A treasure trove of biotech and early SV oral histories by Sally Hughes: digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/search?p=%28...

Genentech (Boyer, Goeddel (recommended!)), VC (Byers, Rock, Valentine), Kaiser ("History of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program"), Lilly, Paul Berg, Stan Cohen, lots more.

Some professional news: the best way to do large scale data processing in native python using pandas/ numpy now open source; Bodo runs 20-240x faster than others like Spark, Dask, and Ray (see benchmark in repo).

github.com/bodo-ai/Bodo

Despite recently learning the story of the real Rayleigh from this great article (press.asimov.com/articles/mea...), I confess that there's only room for one Rayleigh in my heart and it's him:

Is there a game capturing the fundamentals of capital allocation remotely as well as Factorio does process optimization?

"And so Gutenberg's holdouts, confined to the artisanal dustbin of history, went out with a wimper rather than a bang..."

If we ever build agents tasked with holding politicians and policymakers' public statements to account, finding contradictions, inconsistencies, failed targets, missed promises etc. we'll be in a much better position. Some quick thoughts:

The most blatantly self-serving article I've seen in recent memory. The reason for loss of public trust in science is… that we don't treat editors with enough respect? Yes, editors should be respected. No, that has nothing to do with loss of trust. 1/2

Real free speech absolutism is Phil Zimmerman publishing PGP as a book to avoid export controls against the will of the US government. Or DJB fighting multiple court cases (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States) in order to be able to publish cryptographic source code.

One thing I increasingly appreciate (or find grating) about certain sci-fi authors is when they have characters that are supposedly much more capable actually use that competence in important situations. Neal Asher, Greg Egan, and Peter Watts all have super different styles but are all good at this.

Some of you may not know this but I'm part of an esoteric sect of May the Fourth celebrators who thinks Admiral Ackbar was the real hero. We call ourselves Monmons.

He brought bamboo

Moshu’s here

On the margin, I think people overestimate how much salary drives engineers to work on software and underestimate the power of feedback loops and low barriers to entry (not in a physical not economic sense). There's a reason the workplace stereotype of someone in flow started with programmers.

Controversial philosophy opinion: I think people overrated the practical force of Parfit's argument against persistent identity. It's true that your identity doesn't have some special essence tying it together but people are a super high dimensional space.