drewvolpe

4. Acceleron (muon catalyzed)

There's huge advantages to muon catalyzed if they can get it to work. Plants would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper to build.

[0] https://www.acceleron.energy/

It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.

In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.

When I was learning to code, programmers had to know about a lot of low level details like memory management, disk I/O, process scheduling, etc. Today, the average JavaScript programmer never thinks about these things.

I could imagine a world in the near future where most programmers don't think about databases.

People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but high severity risks, which is what nuclear is.

The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.

That's fascinating. How popular are seed boxes? And does the consumer get them from their internet provider directly?

It's owned by banks but run by government appointees. Most Americans who watch the news and follow finance understand it's a public-private hybrid structure. As Lyn notes, this isn't unusual. Many national banks are not owned by the government, including Swiss National Bank.

Smell is such an odd sense. For example, I found this part amazing:

> It is understood that certain chemicals block certain receptors, occupying their binding sites such that no other volatile molecules can reach them. These antagonists might have smells of their own—they activate other receptors—but, in principle, they will dampen or eliminate the smells that depend on the receptors they block. Such aromachemicals could be used not simply to cover up the stink of a latrine, but, in essence, to prevent it from being smelled at all.

We like hackers and free thinkers. Communities like these are hacking modern society. Even if they don't work or aren't appealing to me, they're all interesting experiments that can teach us something about societies, group dynamics, governments, property rights, etc.

Jack tweeted a link to the page where you can buy the NFT, so I think it's accurate to say he's selling it:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367990471759306752

"You're Apple's customer and Facebook's product" is often repeated but completely true in this case. It's all about incentives.

Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).

Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.

Why start with a clean slate and develop a new plane? If the F-16 is still working, why not start with its design and upgrade the avionics and software?

NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.

Come work with us at Plex Research. A huge problem our founder ran into while doing drug discovery research was that there's tons of data in the world, but no one is using it because it's all in thousands of different places. As a programming, it was crazy to me that even the most advanced organizations in industry (Novartis, Sanofi) or academia (Harvard, Stanford, ...) are still keeping many important datasets in Excel.

We're pulling together all of the world's biomedical research data, structuring it as a graph, and allowing research access all of it as easily as Google does the web:

https://www.plexresearch.com/products.html