If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.

Big news: DEVONthink 4 is almost out as a public beta. A Reddit user got an early look at the announcement and a few things stick out:

• As expected (and hoped for), AI features prominently, with options to integrate your preferred online model
• There now seems to be built-in version control
• Purchase (or upgrade from v3) gets you updates for a year, after that you pay for continuous updates

I wish AI integration was on-device only as online integration will limit the types of data I can use it on, but still, sign me up! (↬r/devonthink)

What to call this momentous moment in history? “Liberation Day” doesn’t quite capture the sentiment. I propose FAFO Day.

Waiting with bated breath for the “Make America Wise Again” campaign.

With 23andMe closing shop today and the bluebird bio sale to private equity last month it is clear that the DNA bubble has burst.

Every bubble leaves something positive in its wake. Yes, there was a lot of speculation with tulips in the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is still the world’s top exporter of cut flowers. There was a railway bubble in the United States that left us with a lot of railroad tracks and not so great passenger rail. More recently, the dot-com bubble left decent network infrastructure and a lot of IT professionals with nothing better to do than to invent Web 2.0.

And so with DNA. Sequencing has never been cheaper, and it does have some valid uses. Unfortunately, there are many harms of fetishizing DNA, from thinking that DNA mutations are the be-all and end-all of every disease pathology — think, “the fat gene” — to completely missing the point of the entire field of epigenetics, which has much more to it than molecular changes to histones and base pairs.

Business and finance are now the first to realize that there is more to genetics than DNA, and more to medicine than genetics. Academia and funders, ossified as they are, will be slower on the uptake and come to this epiphany one retirement at a time.

A less hopeful harbinger of the future: someone in Serbia — most likely the government — seems to have used sonic weapons to disperse a 100K+ strong crowd of peaceful protestors. Here is a convincing audio analysis, and here are a few videos. Coming soon to a protest near you.

Facts about the District’s budget from DC council member Charles Allen:

Like any other state, DC’s budget is mostly funded through local tax revenue and fees. About 25% of our budget is from federal programs, largely Medicaid and Medicare, in line with or lower than most US states.

The DC Council and Mayor have collaborated to pass 28 consecutive balanced budgets.

DC continues to have one of the strongest bond ratings of any municipality in the country and has fully funded its pensions.

DC is the only jurisdiction in the nation that budgets out four years on the operations side and six on the capital side to ensure responsible spending.

So if you are reading the history of the 20th century, and come to the 1930s, and you ask yourself “how could people have allowed this to happen”, well, this is how. IYIs too smart for their own good, accepting a guaranteed disaster to prevent an inconvenience.

There is also the small matter of DC city government not being allowed to spend $1.1B of its own money — which it had already collected! — because who needs police and public schools? The colonies revolted for less.

Today’s FT essay on the rise of the anti-vaccine movement was a miss. Instead of asking why so many people lost trust in institutions it goes straight to politics: 10 paragraphs on Germany’s AfD, no mention of whether some of the people’s concerns were valid. With that, the movement can only grow.

I appreciate a contrarian take, but this one from FT on European overregulation (the take — it’s not any worse than America) is just plain wrong. For example:

It’s not just Europe. The most recent “revolt” is explicitly premised on the claim that Europe has been falling behind US growth because it is more heavily regulated. But stop and think for a second: aren’t Americans complaining just as much about red tape? The US, too, is a master of throwing bureaucratic spanners in the wheels […]

In fact, those who measure such things find that the EU has more streamlined regulation than the US. Every five years, the OECD collects data on how competition-friendly its member states’ regulation is. Below is the 2023 vintage, for both the overall indicator and the sub-indicator “Administrative and regulatory burden”.

Pulling a lumbering bureaucracy’s stats sheet to show you’re not bureaucratic is a beautifully European thing to do. Never mind that the chart it shows are each individual country’s rules and regulations. The EU by itself has yet another set or rules, cast as a pall over any hope you may have that doing business in a member country will be smooth painless.