Last month the EU officially approved mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future. In order to produce a kilogram of bug-based food, you need ~10k bugs. On the one hand, bugs probably don’t matter much morally. On the other hand, 10k is a lot. Do bugs have moral value? What about the other limit? Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian, would be to eat the largest animal there is. And according to the Talmud the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan, which suffices to feed all of them forever. Hypothesis confirmed!
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Better Crowdfunding
On Kickstarter you contribute to a project and if a contribution threshold isn’t reached you get your money back. The Kickstarter contract is useful but it’s still easy for a good project to fail because there are many equilibria with non-funding. For example, if I think that you won’t contribute then I may decide not to contribute and if I don’t contribute then you may decide not to contribute. Neither of us can do better by contributing, given the other person is not-contributing, and so non-contributing is a Nash equilibrium. Now introduce refund bonuses which pay out only if the threshold is not reached. Now if I think that you won’t contribute then I want to contribute, to earn the refund bonus, and the same is true for you. The only equilibria in the crowdfunding game with refund bonuses have the project being funded. Thus, a nice feature of refund bonus game is that in equilibrium the refund bonuses are never paid! Without refund bonuses only ~30% of socially valuable projects succeed (perhaps coincidentally almost the exact same as on Kickstarter). But with refund bonuses the success rate increases 60% and it doesn’t much matter much what type of refund bonuses are used!
AI Labor Supply
61.6% of the working-age population were active in the labor force, either working in jobs or looking for them. That is essentially unchanged from the summer of 2020. Wages are soaring. In May, average wages grew at a 6.1% annual rate. In April, they grew at an 8.7% annual rate. Employers are boosting wage offers in order to attract and retain workers, who are increasingly difficult to attract and retain.
Unable to find enough workers, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, installed an automated voice system to take orders. The system never fails to upsell customers on fries or a drink, which has boosted sales. There’s no longer a need for a person to take orders at the drive-thru window. “It also never calls in sick. There’s no way we’re going back.”
A massive shift to delivery and virtual kitchens triggered by the pandemic may mean that some restaurants and some customers will be more willing to use technology that once seemed unfamiliar. Using an app to order at a restaurant table could mean that, eventually, fewer servers will be needed.
City Microbiomes
Researchers took 4700 samples from mass transit systems in 60 cities across the world, swabbing common touch points like turnstiles and railings in bustling subways and bus stations across the world. Using metagenomic sequencing, they created a global atlas of the urban microbial ecosystem, the first systematic catalog of its kind. The results suggest that no 2 cities are alike, with each major metropolis studied so far revealing a unique molecular echo of the microbial species that inhabit it, distinct from populations found in other urban environments.
2023-10-12: Dark matter
Metagenomes encode an enormous diversity of proteins, reflecting a multiplicity of functions and activities. Exploration of this vast sequence space has been limited to a comparative analysis against reference microbial genomes and protein families derived from those genomes. Here, to examine the scale of yet untapped functional diversity beyond what is currently possible through the lens of reference genomes, we develop a computational approach to generate reference-free protein families from the sequence space in metagenomes. We analyse 27k metagenomes and identify 1.17b protein sequences longer than 35 amino acids with no similarity to any sequences from reference genomes. Using massively parallel graph-based clustering, we group these proteins into 106k novel sequence clusters with more than 100 members, doubling the number of protein families obtained from the reference genomes clustered using the same approach. We annotate these families on the basis of their taxonomic, habitat, geographical and gene neighbourhood distributions and, where sufficient sequence diversity is available, predict protein three-dimensional models, revealing novel structures. Overall, our results uncover an enormously diverse functional space, highlighting the importance of further exploring the microbial functional dark matter.
Worst Translator
Attack-resistant Hardware
Attacks often succeed by abusing the gap between program and machine-level semantics– for example, by locating a sensitive pointer, exploiting a bug to overwrite this sensitive data, and hijacking the victim program’s execution. In this work, we take secure system design on the offensive by continuously obfuscating information that attackers need but normal programs do not use, such as representation of code and pointers or the exact location of code and data. Our secure hardware architecture, Morpheus, combines 2 powerful protections: ensembles of moving target defenses and churn. Ensembles of moving target defenses randomize key program values (e.g., relocating pointers and encrypting code and pointers) which forces attackers to extensively probe the system prior to an attack. To ensure attack probes fail, the architecture incorporates churn to transparently re-randomize program values underneath the running system. With frequent churn, systems quickly become impractically difficult to penetrate. We demonstrate Morpheus through a RISC-V-based prototype designed to stop control-flow attacks. Each moving target defense in Morpheus uses hardware support to individually offer more randomness at a lower cost than previous techniques. When ensembled with churn, Morpheus defenses offer strong protection against control-flow attacks, with our security testing and performance studies revealing: i) high-coverage protection for a broad array of control-flow attacks, including protections for advanced attacks and an attack disclosed after the design of Morpheus, and ii) negligible performance impacts (1%) with churn periods up to 50 ms, which our study estimates to be at least 5000x faster than the time necessary to possibly penetrate Morpheus.
Morpheus went undefeated in a hacking challenge.
See also a related approach: Physically unclonable functions, or PUFs, exploit the fact that, at a microscopic level, even mass-produced computer chips have tiny differences. PUFs leverage that to let every chip in a computer, smartphone, or other device generate a signal that no other chip can generate.“ The SolarWinds hack that targeted the US government really got people thinking about how we’re going to be doing authentication and cryptography. We’re hopeful that this could be part of the solution.”
Game in a Font
World’s first video game in a font! You read that right! It’s a video game in a font! A font as in “Time New Roman”. The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font. You can play it anywhere! Your word processor! Your image editor! Your code editor! Even works with syntax highlighting. All the places you should never play games, but now you can because no one will stop you!
How big of a game can you make in a font? Fontemon has
4696 individual frames
2782 frames in its longest path
131 branches from 43 distinct choices
314 sprites
1085 words of text
But, just how much content can you fit, if you push it to the limit?
Max: 2^16 frames (65536)
Max: Longest path ~3277 frames
Max: Branches are a bit more complicated.
Max: 2^16 (65536) sprites
Max: No specific limit on words, but other limits (frames, and sprites) apply
Of all of those, I really want to talk about #2 Max: Longest path ~3277 frames.
Every design decision I've made for this game:
How to draw the sprites
Which type of substitution to use (Ligature substitution)
How to handle branches (again, Ligature substitution)
was directly influenced by this limitation. In fact, of all of the limitations,
this is the rate-limiting step. Almost all optimizations I've done, have been to
push this number upwards.
UAV 3D capture
Yesterday autonomous drone manufacturer Skydio rolled out 3D Scan, an adaptive scanning software package that will greatly improve the workflow of those designing on top of existing spaces. They’re not marketing it that way, however; the rollout is aimed at the inspection industry, where large, complicated structures once had to be scaled by experienced climbers. With Skydio’s technology, you don’t even need a skilled drone pilot. Instead, you use their app to set boundaries around what structure(s) you would like captured, by dropping “pillars” around them. Then the drone’s software figures out the flight path it will automatically take, avoiding obstacles along the way. You choose the resolution, and the software figures out how many photos the drone will need to snap, tightening or loosening its flight path accordingly. The drone takes flight, and the model is generated in real time. You can then review the model on your device, on-site, in case you decide another pass is needed.
Mapping Angkor
Most people don’t realize that Angkor Wat is just 1 of more than 1000 temples in the greater Angkor region. This settlement may have been home to 900k people at its height in the 13th century. Angkor was comparable to the 1m people who lived in ancient Rome at its height. Researchers were able to map 10Ks of archaeological features at Angkor. Because Angkorian people built their houses out of organic materials and on wooden posts, these structures are long gone and not visible on the landscape. But lidar revealed a complex urban landscape complete with city blocks consisting of the mounds where people built their houses and small ponds located next to them. This work has created one of the most comprehensive maps of a sprawling medieval city in the world, leading us to ask: How did the city develop over time, and how many people lived here?
NeuroRights
Neuro rights advocates propose 5 additions to human rights: the rights to personal identity, free will, mental privacy, equal access to mental augmentation, and protection from algorithmic bias. Who owns the copyright to a recorded dream? What laws should exist to prevent one person from altering the memory of another through a neural implant? How do we maintain mental integrity separate from an implanted device? If someone can read our mind, how do we protect the read-out of our thoughts as our own?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 