451–460 of 633 posts
How to get over my mid-life crisis.
Decentralization and bidirectional real-time communications. I don't mean blockchain. I mean no servers with end-to-end encryption, no third parties of any kind.
Javascript and ORMs have a (fairly well-known) interesting set of problems: * There aren't many * Those that you can find, don't support Typescript, so it's all guesswork. * Don't have much (if any) support for related data queries So I've been working on a ORM for PostgreSQL and Typescript for a few months now in my spare time [0]. It's been probably one of the biggest, challenging, and interesting problems I have e…
A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…
I'd just like to echo (verbally "vote") my concern. Every great step forward comes with the potential for an order of magnitude steps backward, i.e. destruction. The amount of man hours to e.g. blow up a building is far fewer than the amount needed to build it. Will the output of your product add a suicide timer to a cell? Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying? Will the output…
Absolutely not.
> Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying?
Absolutely not.
> Will the output of your product prevent pathogen creation?
Strictly defined as the output being a chip, absolutely does not.
> Will the output of your product require a specific, unnatural energy source that can only be man made?
Absolutely not.
> Professionals take great care in thinking about those problems
I am a professional in this field, and have been thinking about these problems quite deeply (if you check on my website, my first time writing about my concern for these problems was back in 2014). I have developed opinions on this over the years, but roughly they come down to the fact that many folks have a gross misunderstanding of the field in general, but quite like to think that they understand what is going on.
For example, I mentioned I wanted to do oligo pool synthesis - how the hell would the output of an oligo pool synth run add a suicide timer? Or prevent replication? Or require a certain kind of energy source? In the context of the stated goal, these objections really don't make any sense. It is roughly equivalent to someone wanting to run a mining company and getting countered by "will the output of your product stop school shootings?". Perhaps better questions are along the lines of - how are oligos matching biohazard sequences prevented from being synthesized? Well, this is a question of both governmental policy (what IS a biohazardous sequence?) and of the integrated device (does it phone home for each synthesized sequence? What about hardware hacking?).
I'm working on a programming environment for making interactive programs. It's focused on addressing how to handle state and network through three main parts. 1/ an embedded functional database as the scope and environment for variables 2/ a managed syncing of database state across the network 3/ the interactivity extends to the compiler itself. I've been following the Tools for Thought crowd for a long while, and re…
A keyboard based IDE for a keyboard based GUI for PCs. Common PC GUIs are WIMP based (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers). They require the usage of a mouse and are pretty complicated. I find the usage of the mouse in a PC GUI "unnatural". So I set out designing a keyboard-input only based GUI. It turned out, that wasn't as difficult as I initially thought. Then I started writing an IDE for designing apps using this new…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd just like to echo (verbally "vote") my concern. Every great step forward comes with the potential for an order of magnitude steps backward, i.e. destruction. The amount of man hours to e.g. blow up a building is far fewer than the amount needed to build it. Will the output of your product add a suicide timer to a cell? Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying? Will the output…
I'm not an expert, but if it's a chip that just synthesizes DNA from a sequence of base pairs, isn't what you're asking similar to making a computer that can't be used to perform evil? I suspect that computing if a given sequence is usable in a pathogen is equivalent to the halting problem. And practically, it seems that a lot of computational resources are required to figure out what a protein does, even for common…
It's super hard, but until novel bioweapons are discovered, it is at least a tractable problem.
My sister works as a veterinarian and is experiencing some serious burnout from her current practice (a subsidiary of a larger corporation). I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are totally unrelated to the medi…