Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

When I was a kid, we too had stupid things. Besides elephant jokes (how many elephants can you fit in a VW Beetle? Five -- two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove box), the dumbest joke I remember was to run up to a friend fast and breathless and demand "Guess what!" as if you'd seen a UFO or fire engine run by, then shout "Langendorf bread, that's what!" and run away cackling like Kamala Harris.

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025...

It's a legal blog with a legal perspective.

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

It's a cute "attack", but not practical in the real world. The "poison" stands out like a sore thumb on your loss graphs.

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.