Thomas Cech: “Unlike DNA, RNA plays numerous active roles in living cells. It acts as an enzyme, splicing and dicing other RNA molecules or assembling proteins — the stuff of which all life is built — from amino acid building blocks. It keeps stem cells active and forestalls aging by building out the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes. RNA discoveries have led to new therapies, such as the use of antisense RNA to help treat children afflicted with the devastating disease spinal muscular atrophy. The mRNA vaccines, which saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic, are being reformulated to attack other diseases, including some cancers. RNA research may also be helping us rewrite the future; the genetic scissors that give CRISPR its breathtaking power to edit genes are guided to their sites of action by RNAs. Although most scientists now agree on RNA’s bright promise, we are still only beginning to unlock its potential.”
Donald Boudreaux: “The classical liberal is neither a bloodless promoter of efficiency for efficiency’s sake nor a citizen who’s morally indifferent or apathetic. Quite the contrary. The classical liberal recognizes that morality is utterly indispensable. But he or she believes that beyond preventing coercion and fraud, the government has no business imposing any concrete moral code. The government can be trusted to possess neither the knowledge nor the consistently excellent motivation that would be required for it to successfully impose ‘the’ appropriate moral code. The business of choosing and enforcing moral codes belongs to the people, to free individuals who talk to and reason with each other, who set and follow examples, who learn from their mistakes, and who compromise with one other.”
NYTimes: “High-intensity workouts are designed to be hard. The whole point of repeatedly going all out for 30 seconds or a minute at a time is to get the maximum cardiovascular exercise in the least amount of time. But that doesn’t mean these workouts need to be punishing for your joints. The most well-known of these workouts, high intensity interval training, or HIIT, involves high-impact moves and has been adopted by serious athletes to become stronger, faster and more powerful, said Susane Pata, a Miami-based trainer with the National Academy of Sports Medicine…These workouts substitute high-impact activities such as sprinting, burpees or jump lunges with joint-friendly alternatives. The goal is still the same: to keep your heart rate above 80 percent of your absolute maximum before letting it barely recover and then repeating the effort.”
O’Reilly: What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I)
Ben Thompson: “Google is certainly building products for the consumer market, but those products are not devices; they are Internet services. And, as you might have noticed, the historical discussion didn’t really mention the Internet. Both Google and Meta, the two biggest winners of the Internet epoch, built their services on commodity hardware. Granted, those services scaled thanks to the deep infrastructure work undertaken by both companies, but even there Google’s more customized approach has been at least rivaled by Meta’s more open approach. What is notable is that both companies are integrating their models and their apps, as is OpenAI with ChatGPT…I think that models will certainly differ, but not in a large enough way to not be treated as commodities; the most value will be derived from building platforms that treat models like processors, delivering performance improvements to developers who never need to know what is going on under the hood. This will mean the biggest benefits will accrue to horizontal reach — on the API layer, the model layer, and the GPU layer — as opposed to vertical integration; it is up to Google to prove me wrong.”
