Month: November 2020

Metagenomic testing

Scientists have developed a single clinical laboratory test capable of zeroing in on the microbial miscreant afflicting a patient in as little as 6 hours – irrespective of what body fluid is sampled, the type or species of infectious agent, or whether physicians start out with any clue as to what the culprit may be.

The test will be a lifesaver, speeding appropriate drug treatment for the seriously ill, and should transform the way infectious diseases are diagnosed. Conventional diagnostic tests are designed to detect only 1 or sometimes a small panel of potential pathogens. In contrast, the new protocol employs powerful “next-generation” DNA-sequencing technology to account for all DNA in a sample, which may be from any species – human, bacterial, viral, parasitic, or fungal. Clinicians do not need to have a suspect in mind. To identify a match, the new test relies on specially developed analytical software to compare DNA sequences in the sample to massive genomic databases covering all known pathogens.

Chip Wars

The dispute over Huawei’s access to TSMC has highlighted how vulnerable American industry is to the loss of its sole supply of advanced chips. If the matter cannot be solved by negotiation, China may perceive the restrictions as economic warfare and rapidly escalate, potentially threatening Taiwan. It is not at all clear that Washington has thought through the consequences of its actions here, nor that the current administration has considered chip supply as part of a wider supply chain security and national industrial policy. Given that China has more positive options than the United States, it is surely time for those in charge to consider where this might lead.

T-Cell testing

T cell assays are very labor intensive indeed, and the sample sizes in the papers on them tend to be in the 10s. The Oxford Immunotec people are trying to improve that. “There has. . .never been great demand for wading into the intricacies of T cell tests.” The test is definitely better at determining whether a person has had a previous coronavirus infection (as opposed to antibody measurements), and if we put that together with the other papers mentioned, it could be that this extends to saying how much protection these people retain. So the story is coming together. And just as vaccine work is never going to be the same after the huge amounts of work during this pandemic, it looks like T-cell research is never going to be the same, either. They’re both going to be better, faster, and more detailed, and that’s good. Because we’re going to need all this again some day.

AI Construction

Construction.

It is one of the largest markets in the world and looks ripe for disruption from advancing information technology and machine learning. Consider:

  • Only 3% of a construction site is active.
  • Construction productivity has declined for 30 years in many markets.
  • Large construction projects are 80% over budget and 20 months late
  • $10t spent per year and growing as a % of global GDP.

Until ALICE, a key component missing within the construction technology was the agility to create alternate execution plans quickly, which is arguably the most essential piece to improving project success factors

Indistinguishability Obfuscation

The scheme’s security rests on 4 mathematical assumptions that have been widely used in other cryptographic contexts. And even the assumption that has been studied the least, called the “learning parity with noise” assumption, is related to a problem that has been studied since the 1950s. “You could imagine that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’”

Join The Universe

If you spend most of your time arguing with your immediate family, then even the family members with whom you most disagree are at the center of your world, and greatly define you. you are defined more by the topics on which you argue, and the communities in which you argue, than by which side you take on such topics. The people you most hate, you hate exactly because they are close to you, and in your way, as they are in your world. These worlds I listed, even the US politics world, seem to me just too small and provincial to spend all my time there.

Here are 41 BIG questions:

  1. Did there have to be something, rather than nothing?
  2. Is the universe infinite, in spacetime or entropy?
  3. Why is entropy always lower in past directions?
  4. Are the speed of light, and forward causation, hard limits on info & influence?
  5. What is most of the universe made of, & can the other stuff make complex life & civs?
  6. Where are the universe’s largest reservoirs of extractable negentropy, and how fast can they flow?
  7. How cheaply can these reservoirs be defended & maintained, and thus how long can they last?
  8. In which of the many possible filter steps does most of the great filter usually lie?
  9. How far away is the nearest alien civilization?
  10. What % of alien civs evolve intelligence via routes other than our social conflict route?
  11. How willing are most aliens to cooperate with us, instead of competing?
  12. When will growth in tech abilities slow down due to running out of useful things to learn?
  13. When will growth of solar system economy slow down due to congestion & exhaustion?
  14. When will growth of Earth economy slow down due to congestion & exhaustion?
  15. When will artificial machines replace biology in running & doing things?
  16. Will that be late enough for genetic engineering or global warming to matter much?
  17. When will the dominant creatures around take a long view, or an abstract view?
  18. What types of competition and coordination (e.g., governance) institutions will dominate in which social areas when and where?
  19. What forms of governance will be most common in which different future eras?
  20. When will mental organization of dominant creatures deviate greatly from that of humans now?
  21. After that point, which kinds of minds will win which competitions where?
  22. After that point, what units of mental or social organization will matter most, and when or where?
  23. After that point, what will minds value, and at what levels will they most encode and coordinate values?
  24. What were the key causes and enablers of each past key growth mode (life, brains, foraging, farming, & industry)?
  25. When will the next growth mode start, what will enable it, and how will it differ?
  26. When, if ever, will all that we caused and care about end and die?
  27. What will be our deepest future collapse, short of extinction, how deep will that be, and how long to recover?
  28. When will be the next major civilization collapse, what % of world will that take down, and how different is the next civ?
  29. When will be the next big war, and will many nukes be used?
  30. When, if ever, will external genetic, econ, or military competition again drive large scale policy & governance choices?
  31. Where in space-time are most of the human like creatures who believe they are experiencing our place in space-time?
  32. What are our strongest levers of influence today over the universe?
  33. How long will how much non-human nature remain, and how wild will that be?
  34. What are the actual motivations that drive most human behavior today?
  35. What has been driving the main changes in values and attitudes over the last few centuries, and what further changes will they induce?
  36. What new practices and institutions can enable greatly increased rates of innovation?
  37. When, if ever, will more general & reliable truth-oriented institutions (e.g., prediction markets) offer estimates on a wide range of subjects?
  38. When, if ever, will average human fertility stop falling, and total human population rise?
  39. When, if ever, will human per-capita income stop rising?
  40. Will human per-capita energy usage ever start rising greatly again?
  41. When will humans become effectively immortal, and least re internal decay?

SoC Opensourcing

Beyond the NDA blocks, there is typically a deeper layer of completely unpublished documentation for disused silicon, such as peripherals that were designed-in but did not make the final cut, internal debugging facilities, and pre-boot facilities. Many of these disused features aren’t even well-known within the team that designed the chip! Thus a typical SoC mask set starts with lots of extra features, spare logic, and debug facilities that are chiseled away (disused) until the final shape of the SoC emerges. From a security standpoint, the presence of such “dark matter” in SoCs is worrisome. Forget worrying about the boot ROM or CPU microcode – the BIST (Built in Self Test) infrastructure has everything you need to do code injection, if you can just cajole it into the right mode. Furthermore, SoC integrators all buy functional blocks such as DDR, PCI, and USB from a tiny set of IP vendors. This means the same disused logic motifs are baked into 100Ms of devices, even across competing brands and dissimilar product lines. Herein lies a hazard for an unpatchable, ecosystem-shattering security break!

Japan phone rests

You placed the receiver atop the cradle, and the weight of the receiver pressed the large button in the center. That activated a wind-up music box. This was a super low-tech way to put a caller on “hold” and treat them to a little ditty while you hustled off to find Matsumoto-san or whomever they were calling for.