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.

TL;DR: If you depend on only one strategy for your absolutely business critical backups, you are in for failure and bankruptcy.

BackBlaze is a bit shy about telling us exactly what's on the back end of their system. On SWIFT object store, the configuration specifies the number of copies of an object, typically 3 but that can be set to whatever makes sense as long as it's +1. As long as two are available, you get your stuff. If only one copy is available, then you can't download it until someone replaces one of the two drives that failed or fixes the server those drives are attached to or corrects the networking between replication server pools in the case of Geographically Separated silos. Replication daemons ensure no copies of an object are stored on the same server, let alone drive and that the quorum is maintained ... .and that failed drives are promptly reported, flaky servers are comforted, and hallucinating networks are sobered up.

Bit rot does occur. Times it does are either catastrophic events in the DC or failure to maintain the ring by failures of maintenance (not done, no parts, lack of funds...). Keep in mind all object stores are "eventual consistency" systems. You upload, you'll get an OK as soon as quorum minus 1 is met. On a three copy system when two are committed and complete, you get the kiss off. The third will complete "eventually". Usually within seconds but weeks is possible too. It is also possible to get a revision of a object that is older than the other two. Using unique naming of an object would avoid that, since you can't change an object, only download, make the change, then reupload the entire object. When depends on factors of internetworking traffic, latency, maintenance... in short, availability. Good quick read on that is Jon Johnson's "The CAP theorem". Or, if you want the real deep dive, the architecture docs on SWIFT were where I learned - maybe there's better, but I don't know. They are somewhere around on NASA's site last I knew in 2012.

Remember that we are dealing with an at scale system with Backblaze. Other than cache (Which I don't think typical object stores use except for the database ... maybe), BackBlaze would be using mechanical drives. Using SSD drives for what is essentially an object store[1] is a waste of capex.
The SWIFT object store data centers I ran typically have 4, 5, 8 or 16 TB drives, 90+ per server, and the boot drive is typically either RAID 0 or 1, but that's the extent of "fancy stuff" for disk drives. I never saw SSD in the object store. File and Block, yes, that was the rule rather than the exception. One of my former team mates told me that the company is up past 100 tons of hard disk drives per object store silo. They have [lots and lots of] data centers.

[1]
Recap:
Block Store == like a hard disk, a series of disk blocks are presented. Atomic changes are possible. Used for things that change a part at a time. SAN
File Store == Like a network share, a file system is presented. Atomic changes are possible Used for things that change a part at a time. NAS
Object Store == Non-Atomic - something like a porcelain sculpture. If you want to change it, you need to destroy it and make it new. Used for things that typically do not change at all, like completed video, accounting transaction snapshots, or .... backups!

I'm surprised that Alphabet has done as well as they have in the era of LLMs. They're as much an AI company as anyone in big tech, but I've always heard that search is they lynchpin of Google, and LLMs must have decimated that.

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

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.

...If the companies enter into "special negotiations" and 'happen' to 'increase' their crypto holdings' in 'specified' currencies, if all the sudden things get much better for them.

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.

I'm not sure you understand how venture capital works.

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'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.