Nicholas DeLateur

Synthetic Biologist. Chess, Fountain pens, spicy peppers, comics/manga/anime, Diplomacy, aquariums, and more. He/Him valis2501 on the other app as well

[fome @at_fome]

I work in CRISPR discovery research. This is one of the most exaggerated nothing-burgers ever and would be laughed out of the room if a human scientist attempted to publish something like this. (cont.)

[Anselm Levskaya @anselmlevskaya]

I’ve built DNA synthesizers and sequencers by hand. I used the engineer viruses for a living. I used to engineer human immune evasion for therapeutic constructs. Who the fuck are you people? Have you ever so much as held a pipette before?

You can spaghetti blast an ensemble of DNA sequences at some shitty provider but 1) you still have to assemble it and bootstrap a system for making virions 2) you are not single shotting a viable, virulent viral design without a ton of experimental selection and development. Viral fitness is deeply dependent on codons and cotranslational kinetics - you’re not just gonna obfuscate away from wild type and get something good by magic.

You keep treating AI like some kinda god, but molecular physics has computational complexity that scales exponentially in particle number which just crushes the abilities of any classical computer to do end-to-end design of biological functions ab initio.

Grabbing a bunch of bacteriophage phi174 hits from a mass ensemble screen in lab microbes is not evidence of some magical AGI bio design ability - it's just a classic spray and pray selection. This is just nothing like building something viable in humans.

Goddamn it read some books before you waltz into biomedicine and lecture us on protecting human life.

[Anselm Levskaya @anselmlevskaya]

Another biologist trying to educate this hellsite on basic experimental bio. one must imagine sisyphus happy

[David Bellamy @DavidRBellamy]

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.

And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.

[Nicholas Larus-Stone @nlarusstone]

There's still a tremendous gap between what people believe models can do (design bioweapons) and what models can actually do (fail to optimize protocols more than half the time).

Even "bio-specific" models like GPT-Rosalind still struggle on real wet lab tasks. I spend a lot of time talking to scientists and this is one of the biggest reasons there's a huge gap between what the AI world thinks models can do and what scientists who use these models every day think they can do.

[Nicholas DeLateur @Valis2501]

@LauraDeming Need this but for non-model bacteria!

[good papers @paperperday]

Natural and artificial variations of the standard genetic code

"...synthetic biologists often seem unaware of the developments in the other camp’s field, such as different codon reassignments and genetic code variants reported to occur naturally"
https://t.co/KAjiKF19pI

[allis🦠n ✨🇺🇸➡️🇯🇵 @allisonmegow]

METHYLOBACTERIUM MENTIONED

[Superfan Podcast @SpfanPodcast]

This week on the Superfan Podcast, Marjorie Liu talks about gardening as metaphor, ritual, and creative rebellion. 🌾 🍂 🌿 🪹 🪴 🍃 🪺

https://t.co/SJyD7kcPJ0

[Jes & Cin @JesnCin]

Y'all would've loved Tomboy

[Charles G. Koch 🏴 @worst_account]

Tbh zero sympathy for the shitty programmers who developed extreme anti-Indian racism over their personal career issues and are currently destroying people's lives and the economy.

Few things in politics are more spiritually pathetic than brute nativism on protectionist grounds.

[AnechoicMedia @AnechoicMedia_]

This came up again in Ben Shapiro's interview with Ezra Klein, how in the canon of conservative opinion writers, Obama saying his son would be black like Travyon was incredibly racially inflammatory, a betrayal of the colorblindness his presidency was supposed to usher in.

To Shapiro, this breaking of the seal by Obama implicitly excuses the right for going down the path of extremism and hate with Trump, who of course has said a hundred times more divisive things than Obama ever did.

I just think it's silly, kind of pathetic to still be talking about it today. And it requires this pretty unreasonable standard that for Obama to be a unifying black figure, he had to be at all times non-black, never see race as a salient fact of any issue, or comment on how his own blackness affected his perspective on those issues.

[roon @tszzl]

@tolstoybb all of american culture is teleologically executed by the species of Zea Mays American Dent Corn to propagate itself better

[Arthur Spirling @arthur_spirling]

Deeply concerning to see scholars cut and paste chatGPT suggested citations into their papers without checking whether they actually exist. Back in my day we were taught the correct way: cut and paste citations from *other papers* without checking whether they actually exist.

[ᐱ ᑎ ᑐ ᒋ ᕮ ᒍ @Andr3jH]

happy birthday America. the stars are for NYC, California, NTSB, and the National Weather Service, the only commendable entities in the USA.

[Nicholas DeLateur @Valis2501]

@Forever_Wario Think you'd get a kick out of many people at any of the MBC incubators, although might need to research and reach out to anyone you're interested in ahead of time.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I'm here to once again remind people that for every topic on HN I've ever been truly an expert of or have had access to inside information: the HN commentary is impressively, yet very confidently, wrong. When reading other topics, I have to constantly remind myself that...

[Gabbie @sindelchan]

i love that cats slap the shit out of everything they can’t understand

[Abakcus @abakcus]

John Nash’s Princeton recommendation letter is the definition of short and sweet. When brilliance speaks for itself, few words are needed. 🧠