"Gain-of-function research (GoF research or GoFR) is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e., the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain-of-function_research)
Well vaccines are all fake, right? And we don't care about making people better, right? So clearly these labs must be terrible. Why would we want to fund more people in doing science? I mean really, what has science ever done for us?
"Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration's national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs"
Wait. Wasn't Trump the president right before Biden? So, what was it, they opened 160 labs in 4 years? Or was Trump just clueless when they existed when he was in office?
Also, great dig on Fauci. Working as a physician, scientist, immunologist, and Director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, definitely doesn't qualify him as a health professional.
Gain-of-function has no demonstrated health benefit (and if you believe COVID was serial passage of a SARS variant in humanized mice, per the EcoHealth grant proposal, significant negative effect).
Facui is a bureaucrat associated with a number of scandals — and has little demonstrated competence as a medical professional. Being an administrator in a healthcare agency doesn’t make you an expert on medicine.
The problem with ragging on a famous dude is all of the documentation that disproves a half-hearted insult (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci#Career) I know you're not gonna read the page. But it says he not only practiced as a healthcare professional for years, he's also widely known in the medical community for making multiple scientific breakthroughs in medicine. He is, in fact, an expert in medicine.
The idea that gain-of-function has no demonstrated benefit is the same as saying there's no demonstrated benefit to going to the moon or mars. Science is not a business. It does not need to show you a YOY return. It's done in order to discover new information, which may have a benefit, or may not.
But in fact, Gain-of-fuction has already given us real scientific discoveries that have improved health outcomes. There are multiple of them documented here (https://web.archive.org/web/20241207202814/https://pmc.ncbi....) and a simple Google search outlines more.
Even if this isn't as big a deal as this [advertisement for a security company] seems, it is a reminder that every application you release does have a security hole somewhere, and a script kiddie can now find it 5 minutes after release for $2 in credit. If you're not red-teaming your code before release, hackers are doing it after.
Theory: Certain USG employees are going after Anthropic because they (or someone they know) has a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI has made the same claims, and months ago released "dangerous" security-analyzing models which "need limits", but USG never punished them for it.
at times? we can't even decide if women are allowed to control their own bodies. we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent. vaccines are apparently not a worldwide health miracle, education is overrated, we're bringing back jobs in coal and oil, and invading/destabilizing latin american countries is back in vogue. in two years we might be so backwards that women's suffrage becomes questionable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...).
> we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent.
you weren't aware of the recent revocation of laws that prevent southern states from gerrymandering black communities out of a vote, in addition to voter ID laws?
there are many, many public reports of ICE detaining individuals merely for having a spanish accent. they've detained US citizens multiple times, even deported some, because they were hispanic.
A DSL exists to give you the power and flexibility of a language, with functionality built-in to make it easier to accomplish specific tasks. It's like an application with a library and config file, but takes it a step further by allowing you to express complex logic.
Humans need help in forming, understanding, and expressing logic; that's what a language is. But computers have an easier time of it. They can essentially read and write whole lot of 0's and 1's and automate the same process without language. An AI is an in-between state: a computer designed to deal with language, to think and act like a human. AIs are pretty good at dealing with human stuff, but they're a poor choice for doing computer stuff.
So really, if you want to do something you'd normally use a DSL for, you should be talking to your AI, and telling the AI to encode it into computer-speak. Binary files, libraries, programs, composeable piped applications. The AI can take what you think and turn it into a regular old computer program, just as easy as you would write a DSL. But you don't need a DSL to do this; the AI can already program.
In fact, talking to an AI might have better results. Humans screw up code because they can't really hold all the logical permutations in their head at once. But the AI can take instructions, decompose them, explode all possible permutations, identify outliers, and encode the result in a programmatic format, that a library that parses actions can then turn into a deterministic program. The AI can take your instructions and convert it into executable binary. No need for pseudocode.
So the future of programming, if we desired to go there, would be Natural Language Programming. Our speech is the programming language, and the AI is the compiler. The trick would be to work on the loop between the human and AI, to be as specific and deterministic as possible, to ensure the compiled program does what we intend and expect. It's not hard for an AI to make a deterministic program, but it is hard to be sure that it's deterministic in the specific way we want.
>So really, if you want to do something you'd normally use a DSL for, you should be talking to your AI, and telling the AI to encode it into computer-speak. Binary files, libraries, programs, composeable piped applications. The AI can take what you think and turn it into a regular old computer program, just as easy as you would write a DSL. But you don't need a DSL to do this; the AI can already program.
I use LLMs to write DSLs that I write all the time! What else is an LLM doing when it is stringing together a bash pipeline than coordinating a number of DSLs? jq is what, 15 years old? I see LLMs using it all the time. Who knows, maybe there are a few more tools that have yet to be made that will further bridge the expressivity gap between human language and computers.
When LLMs write bash one-liners today, it often leads to errors. There's a large range of possible functionality, different versions, extra abstractions, uncertain errors, varying functionality, lack of types and schemas. The CLI is kinda like a language, but much more abstract; this confuses the LLM. Imagine if the English language changed as often and as widely as a CLI program's arguments, options, outputs can across versions, platforms. On the other hand, if the LLM writes python instead of bash, it often leads to more reliable results for the same task, since it varies less frequently, is more specific, can be syntax-checked, has standard metadata, more expressive logic, etc. But there's also a lot of useful functionality exposed by applications that doesn't exist in many libraries, so there are limits.
We do need more tools for the AI to turn our requests into deterministic, reliable, correct results. But this isn't a DSL thing, it's more like a pipeline of steps to get from A to Z. This will likely require multiple bidirectional passes, to confirm with the human along each step, and fix and re-do the pipeline when a mistake is found. You could encode the final result in some kind of DSL, but it'd only be useful as a read-only artifact; if you change a line of it, without extensive testing in an immutable environment, it introduces bugs. We need to lean more into reliability with LLMs since they are so fallible.
Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)
I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.
I was going to ask about others having this experience. I've been using MacPorts for a couple years to install developer tooling because it's far more consistent and doesn't surprise me with new major versions of Python at random. I only use Homebrew for application installation (i.e. Firefox, Slack, Spotify, etc.) that are not available in MacPorts.
Of course, I've also made a concerted effort over the years to migrate everything to uv for Python, pnpm for nodejs, etc. so maybe it's not an issue for me anymore?
Glad you've found a workflow that works for you, genuinely.
For others still using Homebrew: a lot of work has gone into upgrading only when we absolutely have to and showing these upgrades to the user before we do them, including in this release.
I switched to MacPorts because of permission issues with brew, used it for years, then switched back after MacPorts inexplicably started wanting to install like 9000 packages just to install something small-ish like wget. Which is probably just as likely to happen with any other package manager but whatever.
Nix is also worth checking out, even if the Darwin packaging is a bit flaky. I really appreciate having cross-platform devshells when I have to alternate between Mac and Linux on a regular basis.
Mise is also cross-platform, we actually use it at work for projects we develop locally on macOS, then build in CI on Linux -- it even supports multiplatform lockfiles. I had a few tries with Nix but it's a lot to wrap your head around, Mise is simple to "just try".
Anyone can write software, you can't stop them. What we can gatekeep is the building, distribution, installation, and running of software that affects critical systems, like one of the most popular OSes.
The XZ backdoor affected millions of computers, with the potential to effect hundreds of millions of computers, many of which had the capacity to affect billions of people. From one completely unregulated software library.
Even if the human involved had good motives / is innocent, The Lethal Trifecta means any normal user can have their digital life taken over by prompt injection, and it can be used to wage attacks on systems without their knowledge.
Well vaccines are all fake, right? And we don't care about making people better, right? So clearly these labs must be terrible. Why would we want to fund more people in doing science? I mean really, what has science ever done for us?
"Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration's national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs"
Wait. Wasn't Trump the president right before Biden? So, what was it, they opened 160 labs in 4 years? Or was Trump just clueless when they existed when he was in office?
Also, great dig on Fauci. Working as a physician, scientist, immunologist, and Director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, definitely doesn't qualify him as a health professional.
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