Protostome

AI slop. next.

Edit: A true expert would never define a problem in such a sloppy way: "Specifically, the protein must convert N₂ to ammonia at rates that are at least of a similar order of magnitude to the rates of naturally occurring proteins, and must fall well below the sequence- and structure-similarity thresholds relative to all known nitrogenase and nitrogenase-like proteins. The protein may be designed de novo, discovered in nature, or engineered or evolved from naturally occurring starting points."

Obviously, the scenario portrayed in The Economist article is a little far-fetched. I agree that a teenager won’t plan a deadly virus with ChatGPT anytime soon.

But I think the overarching argument here is mostly correct, a lot of really complicated science has been democratized to the point where it is much more accessible. You don’t need a team of brilliant molecular biologists, biochemists, and bioinformaticians to do what you can do with a few agents today. And the pace is increasing. this is the nature of exponential improvement when you approach what Kurzweil popularly call "singularity"

Sure, today, peptide inhibitors and enzyme design are still out of reach for many tasks, I know because that's what I also, as the post authoer, do for a living for the past 15 years. However, only five years ago, protein structure prediction was an open problem, and everyone in our field now regards it as solved.

I’m not worried about a lone wolf taking advantage of AI to design viruses, but I’m concerned that the bar has been lowered to the point where many rogue governments or terrorist organizations can now access tools and skills that were previously available to very few people with a prohibitively high price tag.

The author here looks at the problem with the tunnel vision of a scientist well versed in the field. I know because I’m one as well, but experience has taught me to be more concerned about the unknown unknowns. There could be a team somewhere working on something we haven’t thought about. It doesn’t have to be a population destroyer, either. It could be a tactical infectious agent or something that isn’t meant to kill everyone but ends up being far more dangerous than it initially seems, with implications that are much longer lived than the team anticipated.

I’m not saying we should ban AI or do anything radical, but I do think that with great power comes great responsibility, and we aren’t dedicating enough effort to the responsibility part. There are many benchmarks measuring AI capabilities, but not enough measuring safety. It is becoming increasingly important to develop those.

This is so cool. One of the thing that was truly missing in Godot.

Oh, so that's what you were aiming for, LOL

there are many reasons for this chimera not to be viable, mitochondria co-evolves with the nuclear DNA, you can't just take a mitochondria from a totally different species

Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures

Did you encounter any mistranslation here specifically? it's pretty easy to translate the video with Gemini or a different AI tool. I did it - I ran it through ElevenLabs transcription and GPT5.5 based translation of the transcript, this is what I got:

00:00:16,479 --> 00:00:34,520 [Speaker 0] And I pray in every prayer — every prayer, every prayer — that I, your father, your sisters, girls and boys, all of you, will be martyrs for the sake of God. When death comes to us, may our whole family be martyrs for the sake of God. And of course, I am proud of Muhammad. I am proud, praise be to God. I mean, praise be to God, praise be to God, all my children are religious and good.

00:00:34,520 --> 00:00:34,919 [Speaker 1] God has willed it / God bless.

00:00:34,919 --> 00:00:49,959 [Speaker 0] And I, praise be to God — by God, by God — my children and my grandchildren, and all of their family, if all of them were martyred for the sake of God, I would be happy. I mean, praise be to God, I love this path. I mean, I feel that this path is salvation.

Clearly, there's no mistranslation here, the intention is very clear.

Again, children got killed because their school was used as a ground base to fire rockets from. Do you expect Israelis to allow Hamas rockets to fall in Israeli schools? That's not a reasonable expectation.

The choice hamas forces israel to make is cruel and inhuman, that is direct consequence of their radical islamic belief of martirdom. They do not see death like the same way as the west. To them (and I'm not talking about all palestinians, for sure, only Hamas senior leadership which governs Gaza) dead children is a weapon against Israel. In light of this, all their actions finally make sense:

1. No civil defenses, or shelters - just tunnels. 2. Firing from schools and hospitals, as well as hiding weapons and ammo in those places. 3. Arming and sending children to fight

That's the most reasonable explanation (which many palestinian extremists have even voiced themselves)