PICARD: Data, shields up
DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.
[camera shakes]
WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS
DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
@SamaHoole About 60-70% solid. The UK-specific arguments are mostly fair and well-grounded. Where it gets shaky is overgeneralizing UK conditions to the global picture, and dismissing rather than engaging with the strongest criticisms (land use, global herd growth).
A 17-year-old in Iowa boiled beets in her chemistry class and turned them into stitches that change color when your wound gets infected. Her name is Dasia Taylor. It started as a science fair project.
She wanted a low-tech version of the "smart stitches" Tufts researchers built in 2016. Those used thread wired up with sensors and a tiny chip that pinged your phone if something went wrong. Cool, but useless without a phone or a hospital that can afford it.
Her version doesn't need any of that. Healthy skin is slightly acidic, like lemon juice but much milder. When bacteria grow in a wound, the chemistry flips and turns more like soap or baking soda.
Beet juice has a quirk. The same red pigment that stains your fingers when you cook it shifts color based on what it touches. Bright red on healthy skin. Dark purple on infected skin. The switch lines up with infection almost exactly.
She tested ten threads before finding a cotton-polyester blend that soaked up the dye and changed color within five minutes. That was the prototype.
Around 1 in 40 American surgeries end in an infection at the cut, costing hospitals more than $3 billion a year. In poorer countries the rate is closer to 1 in 9. In parts of Africa it's 1 in 6. In some Ethiopian hospitals, up to a quarter of surgery patients leave with an infection.
The whole game is catching it early. Spot it in time and antibiotics handle it. Miss the window and the patient is back on the operating table.
Dasia filed a patent in 2021 and started a medical device company called VariegateHealth in 2022. The stitches haven't been tested on real patients yet. New medical device patents can take a decade. She's also looking into a side benefit: the beet pigment kills bugs like E. coli and Klebsiella in lab tests.
Smart stitches need a phone to read them. Hers just need eyes.
The Sam Altman and @miramurati texts from the day he got fired from @OpenAI in 2023 just became evidence in the @elonmusk v. @sama trial.
It felt like a meaningful moment in AI history, so I turned it into a musical.
The lyrics are the texts.
What does long-term thinking look like in practice? Introducing Long Now Labs, a collaborative space to test, prototype, and build long-term tools.
Lab Series 001 is a collaboration with the Protocol Institute to investigate three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies.
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IN HONOR OF CALIFORNIA’S 175TH ANNIVERSARY, WE WILL BE ROLLING OUT A VERY SPECIAL DRIVER’S LICENSE FOR EVERY CALIFORNIAN THIS SUMMER! IT WILL FEATURE A HANDSOME, HIGH-QUALITY PHOTO OF ME, GAVIN C. NEWSOM. MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING IT’S THE BEST LICENSE EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. THIS IS ABOUT CELEBRATING OUR BEAUTIFUL STATE (IT IS NOT ABOUT ME, DESPITE THE VERY HANDSOME PHOTO!). ENJOY! — GOVERNOR GCN
Looking for some alpha testers for my system that allows an LLM agent to render things spatially for you in Vision Pro. https://t.co/wuanQ5DLHF
https://t.co/nwn1DeYoZs
Quite a mess brewing in Calif. But some of us can remember a gov race there that featured a porn star, the kid from Diff’rent Strokes, Arianna Huffington, a 100-year-old woman, Larry Flynt, a sumo wrestler and … Arnold Schwarzenegger.
@MeganTStevenson Like not enough of your thousand people that you follow are still posting here, but find the related accounts that are still posting and follow them. Then you’re following stream will feel more like it used to.
@MeganTStevenson Interesting. Just a hot take, but maybe now with LLM agent assistance we can basically create our own algorithm by analyzing our existing follow list to find the still frequent posting accounts in the broader network that you don’t yet follow, but will give you better content.
My favorite part: Mr. Gallagher had an itinerant childhood, living out of motels and cars for a time before landing in Cincinnati when he was 12. That was where his uncle gave him a laptop, which he used to teach himself to code so he could make a Weird Al Yankovic fan page.