Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
found a new movie plot threat https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158
funded by open philanthropy, but not only and also got some other biologists onboard. 10 out of 39 authors had open philanthropy funding in the last 5 years so theyāre likely EAs. highly speculative as of now and not anywhere close to being made, as in weāll be dead from global warming before this gets anywhere close from my understanding. also starting materials would be hideously expensive because all of this has to be synthetic and enantiopure, and every technique has to be remade from scratch in unnatural enantiomer form. it even has LW thread by now hxxps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87pTGnHAvqk3FC7Zk/the-dangers-of-mirrored-life
it hit news https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/a-second-tree-of-life-could-wreak-havoc-scientists-warn.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/12/unprecedented-risk-to-life-on-earth-scientists-call-for-halt-on-mirror-life-microbe-research
I read the headline yesterday and thought, āThis is 100% fundraising bullshit.ā
This strikes me as being exact same class of thing OpenAI does when they pronounce that their product will murder us all.
What do we call this? Marketerrorism?
i see how itās critihype but i donāt understand whereās money in this one
CRITIHYPE, thank you! I couldnāt find the word!
If I had to guess a motive, it would be to bring mirror biology out of the obscurity of pure research (who funds that anymore?) and to instead plant it firmly into the popular zeitgeist as a āscary thingā that needs to be defended against. This can lead to it becoming a trendy topic, and therefore fundable by grant-awarding agencies.
as in, funding for writing ratty screeds? because they specifically want to cut funding to d-proteins and such. this also works for fundraising
Maybe Iām being too cynical. It wouldnāt be the first time this week that someone drew a spooky picture, would it?
nooo waay
Mirror bacteria? Boring! I want an evil twin from the negaverse who looks exactly like me except right hande-- oh heck. What if Iām the mirror twin?
Iām definitely out of my depth here, but how exactly does a lefty organism bypass immune responses and still interact with the body? Seems like if it has a way to mess up healthy cells then it should have something that antibodies can connect to, mirrored or not. Not that Iām arguing we shouldnāt be careful about creating novel pathogens, but other than being a more flashy sci-fi premise Iām not really seeing how itās more dangerous than the right-handed version.
Also I think this opens up a beautiful world of new scientific naming conventions:
they way i understand it, because immune system is basically constantly fuzzing all potentially new things, what is important is how antigen looks like on the surface. what it is made from matters less, and whether aminoacids there are l- (natural) or d- (not) it shouldnāt matter that much, antibodies are generated for nonnatural achiral things all the time including things like PEG and chloronitrobenzene. then complement system puts holes in bacterial membrane and thatās it, itās not survivable for bacterium and does not depend on anything chiral. normally all components are promptly shredded, itās a good question if that would happen too but, like - this might not matter too hard - thereās a way for immune system to smite this thing
the potential problem is that peptides made from d-aminoacids are harder to cut via hydrolases and itās a part of some more involved immune response idk details. thereās plenty of stuff thatās achiral like glycerol, glycine, beta-alanine, TCA components, fatty acids that mirrored bacteria can feed on without problems. some normal bacteria also use d-aminoacids so normal l-aminoacids should be usable for d-protein bacteria. thereās also transaminase that takes d-aminoacids and along with other enzymes it can turn these into l-aminoacids. but even more importantly weāre perhaps 30 years away from making this anywhere close to feasible, itās all highly speculative. thereās a report if you want to read it https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cv716pj4036/Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks.pdf
also look up cost of these things. unnatural aminoacids, especially these with wrong conformation but otherwise normal are expensive. l-tert-leucine is unnatural but can be made in biotechnological process, so itās cheaper. for example on sigma-aldrich, d-glutamine costs 100x more than l-glutamine, and for sugars itās even worse because these have more chiral centers
besides, itās not really worth it probably? it will take decades and cost more than ftx wiped out. other than making it work just to make it work, all the worthwhile components can be made synthetically, maybe thereās some utility in d-proteins, more likely d-peptides, tiny amounts of these can be made by SPPS (for screening) and larger in normal chemical synthesis (for use). these might be slightly useful if slowed down degradation of peptides could be exploited in some kind of pharmaceutical, but do you know how we can make it work in other way? donāt put amide bonds there in the first place and just make a small molecule pharmaceutical like we can do (as in, organic chemists)
another part of the concern is that these things could transform organic carbon in form unusable to other organisms. but nature finds a way, and outside of fires etc, there are bacteria that feed on nylon and PET, so i think this situation wonāt last long