Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:
ChatGPT can now take any photo you send it and create an image of any style based on it (↬Stratechery). The results range from OK to spectacular, particularly if the style is simple, and the Internet is now awash with famous photos done in the style of Studio Ghibli.
Miyazaki would be horrified and out of respect to him I won’t link to any of it, but this update has immediate and great effect on our household as we will now have all of our family photos redone in his style, for personal and private use.
A few changes to my iPhone setup, courtesy of a YouTube video which is itself c/o r/dumbphones:
So far so good.
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.
🍿 Martha (2024) was well worth the time (nearly two hours — long for a documentary). Excerpts from her 30-minute rant to the NYT about why she hated it were the cherry on top. Only in America…
A quick Ranking of DC restaurants I’ve eaten at within the past 6 months of so:
Moon Rabbit > Rumi’s Kitchen > Chloe > Blue Duck Tavern > Rasika > Albi > The Dabney
For all his good work, Jose Andres’s restaurants are lackluster. Oyamel was just OK. Jaleo and China Chilcano stank. Haven’t been to Zaytinya but I doubt it could be better than Rumi’s Kitchen and Chloe.
The most recent episode of Conversations with Tyler featured Ezra Klein as a guest. I won’t delve into their discussion, but I will note two quirks in Tyler’s thinking that were somewhat off-brand.
When Ezra mentioned mass firings and re-hirings in the federal government, Tyler expressed uncertainty about that actually being the case — essentially a denial of what is widely known. As a counter, Ezra mentioned knowing people who were fired. I, too, know people who were fired simply because they got promoted and transitioned from contractors to full-time employees within the last two years, despite having deep expertise in the subject matter they were hired for. The “I’m not sure that’s happening” sounds what one would hear on the streets of Berlin in the late 1930s, motivated reasoning par excellence.
Another example is Tyler’s tendency to extrapolate into the future and then use that hypothetical future as a benchmark for current policy. Think “Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person” at some unspecific time in the future as a context for massive federal government downsizing now. We do not, in fact, have billion-dollar companies run by a single person; that is a VC pitch at best, and if we are being less generous pure vaporware. Government hiring policy by vaporware sounds bad.
I think Tyler was aiming for provocation. He didn’t mention in his show notes that he “tried to “push him further from a libertarian point of view”, but then what is he really thinking? To come back to the 1930s analogy, I picture this interview’s version of Tyler in the FDR-era US and I see him praising Charles Lindbergh (they both speak German) and Henry Ford — progress über alles — and not really being a fan of FDR. Yikes!
It was time for my quarterly now page update. Ludus longus, vita brevis.
A brief Q&A:
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.