The companies selling genes online already scan the orders and do not fulfill anything considered a possible hazard (presumably unless it is to a known and certified lab at a serious organization).
And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.
Yup, several things are wrong with it even though it may be a good idea as a good shortcut on the part of the SVP
But it should be used and phrased better.
Used better:trust and only sometimes ask for the detials, like cutting the just-shuffled deck in a card game, sometimes the player to the dealer's right will just tap the deck instead of cutting it, in effect saying "I trust that shuffle". Sometimes, certainly enough to both keep the SVP well-grounded in the details, and to keep the team knowing the SVP is both watching and cares about the details, the SVP MUST ask for the details. Trust and verify.
In terms of phrasing, "I don't want the details" is all about the SVP sending the message s/he doesn't want to be bothered. The phrasing should be: "I trust you on the details on this one; let's go straight to what do we do to manage the next one of these?".
Notice leading with "I trust you on this", not "don't waste my time".
Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.
So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.
A bit offtopic, but this seems to be an AI pattern everywhere:
>>"The AI learns rules from rulebooks meant for beginners. The AI notices patterns from code in the wild and let’s be honest, most code in the wild is pretty bad."
Similarly, for self-driving, the AI for driving learns from rulebooks meant for beginners and observes patterns of driving from ordinary drivers in the wild and let’s be honest, most ordinary drivers in the wild are pretty bad. The best the AI self drivers trained in this way can hope to get is the average slop driver minus the catastrophic errors.
Similarly, in legal specialties, there are a few highly expert and wise practitioners, and hordes of average practitioners, and quite a few near-malpractice practitioners, and it is the latter group who write the most stuff on the web because that is how they do marketing, trying to make their ignorance look better — and mostly louder — than what the average lay-person knows. The AIs can NOT tell the difference and 'learns', and dispenses both the good and the actively harmful advice. Acdg to relative who is a top expert in their specialty, AIs can both find key relationships between laws in complicated situations but also readily dispense the actively harmful advice, and you MUST already be a top expert to recognize which is which.
They are great averaging machines, but when average is not good enough, you must be on top of your game.
Where are you located? In the Northeast US, we're finding getting a contractor who is both good and has availability is quite an ordeal, involving significant delays.
And when the hacked information is used to cause a national-level disaster, the costs of which are greater than the assets of the insurer, and their re-insurance funds, bankrupting them, what then?
Insurance is not a solution for everything.
More critically, just because a company buys insurance, it should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card for the executives and management to feel free to manage data irresponsibly.
It is really simple:
If they can not handle properly the risks of their business, they should be in another business.
Any data stored anywhere can be exfiltrated through either social engineering, or computer hacking.
Make it illegal to have this data, and if they really want it, then you hit them with jail when it leaks, not fines that can be paid by the board in the form of a golden parachute.
Only those that absolutely need data like this should store it. Like, I dunno, the government? Everyone else can rely on zero knowledge proofs or literally anything else than forever storing a scan of someone's entire fucking identity.
We need people to stop internalizing that the government and the rich somehow deserve access to private data just because they want to use it. Seeing a way to make money using enough to make you entitled to it.
Force businesses to add value if they want to exist instead of extraction or rent seeking.
Reality and certainty of consequences, not evasion and insuring of liability
I specified it in the last sentence:
>>If they can not handle properly the risks of their business, they should be in another business.
The same way it is handled in any other business or trade with risk.
Make sure the risks are also PERSONALLY CONSEQUENTIAL TO THEM.
If they fail to handle the business with state-of-the-art advanced knowledge, intelligence, diligence, and resources, then they will face serious personal consequences. If they do not want to take that risk, they are free to go work in any other business.
Some people are fine taking the risks of subsea welding or windmill maintenance. Others are not, and are free to pursue other work. The risks for fuking-up there include sudden death and life-changing injury.
It should be the same for people risking the livelihoods of every person who's data they handle — if they fuk-up badly enough, their risk should be financial bankruptcy and prison.
Instead, white-collar work is typically organized so those who fckup get a promotion or just find a new higher-paying job, while the people they screwed over are left to deal with the consequences.
They are, by deciding if they are able to handle having their lives certainly ruined if they screw up. The trick to punishment as deterrence to planned actions is 100% identification and enforcement, so that people will avoid the behavior to avoid the punishment. Anything less and some people will decide the potential payoff of success is worth it.
Yup. Sacks has been so consistently catastrophically wrong about everything else (especially geopolitics), this prompts me to reconsider my opinion on this.
As you should. Sacks takes the contrarian moronic take on everything, and the people that are correct and prescient (idk maybe all of the people who ended up as CEO's of frontier labs and Turing award winners in AI?) are saying that AGI is a very real risk of humanity's extinction.
Indeed, although now we are assured by the thing occupying the President's chair that we need nothing but "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" (as if we had one) to handle the problem, so I should believe that, right?...
At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them.
And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system.
You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.
I was trying to avoid that topic on HN, but DS' takes on the Ukraine ware were the MOST atrocious, amoral, and just plain wrong, basically suggesting Ukraine should just give up because Russia would win anyway.
Nevermind that any decent person would support a people's right to live and determine their own future without a neighboring despot using all his nation's might to literally eliminate them as a people.
Quite the opposite is true. And even if it weren't, condemning all of Ukraine to the fate of the massacres Bucha and Mariupol is just plain evil.
Unreal anyone would call that kind of take "fair". Rethink your life
So to clarify...your position is that: it's better that Ukraine has been completely decimated and half a million have died fighting an un-winnable war...instead of taking lesser concessions upfront than they will ultimately have to make for this thing to end?
Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences.
I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
Because while Russia was in a way stronger position than western media was portraying, they don't have an infinite capacity for pain.
They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions.
The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal.
This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
If Russia does not have "an infinite capacity for pain", then it does not sound like an unwinnable war. Ukraine estimates that they need to inflict at least 50 000 casualties a month to break the backbone of Russian military. The latest surge has brought it to 42 000 a month, up from 30 000 earlier this year. This already exceeds recruitment and training capacity.
Who are those who would love not to send their kids to die, sell resources and travel the world? Putin? His children already live a pampered life in palaces and he himself is probably the richest man in the world, currently on a trip to India. The rest don't matter. Even the head of security services Patrushev, historically the second most powerful man in the country, is scared of Putin like a schoolboy and fumbles words before him. That has been one of the most shocking revelations since the war began: that oligarchs, security services, nor anyone else can put out even the slightest opposition. The whole country dances to Putin's whims. His only real opponent is time.
And Putin doesn't give a shit about Donbas. The aim is to restore the world that birthed him, the USSR at its peak. Russia has not backed one one inch from the 2021 ultimatum to return to the European political order of the 1980s. Any concession only confirms that attacking Ukraine was a viable strategy, that piece by piece he can claw his way closer to that goal.
Military specialists from Northern Europe estimate that Russia would be in position to attack the Baltics and Poland (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding, especially if "realists" are at the helm in Western Europe and the USA) no more than 6 months after the war with Ukraine ends.
Wow, clueless. You entirely miss the point of the war.
Putin sees the mere existence of a successful Ukraine's as an existential threat. Putin initially got elected on promises that included becoming an advanced Western-style economy. He abandoned that to crony oligarchism, stripping the country for parts. Now, he and the Russian people see former Soviet state Ukraine actually becoming successful, well-off, and aspiring to EU membership. THAT can not be tolerated, because it would give Russian people the idea that they should have the same, and create a likely revolution at home.
So Putin's goal is to wipe Ukraine not only off the map, but off the consciousness of everyone in the world as Ukrainians as a people
Putin will stop until either 1) he achieves this goal, or 2) he is forced to stop.
THAT is the reality.
Thinking that Putin would somehow have accepted lesser sanctions earlier, and that he would have actually respected your new peace plan when he has never respected any other is to be played for a fool.
Allowing 1) to happen is unacceptable. Note the Ukrainians who are directly suffering the daily assaults can think as well as you can of the "realpolitik solution", and they reject it, because they know it is absolutely stupid, and leads only to rape, torture, and death — theirs, personally.
Making 2) happen is the only course of action. Ukrainians will follow it until they cannot.
If you want to stop the suffering, then accelerate Russia's exit. Garry Kasparov articulated a fine plan days ago [0]:
1: Provide complete protection of Ukrainian airspace
2: Immediately send Ukraine all the weapons it needs; no delay
3: Enforce existing sanctions. To this I add including seizing Russian and Iranian shadow fleet vessels
4: Cessation of diplomatic affairs with Russia
5: Seize Russian sovereign funds immediately and use them to power the war effort in Ukraine
This would be a start. Ukraine continuing its "long-range sanctions" is already bringing the Russian state coffers to rapid decline and looming budget crisis. Continuing it longer will force Putin's hand.
I agree the EU actually stepping up and entering the war in a serious way would tilt everything in Ukraine's favor.
The problem is they just won't. The most important members of the EU (Germany and France) are in shambles domestically and turning far right. Both have little desire to stick their necks out to support Ukraine any further and are likely turning the opposite direction.
Also, Russia has nukes. Nobody wants to provoke that any more than necessary. If Europe weren't a feckless, fragmented military vacuum things might be different, but nothing about that appears to be changing any time soon.
You still insist on overlooking the fundamental truths:
1) If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.
2) If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
Whether or not the EU steps up and helps, whether or not Russia uses nukes (another entire discussion), this is still the fundamental fact of the matter.
The Ukrainians know this, and that is why they must, and they will, fight to the end.
It is easy to sacrifice the land and lives of others.
Would you willingly surrender YOUR OWN city/sat/country to Putin's under those plans; do you have children and do you know what happens to captured children, particularly girls? (serious question)
Your "realism" is [unprintable here]. Worse, it is not reality at all, but believing a false promise from Putin.
The ACTUAL realism is to recognize Putin's Russia for what it is: a relentless aggressor who will respect no peace. Putin's Russia has violated EVERY "peace agreement it has ever made. "Peace" in their mind is merely a strategic pause in the conflict to regroup and rearm.
The list is extremely long, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, and more. Exactly ZERO concessions brought peace.
The REALITY is Ukraine submitting to such a peace would merely be buying another worse war a few months or years down the road, after Russia has had a breather and a chance to rearm. It'll just be more deaths at a faster pace in Ukraine.
If you think otherwise, I'd have both a bridge and some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
Meanwhile, your view of Ukraine is years out of date and was never true.
Ukraine has been anything but "completely decimated" — they have emerged as the leading global power in drones and air defense.
As to your 'half-million who have died', they are overwhelmingly Russian fighters — the absolute f'kn aggressors, and documented war criminals, torturers, rapists, thieves and worse. Zero sympathy. If they didn't want to die they could have just stayed home.
Also recognize the absolute goal of Russia, and Putin has NOT ONCE backed off from the stated goal: The entire concept of Ukraine as a people and as a state must be eliminated.
There is not even a surrender that can be acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
There is no compromise with someone who has the goal of murdering you or genociding your people.
The ONLY realistic solution is to boot Russia from every square inch of Ukrainian land, and force it back i it's box.
You obviously haven't noticed that Ukraine is on its way to accomplishing that, both decimating Russia's economic engine, and now taking back more land than RU has taken in 2026.
The shame here is the Western countries and Russia convinced Ukraine to give up nukes in return for inviolate borders, and when Russia violated that treaty back in 2014 taking Crimea, not one Western country pushed back.
Allowing Ukraine to get wiped off the map, and Ukrainians each, individually, to be forced to abandon their identity and language, and suffer rape, torture, and death may be a "realistic" option, but it is not an option to anyone who has an ounce of morality. Perhaps you should learn about it.
The only outcome that actually works is to force despots like Putin back into their box. Preferably six feet underground.
It sounds like your whole position is again dependent on the west's wishful thinking narratives of this war being true (which it hasn't been thus far).
The numbers I cited were purposely in between the Russian numbers of Ukrainian casualties (1.5M, obviously false) and the Ukrainian numbers (100k, obviously undercounted). The Netherlands intelligence service and the CSIS put the number around 500K, which could also be wrong, but intelligence services tend to have better methods than media orgs like the BBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
As far as your assessment of 'decimated', the UN projects Ukraine will require over half a $Trillion to rebuild. For a country with a GDP per capita of $7,000...I would call that decimated unfortunately. And that's not something that makes me happy: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/02/23/u...
The idea that Ukraine is winning or Russia is winning on any given week is entirely dependent on which news source you're reading, and given the fog of war, unless you have actual intelligence service briefs we don't actually know how its going other than the fact the frontlines have basically stayed +/- some kilometers for a super long time at this point.
Also, the idea that Russia would not accept concessions and also that Putin being dead would be desirable (hard truth: there's people who are even more hardliners than Putin waiting in the wings), are unfortunately incomplete assessments of the reality.
Again, I don't disagree with your emotional take on this, or the moral question of who's right or wrong. But on the reality of the situation I don't think your assessment is accurate as far as what's going to get the best outcome for Ukraine.
You are treating this situation like a game where there has to be a possible good outcome and since the current situation is not good the other move would have been the correct one. That is not a very realistic take.
Ukraine's main chance is to bleed Russia dry and make a future invasion not feasible. That needs a Russian economic breakdown and a 10 year time window to let the Europeans arm Ukraine to the teeth. Russia knows this which is why Russian "diplomatic" proposals have the clear goal to make that future invasion easier. It is Ukraine's war of independence against their former colonial master and we will see how it ends.
If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
There IS no choice other than to force Russia to end it.
There is no treaty or agreement Putin could sign that is trustworthy. He has broken EVERY SINGLE ONE the moment it became convenient to him.
Yes, Ukraine will take a lot to rebuild. It will also substantially increase the EU's economy when it does.
And no, the trends are NOT merely which news source or week. Russia's revenues are declining, it is selling its gold, and its sovereign wealth fund is close to gone [0]. It is exhausting military supplies so badly it is now humiliatingly reliant on North Korea and Iran. Yes, it builds some of it's own drones and missiles. Ukraine has built its own defenses against almost everything but the ballistic missiles, and that shortage is the only area in which they are losing. Russia can only get more territory by attempting to "negotiate".
And again, stop trying to act as if this is somehow emotional and surrender is rational — an even slightly realistic look at Russia's goals, and their strategy of war crimes, terror, rape, torture, and child kidnapping shows the only rational way forward is to fight to the death.
A fight to the death is literally less bad than life under Russia, on every measure of quality of life.
And that is the assessment of the vast majority of Ukrainians who actually experience it.
Stop trying to give away their land and lives as if you are somehow superior. Figure out how to argue how to help them.
Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were:
- Russia was a paper tiger and weak
- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting
- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown
- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions
- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)
- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense
- Etc.
He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.
Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc.
Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”?
The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
Going on Joe Rogan and having a million YouTube followers is absolutely the modern definition of mainstream.
Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
No wonder this account is such a font of idiocy and backwards takes — it considers "Joe Rogan" to be a serious mainstream source of information.
If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine.
But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility.
Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today.
So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts.
And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of.
The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine.
Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative.
Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources.
You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
It appears you are living in a different algorithmic reality.
The root cause of everything going wrong in Germany is the war and cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
The rapid de-industrialization, economic stagnation, ballooning deficits, removing the debt brake, new massive military debts, etc.
All of it is being economically felt by normal people and they’re scapegoating brown people (immigrants) as a result. If Germany still had cheap Russian gas and was still growing its economy 3% per year you would not be seeing any of this go mainstream.
Here are the natural gas prices for Europe: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas If you look at the price from summer 2021 on you will see a sharp rise in prices. The reason was that Russia stopped supplying the spot market. https://www.martenscentre.eu/blog/how-gazprom-manipulated-th... Russia also bought European gas storage capacity to let it sit empty and worsen the situation. All of these actions did not make much economic sense. They did however make a lot of sense when Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to use the gas supply for black mail. Their bad luck was that their hegemon China did not give Russia permission to invade till the end of the Chinese winter Olympics. Olympics ended on the 20th and invasion started on the 24th of february which made the gas threat far less potent.
I know Lenin said: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" but to suggest continuing the business relationship with Russia is beyond silly. It would show that Germany has no rudimentary survival mechanisms and put its viability as a political entity in serious doubt.
WTF? I remember the exact opposite. Everyone on social media and in the mainstream news said Ukraine was toast and the war would last a few months tops.
On the topic of regulatory capture, there is this rumor that Google has achieved Recursive Self Improvement, and the other three (OpenAI/Anthropic/X) are just trying to get the regulators to slow down Google so they can catch up.
Yes, what is in the labs is almost by definition ahead of what we can see, but I've come to take all of these announcements of impending doom as perverse marketing stunts — it is so powerful Disaster-XYZ is coming — so if it's that power you must invest...
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.
The Iranian-backed Houthis also struck the Saudi East-West oil pipeline [0], pumping stations and refining capability. Reductions in export output initially estimated around 700,000 barrels per day now missing from the market.
And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.
It is a complex problem.
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