fairs like Art Basel and further increase the price of paintings to the higher tens of thousands. Beyond that, there's a relatively small circle of prominent living artists selling for $100k-$1M; these are mostly talented hard working people with distinctive styles that find an eager collector audience. The tier beyond that is an even smaller group of "celebrity" artists -- which is maybe who you're referring to as "hack artists" since it includes some gimmicky work.

Many market places have an optional royalty to send a percent back to the artist on every sale.

I think non-crypto coverage of NFTs conflates a few different categories. There's a lot of stuff for sale on more niche venues like Hit et Nunc that's really just art made in a classically recognizable way; people don't flip there very effectively and seem to buy based on their own aesthetics. There's also generative art, most prominently Art Blocks, which has a very active collector community but has more recently entered into a speculative bubble because some pieces pull in high prices. And then there's avatar NFT projects (e.g. Pudgy Penguins), which I think what you're mostly talking about.

First one I pulled up I recognized as actually existing. Seems like they need a blacklist of real chemicals?

It's primarily a subsidy for American weapons manufacturers (from whom the Israelis have to make purchases), mixed with a hefty R&D budget for new military technology like Iron Dome.

High accuracy long read DNA sequencing. The new chemistry for Oxford Nanopore is getting close to where you can use it exclusively without polishing (down to ~1 in 100 base errors), and the price per gigabase has become competitive with Illumina (but with reads in the 10s or 100s of kilobases in lengths). On the other hand, PacBio HiFi reads are really reliably high accuracy and still long enough to resolve complex variants missed by Illumina, and only ~2x more expensive than ONT.

Both technologies totally redefine what we mean by "sequencing a genome" and open up broad categories of mutations that are completely invisible to more common forms of genotyping or sequencing.

As an academic, it's really surprising to see people describe the C++ language cabal as academia. Like, no one is getting tenure for dumping more language features into that witch's brew.

>take[1] some mRNA[2], inject it [3], have in translated as the antigen in the body[4]. Poof, that's it.

1) Develop synthesis technique for large scale high purity mRNA without base errors or truncations.

2) Discover pseudouridine modification to decrease innate immune response.

3) Discover and optimize lipid nanoparticles for encapsulation of mRNA to prevent its degradation.

4) Optimize LNPs and miRNA sites in UTRs for localization to desired cell type and to prevent aggregation in undesired or dangerous cells/organs.

Poof, that's it!

It depends complete on what kind of virus it is. All of the interesting research required to hit "print" on mRNA-1273 was already done in MERS. It would have been surprising if the vaccine didn't work.

If a new pandemic emerges from a less well understood family of viruses for which we don't have any good preclinical vaccines, it could still take decades.

Sticking the genome into synthetic mRNA isn't the rate limiting step, it's knowing to target the spike protein, inserting the stabilizing proline mutations, &c and also having experience getting safe and protective responses from a similar vaccine for a related virus.

I did a summer internship at Google in 2009. The "don't be evil" ethos was clearly on the decline as it stood in the way of several major business directions.

It's certainly a...peculiar...belief system.

Can someone tell me more about the ideological (theological?) assumptions underpinning these questions? They seem to come from a very peculiar understanding of "social impact".

The genes essential for cancer cells to grow in vitro could easily be quite different from those required to establish the tumor micro-environment, invade new tissues and fight off the immune system. They'll have many false negatives from the mismatch in context. Simultaneously, they might have false positives from e.g. differences in layout and density of tumor cells (2D/uniform vs. 3D heterogeneous tumor).

And even if they get the right targets, finding drugs with an effective therapeutic index is hard.

This might be a useful screening technique...but it's not the first high throughput screening method. They might have some successes, only trials will tell.

That's a good summary but it's missing the context that these kinds of "hits" will most likely fail clinical trials. Many drugs look good at this stage in preclinical development and almost none of them show both safety (ph1 trial) and efficacy (ph3 trial).

There aren't actually that many low hanging therapeutic fruit out there, mostly we have to actually do the work to discover new mechanisms and make new compounds to target them.

Re: monotherapies. This hasn't been my experience.

Almost all chemotherapy regimens are combination cocktails (e.g. R-CHOP, CMF, FOLFIRINOX, &c)

And as soon as a drug is shown to be very potent on its own (e.g. aPD1/aPDL1 checkpoint blockade) there's an explosion of trials looking to combine it with every possible other mechanism.

However, there is a strong desire to see drugs do something on their own before combining them with something else.

Drug repurposing for cancer is a neat and vaguely plausible idea that's been eating up attention and grant funding for a decade now, without any successes in clinical trials.

I didn't watch more than a few minutes, too much real research going on to keep up with the more fringe stuff.

But tl;dr it could be a lab escape but most virologists think it's more likely to be spontaneous zoonosis. In either case, the evidence for genetic modification or "serial passage" is very weak and the virus's distinguishing traits all fit in well with the background distribution of coronaviruses we know about. So the fixation on lab escape seems like a distraction.

Sure, what's your degree of bio background?

It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology.

There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.

This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)"

(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)

Ultimately, is there anything you could do with repetitive regions? Like, were the problems with the heuristics or just a mismatch between ~100 base reads and multi-kb repeats?

That's right -- sequenced genomes are typically assemblies of short fragments. The assembly algorithms fail in areas of low complexity or when large sequences are repeated an unknown number of times.