SOUND ON. Youâre hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years. Meet Romulus and Remusâthe worldâs first de-extinct animals, born on October 1, 2024.
The dire wolf has been extinct for over 10,000 years. These two wolves were brought back from extinction using genetic edits derived from a complete dire wolf genome, meticulously reconstructed by Colossal from ancient DNA found in fossils dating back 11,500 and 72,000 years. This moment marks not only a milestone for us as a company but also a leap forward for science, conservation, and humanity. From the beginning, our goal has been clear: âTo revolutionize history and be the first company to use CRISPR technology successfully in the de-extinction of previously lost species.â By achieving this, we continue to push forward our broader mission onâaccepting humanityâs duty to restore Earth to a healthier state.
But this isnât just our momentâitâs one for science, our planet, and humankind. All of which we love and are passionate about. Now, close your eyes and listen to that howl once more. Think about what this means for all of us.
By working harder, you quickly gain experience in the subject matter and will be in a much better position to figure out how to work smarter.
Those who try to âwork smarterâ, but donât know wtf is going on actually, are bringers of disaster.
https://t.co/Q0rhzKcU8J
This speaks to me: itâs the essence of building hard things that take time to have impact, but then matter in a big way - you have to love the process, not just the outcome!
This might be the best Paris 2024 story: Zeng Zhiying made her Olympics debut at 58-years old.
Born in China, she is now representing Chile in table tennis because of an incredible journey.
At age 18, she expected to go to the Olympics for her birth country, China, as one of the best players in the world.
But then table tennis changed out the two-sided paddles, and her game was thrown off.
She never made the team and became incredibly frustrated with the sport. She retired from the game as a player at age 20. Shortly after, she moved to Chile and coached various table tennis teams.
Then, in 2000, she decided to get a âreal jobâ and step away from the game. For 20 years, she didnât play. Then, in COVID, she bought a table and started playing again.
She made it a goal to make the 2024 Olympics representing Chile. And, at age 58, she did it!
The human brain is crazy powerful, and it can prevent us from continuing something we love or help us persevere through times when the odds are heavily stacked against us.
What an inspiration to follow your dreams.
Sunday rant.
For software engineering, my sense is that the phrase âpremature optimization is the root of all evilâ has massively backfired. Its from a book on data structures and mainly tried to dissuade people from prematurely write things in assembler. But the point was to free you up to think harder about the data structures to use, not leave things comically inefficient. This context is always skipped when itâs uttered.
Not all fast software is world-class, but all world-class software is fast. Performance is _the_ killer feature.
If you are in engineering, here is a fantastic anecdote. I refer to this account often. Itâs a bit subtile, but the implications are massive-
Itâs an account of how SQLite became 50% faster, not by doing one specific thing but hundreds of small ones.
SQLite is everywhere today because of this work.
https://t.co/krLFFps2up
We need the engineers in all companies fight for this more. Product leads are not the right owners of the end performance of the software. This needs to be encoded in the professional pride of the software engineering discipline. Leaders in companies need to encourage it and hold engineering accountable. Itâs simply not ok to fritter away the performance of the products for random reasons.
Every user of your products cares exactly as much about latency as engineers do when typing in their terminal. They just donât have the words to describe what they donât like about the experience and neither should they.
Five productivity Feynman strategies:
i) Stop trying to know-it-all.
ii) Do what you get the most pleasure from.
iii) Don't worry about what others are thinking.
iv) Have a sense of humor and talk honestly.
v) Make mistakes and learn.
A nightmare substance would be one that, in low doses, protects the heart, but is toxic to the brain. According to research in the last few years, that substance is alcohol⊠đ· https://t.co/IOKrhAtRfd
A new version of Foundation launched today as an open source project, written in Swift. This project provides a single, cross-platform implementation and shows significant performance improvements. https://t.co/ItMd423gvz
I'm tired of seeing lazy "software performance doesn't matter" excuses on forums and social media, so I devoted an entire video to the mountains of evidence debunking that ridiculous idea: https://t.co/6mhTXcuGvA