A better future is possible. Open data. Open code. Skepticism. AI maximalism. AI cynicism. In an empire falling to greed, dishonesty, and delusion. ⛰️✈️🚄🚲
A Boston area suburb
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
One hour difference as the tide comes in here in Ocean City #NJwx
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I’ve seen parts of Key & Peele, and tried Slow Horses but stopped in the first episode.
Survivor, RuPaul, Eastbound, Squid Game, OA shouldn’t be listed. ATLA, Righteous Gemstones, and Mr Robot should be. Curb should be lower, Shogun and Station 11 higher.
The New York Times’ final list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century is now complete.
What do you make of the final ranking? Which placements surprised you the most?
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In my opinion, The Boys and Midnight Mass would also be on my list. And Korra, and Love Death and Robots. Legion is debatable. I assume the only reason Widow’s Bay wasn’t included was that it was too recent, but I’d put it in the top 50.
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I didn't get a reply from Luxembourg Police, however their language has changed, saying something I often say, you generally hear a drone first at night so the police are now asking people not to report lights in the sky UNLESS they can hear it's a drone.
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More people should be talking about the growing financial industry built around selling fake alien and telepathy claims as if they were real science.
They are convincing people that it’s real. I think society is losing its grip on reality along many vectors, and this is one.
It's a bit insane that grown men are spending all this money to sit in the desert and pretend they are summoning UFOs when satellites and planes pass by.
piped.video/watch?v=dttVQ54u…
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
I am calling for the National Security Council to hold regular meetings on the emerging national security threats posed by advanced AI systems.
America must continue to lead the world in AI while staying ahead of the security challenges posed by this rapidly advancing technology.
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
it's really ironic that only people in education think that educating kids is a bad idea
It's not developmentally appropriate for a child to learn individual letters at 2½ or 3, says Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University
(4/n)
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I remember spending time debugging scrollbars and layout stuff.
Today you tell codex “getting weird scroll and sizing stuff on <page>. clean it up. write report with images of before/after”
And it just does it. And it works.
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Huang is the head of an economically load-bearing company that’s (now) a major player in AI, and he’s been commenting publicly to downplay AI risk while apparently being unaware of relevant real-world events. Until Ezra Klein got the chance to explain it to him in-person.
Interesting back and forth. Ezra describes the HF incident, Jensen says "well they shouldn't release the product." Ezra says "this product wasn't released," and Jensen's response is that if they say they can't contain their experiments then "we have to shut the labs down"
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
I wish we didn’t need these again, but here is the honest version of Anthropic’s biology announcement 🥳🥳🥳
(Caveat: I haven’t worked in bioinformatics for many years.)
The good: Anthropic ran ~950 Claude agents over a large biological sequence database. Claude searched, wrote code, compared sequences and genomic neighborhoods, and found an interesting pattern that apparently had not been noticed before: a known reverse transcriptase associated with another gene and a repetitive DNA array.
That is cool. Automating this kind of open-ended bioinformatics search at scale is useful, and Claude may have found a lead a human would have missed.
But: Claude did not do a biological experiment. It searched databases and analyzed data.
Humans then took the candidate into the wet lab. And the wet-lab result so far is modest: they showed that the repeat array produces short RNAs.
We still don’t know what the system does. No function, mechanism, phenotype, targeting, defense activity, or programmability has been demonstrated.
This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result. Right now, “it has some features reminiscent of known programmable systems” is a hypothesis for what to investigate next, not a discovery that it behaves like CRISPR.
And there is a missing baseline: bioinformatics has had tools for finding unusual gene neighborhoods and candidate systems for years. The interesting comparison is 950 Claude agents vs. an expert using the best existing computational pipelines - not Claude vs. someone manually looking through 200,000 sequences.
So my honest announcement would be:
Claude autonomously found an interesting candidate for a previously uncharacterized biological system. A small human wet-lab experiment confirmed that part of the candidate is expressed. We don’t yet know what it does.
That is a good result.
But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”
Maybe that next step leads to a major discovery. But that discovery hasn’t happened yet.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
you're obsessed with the lesbian bar's mask policy because of woke.
i'm obsessed with the lesbian bar's mask policy because it reveals the psychotic levels of entitlement bred by stakeholder-veto culture and participatory democracy.
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>we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear
Seems to be jumping the gun a bit. Determining the function and potential use (if any) is a more substantial piece of work
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend.
The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans).
More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains.
In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries.
Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology.
I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
LAWSUIT: Eight officers raided his home before dawn.
His offense? He filmed an officer speeding, criticized him when he got to a drive-thru, and embarrassed the department.
In a free country, criticizing police shouldn’t end in handcuffs.
In 2022, Joshua Gibbons filmed a Kingsport, Tennessee police SUV speeding without lights or sirens, violating state law.
He caught up with the officer at a drive-thru and had salty words about his disregard for the law.
That exchange lasted all of one minute. The consequences for Joshua lasted four years.
After someone complained about a different video — an officer flipping Gibbons off — police scoured Gibbons’ YouTube channel for ammunition.
Before dawn the next morning, while Gibbons was still in bed, eight armed officers raided his mother’s home to arrest him — for speeding using a cellphone while driving, and disorderly conduct.
A judge dismissed the speeding and cellphone charges but convicted him of disorderly conduct, saying he was “offended by the way” Gibbons was “talking to that officer.” Gibbons appealed. At a second trial, a jury again found him guilty.
In June, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously reversed that conviction and dismissed the charge.
The court found “no evidence” that Gibbons’ criticism prevented anyone from doing anything lawful.
The court recognized — as many courts had held — that even “profane and insulting” words alone aren’t a crime, especially when directed at police officers, who are trained to exercise restraint.
With FIRE’s help, Gibbons is suing to vindicate his First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment protects your right to film and criticize police. Kingsport PD needs to hear that message loud and clear.
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Kyle Ferriter retweeted
“Agents later learned that he was a U.S. citizen,” after putting him in the hospital.
A man is recovering from injuries to his head, neck and teeth that he sustained after ICE officers mistakenly targeted him in a Chicago suburb. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/vid…
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In @jetlagthegame Layover Pod ep “Stateside Scramble: Mailbag Q&A” at 44:00-44:20, noted aviation fan @wendoverpro refers to North Carolina as “the birthplace of aviation”. As a North Carolinian who’s been to Kitty Hawk/Kill Devil Hill, and to Huffman Prairie, I have to agree
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That station is right next to the trail but there is also a Hudson line station (Manitou) pretty close to the trail near Bear Mountain.
From DC you can also very easily get directly to the trail via train to Harpers Ferry.
The Appalachian Trail Metro-North station. Only one door on one car opens for it, just on weekends.
This station on the Harlem line averages 2 passengers daily
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