Georeactor Blog

I'm about to travel again, so I ought to finish books on Kosovo and Chicago's deadly heat wave soon. These are hopefully going to be more thematic posts about 'air wars' and 'climate reality' so it wasn't a good fit for end notes. So I'll post these now:

Sidewalk / techlash related

• My Waymo aside was a little too early… While writing I was considering mentioning people who vandalize and block Waymo cars to antagonize riders. In the LA protests, five or six got trapped and burned. After seeing many takes about this being a deliberate anti-tech and pro-labor protest, a safer alternative to burning personal cars, a bad look for future downtowns, etc., I conclude that no one knows what's going on.
• A Sidewalk Labs smart roads spinoff still exists and promised news would be coming: https://www.instagram.com/cavnueroads/
• An island development story from Vancouver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsu3NA1W_k

Genome LLM

Google DeepMind released an AlphaGenome API, and plans to publish the model in the future. Here are the features:

• 1 million base pair context
• trained on human and mouse reference genomes (i.e. not plant-based)
• input/embeddings adaptive for different tasks
• improvements on a particularly difficult task (identifying enhancers which are 10,000–35,000 or more base pairs away from a gene); outperforms other models, sometimes with zero-shot, then with training on the task can improve itself or get the other models to SOTA

I had been planning to train a diffusion model on multiple genomes, using the same bd3lms script that I used to make my papaya model, but there are issues with versions of Torch and CUDA… now with DeepMind and Evo-2 and ChatNT out there, it seems like if there is an advantage for genomic LLMs, it isn't going to be trained in CoLab.

Other Projects

• On BlueSky there's been organic use of the Sark emoji for travel, nature, and history posts. Love to see it.
• I patched the Arabic UI font used by OpenStreetMap. If deployed it should affect about 1,000 names of places and streets in the Kurdish region: https://mapmeld.com/arabic/index.html
• I received the GMO mouth bacteria which the charter city libertarian / eacc people at Lumina are marketing as a probiotic. I preordered in August, they sent some messages in January, and then I finally received and brushed it onto my teeth! This felt very weird for half of a day, minimally weird mouthfeel for another day, and then potentially digestive changes. I've never gotten cavities, so I don't expect this to change my life, but I wanted to encourage a boutique GMO business.
• When I first lived in Chicago in 2013–14, I considered changing my name and briefly made an expunge.io-inspired Bootstrap CSS website for my findings from different cities (rename.ninja). These days there is a real community website: https://namesake.fyi
• My 'Chat-OMG' posts were full of bad lawyers, and finally there are two websites tracking these more professionally: https://www.polarislab.org/ai-law-tracker.html and https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
• After a ~3 month hiatus, I finished the Supreme Court pro se series with a video about the last non-lawyer to argue there. My first science video might be about researchers' compulsion to claim that corn was in China, the Middle East, India, Egypt, etc. before Columbus.
  For some reason my early research of this case revolved around the SEC, and I only recently discovered the guy's websites, Usenet posts, and custody battles. I decided it was best to mention his felony and then skip ahead to the 'perennial candidate' role he's taken on in the past ~10 years. Normally I would look at his 2021 Supreme Court filing and stuff, but anything he's put out since 1990 has his kids' names, and they're adults living their lives now..
  He reminded me of previous episodes like Randolph Phillips (who involved himself in multiple shareholder cases), Herbert Schlanger (who argued at the Court as a young man, got a law license, then spent years trying to return), and Harrison Parker (who sent lengthy religious screeds to courts). With that context, maybe Justice Burger was right to keep pro se people out? Were more historic figures also 'cranks' in their time?

Travel

• The city of Medan came up in my Indonesia research as a travel hub on Sumatra (with an airport rail connection!). Unfortunately every source advises you to find a tour and GTFO, saying the city is too run-down and crime-ridden. This video was trying to give Medan a fair shake, talking about the cuisine (especially nasi padang) and reconnecting with his former friend and business partner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Vb1uOW_LA
• I learned that the car-free Sunday which I accidentally visited on my first day in Makassar, is a trend across Southeast Asia. This guy is Singaporean and made several videos about urbanism and bike-ability in the region: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03_6zjEkK0o

Previous Reads

• Reading Silent Steppe I was shocked by the perilous journey returning home to Kazakhstan after WWII. A comment recently suggested that getting shipped home among other soldiers might have reduced PTSD among North American soldiers and helped people re-socialize (?).
• Military submarines usually don't dive so deep https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1lel2l9/til_that_military_submarines_are_typically/
• Bill Clinton wrote a third White House thriller with James Patterson.
• Deeper dive into the iron smelting craze in China's Great Famine. It was rather short-lived and developed in stages. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ld785f/comment/my6aaa7/
• A new, indigenous name for a street in Vancouver, which OSM represents as name=Musqueamview Street, name:hur=šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm, official_name=šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street, https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/1lgfykh/new_signs_are_up/
• Canada offering free museum admission to kids https://bsky.app/profile/implausibleblog.bsky.social/post/3lrvvfqvfsc2c
• This podcast episode cured some Covid-not-so-bad retro-narratives which I'd accepted over the years https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bonus-the-lab-leak-goes-mainstream/id1651876897?i=1000711465615
• Japanese manga style choice https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1ldkqov/ive_never_seen_%E3%83%8C_in_handakuon_before_how_are_you/
• Couple from the Ample Hills ice cream stores / podcast plan to return with chicken smashburgers https://ny.eater.com/new-york-restaurant-news/399924/ample-hills-ice-cream-chicken-burger-restaurant-ramblin-chicken-brooklyn
• After the movie trailer release, I finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook. I wish I hadn't read the plot on Wiki years ago. I'll just summarize it as, writer of The Martian comes up with an environment where they can write about an interstellar mission. Or maybe he got very invested in the movie Sunshine.
• In true crime news, Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to murdering four college students in Idaho. This is a win for the state, and the public defender explored every alternative. There are some vocal, angry people who wanted to see a trial this summer or the death penalty, either way really gross.
• The new Jurassic movie should remind us all that the Jurassic World trilogy is essentially about failed containment of a lab leak.