Ricky

Fan of old radios, vacuum tubes and display technology

[dimenwarper @tsuname]

>be cell biology postdoc at UCLA, 1986
>job: purify vesicles from rat liver
>ez
>purify the vesicles
>something else in the tube
>weird little barrels, way bigger than a ribosome
>fkisdis
>purify the barrels instead
>mostly protein, tiny bit of RNA
>not related to vesicles at all
>new organelle just dropped?
>lab holds a naming contest
>"vaults" "sure, "great name" "
>write it up, publish
>conclusion section: "function: unknown"
>surely we'll figure it out in a couple years
>reviewers: "are you sure this isn't just a virus"
>prove it isn't a virus
>apply for grants to study it
>first question on every call: "what does it do"
>"we're working on it"
>be early 90s
>vaults hang around the nucleus
>"they must plug the nuclear pores"
>they do not
>be different scientist, Netherlands, 1995
>chasing LRP, mystery protein that shows up in chemo-resistant tumors
>clone it
>~88% identical to rat vault protein
>it was vaults the whole time
>whole cancer field piles on
>a decade of papers on vaults and drug resistance
>nobody ever proves vaults cause it
>back at UCLA
>one of the vault proteins binds telomerase
>"guys what if this is the fountain of youth"
>knock it out in mice
>telomeres fine, aging fine, mice fine
>2002
>knock out the main vault protein
>mice: perfectly healthy
>knock out all three vault proteins
>completely vaultless mice
>mice: basically fine, some subtle immune stuff
>mfw something in every cell since the dawn of eukaryotes does nothing obvious
>"just test it in yeast"
>yeast don't have vaults
>"worms then"
>no vaults
>"fruit flies"
>no vaults
>mfw every easy model organism dropped them
>try making recombinant vaults in insect cells
>expecting to get some loose protein at best
>get fully assembled vaults
>can't find a single free copy of the protein anywhere
>turns out ribosomes 3D-print the barrel straight off the mRNA
>lolwut
>still no function
>be structural biologists
>spend years modeling it as 96 proteins with 8-fold symmetry
>2009 X-ray structure
>it's 78 proteins, 39-fold
>caps still blurry
>2025: caps are closed, 13-fold, tiny hole in the middle
>still no function
>NIH funds vault research for 15 years
>NIH: "so what does it do"
>"...we're working on it"
>NIH stops returning calls
>if we can't figure out what it does, we'll make it do something
>stuff a cancer-fighting chemokine inside the barrel
>inject into mouse lung tumors
>immune cells swarm in, tumors shrink
>2011: "human trials within three years"
>2024: "human trials next year"
>2025 database: preclinical
>start a YouTube channel explaining vaults to anyone who'll listen
>be different scientist, Broad Institute
>want to record what genes a cell turned on over time
>try tethering mRNA to a bacterial protein
>doesn't work
>stumble onto a YouTube channel about some obscure barrel organelle
>engineer vaults to grab mRNA
>RNA half-life goes from ~17 hours to ~132 hours
>publish in Science, 2026
>use it to catch drug-resistance genes in lung cancer cells before the drug even hits
>the vault guy is thrilled
>still nobody knows what vaults are for
>be epigeneticists
>screen the whole genome for methylation set at random in the early embryo
>separately study kids conceived in different seasons in rural Gambia
>both screens independently point at the same gene
>it's the goddam vault RNA gene
>its methylation depends on conditions around conception, locked in for life
>linked to cancer outcomes, blood sugar, cleft palate
>mfw the mystery barrel has a mystery RNA that remembers when you were conceived
>40 years later
>one of the most abundant structures in your cells
>still not in a single textbook cell diagram
>we use it anyway because yolo
>function: unknown

[Ricky @rickythewoof]

@SyntheticBeef For that you actually need to interact with the animal itself, therefore a real object, which LLMs aren’t very skilled at doing

[Ricky @rickythewoof]

@SyntheticBeef @skoshx Your point is fair but it fails to take into account that humans try this approach every day. 90% of drugs that look spectacular on paper and in vitro fail miserably in human trials. No one has a complete theoretical model of a full, living animal.

[Floro S. @sflorimm]

Revenue: $16.3B
Net loss: $80.7B
IPO valuation: $2T

[AYUSH @yushbuilds]

me: hey claude, can you fix this one tiny bug?

claude: absolutely! i've also refactored 37 files for you.

me: what

the app: #̢̛ͥ̀̽̽ͨ̌̓͆̇̀̽ͦͨͫͯ̏̎̇̈̚͜҉̕͢͏͡҉̸̶̛͢͡҉̵̨̭̳̘̹̫͔͖̜̠͖̫̲̖̱̤̻̖͉͢͞͡ͅͅ͏̸̷̢͑̊̀̐ͣͭͭ̉͂ͨ̽͒̊̎͛ͪ̊̎ͩͧ̀͝͠͠͏̸̵̵̷̵

[Eron @0xEronn]

You can turn a sphere inside out without tearing, poking holes, or creating a single crease - and this is not a trick, it is a proven mathematical theorem. You cannot do the same thing to a circle. The reason is a topological invariant called the turning number, and it is the same invariant governing the geometry every LLM embedding space is built on. Stephen Smale proved eversion was possible in 1957. It took seven more years before anyone found a way to actually do it.

The mechanism is corrugation. Divide the sphere into guide strips connected by wavy sections that let the surface pass through itself without pinching. Push the caps past each other before a crease forms. Twist them in opposite directions - the same way a belt with a loop untwists when you rotate each end half a turn. Then push the equator through and uncorrugate. Bowls, domes and saddles cancel in a pattern that stays invariant throughout - the same structure that makes high-dimensional transformer geometry behave nothing like 3D intuition.

21 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The mathematical proof that breaks every intuition you have about surfaces.

[St1ka @St1ka]

Modern English is incomprehensible to someone born 100 years ago

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

You should be fascinated hitting the power button on your computer.

Every boot on an x86 machine iterates through the entire sequence of computing evolution in a few milliseconds:

Stage 1:
16-bit Real Mode, acts like an 8086 from ~1978. 500ns (ish); about 15-30 instructions. Goal of this stage is to create a writeable stack+heap.

Stage 2:
32-bit Protected Mode, acts like a 386 from ~1985. Tens of millions of instructions; takes forever on DDR5 /w memory training. Temporarily uses L2/L3 “cache-as-ram” to kickstart main ram (Intel calls this NEM).

Stage 3:
64-bit Long Mode, acts like AMD64 from ~2003. Hundreds of millions of instructions; enumerate pcie devices, gpu, bootloader, etc.

Stage 4+:
Secondary core wakeup. Every *single* core has to go through the same process, but by this point it’s faster because Main RAM is warmed up.

Stage 2 is just so neat man. Quite literally the same concept as an APU/cart start. Use the smaller motor (L2/L3) to kickstart the main turbine (Main Ram) and execute the training process.

Is that not just the coolest thing? Next time I’m annoyed waiting at the DDR5 training process, I’m going to imagine it’s spinning up SR71 turbines.

[Moritz Kremb @moritzkremb]

I told Claude to make a video about what it's like to be European

One day later...

[飯島モトハ @mochiunagi]

ブラウン管テレビと同じ発色方法を絵の具でやる人

[Ricky @rickythewoof]

@Mileage_impo Omg that's such a beautiful dash, analog on an EV slaps so hard.

[lio 💫 @starbitezz]

gotta stay prepared

[Dr. Marxism, PhD @apostrophebeats]

guys with vasectomies after hitting it raw:

[MoFoxxies @MoFoxxies]

*gasps*
How could you?! 🤭

[fag daughter🐦‍⬛𓅨 @fag_daughter]

basically the way electronics works is, you summon a demon to do your work for you. and it wants nothing more than to return underground (to hell, where it belongs), and you're tricking it into running through mazes to perform calculations and actuate motors, BUT—

[Everything Out Of Context @EverythingOOC]

Bro looking for his mouse 😭🥀

[Ricky @rickythewoof]

ChatGPT when you ask “How do criminals commit crime”

[ICElationist @ICElationist]

“My faggot in communism”

[Tzo @Go__5356]

You WILL use GNOME
You WILL use Wayland
You WILL use systemd
You WILL use elogind
You WILL use udev
You WILL use dbus
You WILL use telemetry
You WILL use Microsoft Secure Boot keys

and you WILL like it.