2) Trump’s son in law (Kushner) has most of his net worth wrapped up in OpenAI.

And if you gather food like berries and fruits - you (at least sometimes) get to eat foods ripened that day in the field. How many today get that luxury?

And if one of the things that provides joy to humans is to prepare their family’s food - many folks today would be disqualified.

- create a new way to generate thymidine

- fall into a proliferation strategy that no longer needs thymidine

Human cells did the same thing and created checkpoints to preclude malignant growth. There are a number of checkpoints already employed in your own bodies. But if you accrue enough DNA damage, you can get around each of those checkpoints (and get cancer):

- IF too much DNA damage, then die

- IF divided too many times, then die

- IF committed to die, actually die

But if a cell collects enough damage, it can get around ALL of the checkpoints. And evolution has shown us that there is no perfect watcher of the watchmen. Still pretty cool to create a new checkpoint this way.

AAVs, unlike Lentiviruses, do NOT integrate.

Some viruses will just inject the DNA into cells, but will not become part of the cell's genome ("transient" transduction). Other viruses (like lentiviruses and these adeno-associated viruses [AAVs]) inject their DNA not just into the cells, but also have machinery that splices their payload DNA directly into the cell's chromosomes ("integrated"). The location in the genome of the splicing event is relatively random. Random is not necessarily great as it could interrupt other genes already in the chromosome. CRISPR is a now-famous tool that helps "integrate" DNA into a specific spot in the genome by being guided to a specific location with a small piece of a specific sequence.

Once the DNA is integrated, any cell, and any of the cell's progeny, will produce or "express" the gene on the delivered DNA. In this case, they delivered the 5991 characters of DNA associated with the OROF gene [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoferlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n--zawliqvA

Seems the diligence on local weather is not so good with these folks...

[*] "Michelin's tyre mistake sends US Formula One Grand Prix into farce" https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Michelin%27s_tyre_mistake_sends...

And this was deliberate. Those in the know knew _of_ the program, but could do little actionable with that knowledge without Snowden’s public proof.

DNA base set, Amino acid set, Translation layer between DNA/Proteins.

Currently, we've got: 4 DNA bases, 3 bases/AA, 20 AAs; 4^3 => 20

If you change one of those numbers, you'll need to rejigger the rest, and you'd need to reoptimize. And there are competing goals which at least include: - maximize access to biophysical/chemical diversity - minimize energy expenditure to produce each component, chemically - minimize energy expenditure to both copy instructions & produce products - maximize information fidelity - minimize or at least degrade gracefully in the context of errors

In the context of a 3-base system, you very well could throw off those optimizations given the consequences for the other 2 parameters (#AA & nt/AA). 3^3 = 27, which is very close to the maximum of 20 amino acids. Which means you'd probably need a 4nt->AA translation layer to keep the same number of AAs, and that alone would add 30% more energy expenditure. If you kept the 3nt->AA system you'd BOTH need to reduce the number of accessible amino acids AND you'd lose some of the error correction mechanisms of having degenerate codons code for the same amino acid.

By using base-4, there's enough space to permit lossiness of the coding itself - given the number of amino acids and the 3-NT encoding.

So you really aren't optimizing JUST for nucleotide encoding, but you're also optimizing in concert with 3-nt/AA, and 20AA codes.

So if you have to optimize for information density and fidelity, given X-nucleotides, Y nucleotides/AA, and Z AAs, and sample as much chemical and physical diversity in those AAs life has settled upon: X=4, Y=3, Z=20.

If we went with X=3, you might need Y=4 to get the same kind of fidelity, but that cranks up your energy costs by 30% (from 3 to 4 NT per AA).

https://medium.com/@dcvc/john-deere-acquires-blue-river-tech...

> More recently, Bostrom has said that "unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy," such as helping the poor, solving world hunger, promoting LGBTQ rights and women's equality, fighting racism, eliminating factory farming and so on.

If you actually link to the article, the quoted sentence does exist, but the following implications very clearly are absent. There is no such suggestion that "fighting racism" is a "project of suboptimal efficacy". This is very clearly a disingenuous argument.

As are many of the other of the article's points. There's plenty of room for honest and productive critique - this is not that.