I’ve expected this for a while but it still hurts. The “Life Sciences Verification Program.” It breaks my heart to know that biological knowledge will be locked down and gatekept like this. I want to take a moment to mourn, because I believe this marks an end for open science as I knew it. I think back to my education. I owe so much to the open-access literature. I'm so deeply thankful to the culture of transparency among scientists. All the free knowledge I've been given. The free GenBank sequences. The free PDB structures. The education and know-show that my colleagues shared with me for the pure love of learning. The Life Sciences Verification Program will kill that spirit. The most important biology tools of the next decade will be locked down and controlled. Some fragments of the old literature will remain free, but the real heart of where science happens will not be free. Frontier knowledge will belong only to people who the authorities decide deserve it. I want to fight this, but I don’t think I can. I don’t believe bioterrorism is a serious threat, but convincing people of that is not realistic. The fear is embedded too deep in the psyche. If I tried, there are armies of internet trolls eager to accuse me of evil things. It would become my entire online life. There is a growing and well funded fear-industrial complex dedicated to the idea that Bio-AI is a terrible risk and the people who practice it need to be monitored and policed. Hundreds of full-time professionals whose salary depends on their belief that biology presents a dire threat. What hope do I have of arguing with them? On the other side, the traditional defenders of free information are historically weak. Biology professors are struggling just to keep the lights on. The last thing they want is to be called reckless enemies of national security. They aren’t going to fight this - I’m sure many of them are already signing up to ask for permission to be on the list. So I’m writing this to bear witness. This is how it ended. Biology isn’t going to be free going forward. That was an idea of the pre-AI era and it is over now. The fight now isn’t over free access to information. It’s over who gets verified access to the closed information. Big pharma companies get permission, of course. So do professors at elite universities. But we can petition Anthropic to expand that list. Maybe they might allow access for high school teachers, medical students and nurses? I hope they will approve farmers, iGEM teams, community biolabs, birdwatchers, park rangers and community gardens. Will Anthropic allow those people to study biology at the frontier? As of today, the power officially belongs to them. We can only ask.

slightly offtopic, but I truly believe we've barely scratched the surface what's possible with the models we have available _today_.

I wish there were someone who sat at the center of the "experienced the development, use of, and reigning in of nuclear weapons" x "deeply familiar with frontier ai research and potential alignment policy" venn diagram

11 years living in NYC today. I came here after leaving the Bay Area and the legendary early Coursera team to help open a restaurant as a chef, a challenge I couldn't pass up. Since then I've been part of multiple amazing teams in tech (two of whom happened to also grow wildly) and even went to grad school to do weird art and engineering stuff that changed my life in ways that are still unfolding. People talk trash about the city any chance they get, and they're always wrong. NYC forever. Knicks in 5.

I was a walker at 6 years old to my school around the corner from my house. I regularly came home, dropped my book bag, and took off alone or with kids in my neighborhood - sometimes hours at a time - before coming home. I'd easily get more than a mile from my house at a time. Sometimes several. I'd go into the woods, down to the local pond, or tear it up through backyards with friends. It was a glorious, independent, fun childhood. Stealing this from children because of absurd, baseless fears about how dangerous the world is, is the actual crime.

Pretty stacked lineup for @every Thesis conference. I am notoriously (for those who know me) anti-conference but I am actually excited about this one.

The password reset requests begin… was starting to feel left out!

First stop in SF

This is going to cause the whole conversation around decentralized, censorship resistant systems to change dramatically in the next few years.

Damn this week got Yayoi too?

One trick that rarely fails if you're stuck in a creative perfectionist rut: just give yourself something to react to Even if it sucks, just getting from blank space to something to react to can help get the gears spinning again

DEAD INTERNET MUSEUM opens Oct 1st at MAD Arts. 10,000 square feet of immersive storytelling and art. There will also be ways to remote in to the experience. If you’re interested DM me. Link in comments

Is life in America more similar between 1996-2026 or 1966-1996?