@aboutberlin But with automation you could expand to more cities. Basically AI should improve throughput, therfore I would expect that. But will be interesting to hear your solution.
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Andy Hauser
1.4K posts
@AndyCMDE These workflow improvements do not increase my income.
I will keep the website useful, neutral and free. I don't want to compromise on quality or abandon principles to keep the lights on. I will find other ways to pay rent. Something is in the works.
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AI on All About Berlin? Yes, but not like that.
I am releasing a tool that updates the website when certain facts change. If the minimum wage goes up, it updates it everywhere on the website. (1/2)
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@aboutberlin Thanks for sharing stories of AI impact on you. Your site is a middleware between the user and the data. As user visits drop due to search engines turning into answer machines, will your own AI automizations make up for it (probably needs scale over multiple sites) or wwyd?
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It barely uses AI: I use a tiny LLM to extract values from text, that's it. When a value changes, a constant gets updated in the code, a change request is submitted, and a human has to approve it. There are no unsupervised changes, and all the content is still written by a human.
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@NikoMcCarty It‘s quite costly and limited to take samples from air. If you can, try something where your sample is more concentrated.
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Underrated Ideas in Biotech (Part I)
My list of writing ideas is growing far faster than I can possibly publish. So here are some "half-baked" ideas in biology that I hope others will pick up and run with.
In this first blog, I share three ideas:
1. Hyperspectral Biology — It is possible to see microbes from outer space. (That sentence sounds ridiculous, but it's true.) We can now build planetary-scale networks that would enable us to engineer microbes that sense pathogens, or act as early warning systems for other threats, and monitor using satellites.
2. Biology for Beauty — Nature is often described as the most beautiful thing on Earth, far exceeding artistic works from Monet and Picasso. Yosemite and the Grand Canyon feel as if they were sculpted by the hands of God; all other art is unmistakably the work of humans. Why aren't there entire companies that (like Tiffany or Cartier) aim to make eternal art using biology?
3. Mapping the Air — Microbes can travel thousands of miles, traversing continents by riding on dust motes carried by atmospheric winds. Sand from the Sahara desert travels all the way to New York City, carrying pathogens with it. We have barely begun to study the microbes hitching rides on these atmospheric winds.
On a related note: There is a growing field of AirDNA. Every time you breathe, saliva droplets are released into the air. These droplets contain DNA, which can be captured and sequenced. After the DNA settles onto the ground after about 24 hours, it gets wrapped into dust, and sits there for years.
It is feasible to take the dust from a room and build a genomic record of everyone who has ever entered it. In 2023, researchers at MIT also engineered living cells to take up and permanently record DNA from their surroundings. The bacteria were sensitive enough to distinguish between two sequences differing by a single nucleotide at exceptionally low concentrations — about 4.6 femtomolar.
These “sentinel” cells can be used to figure out what a person looks like, solely by storing the trace amounts of DNA they leave behind in a room.
Many facial features are influenced by single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or single-letter variants in the genome that correlate with things like nose width and eye spacing. The MIT team engineered cells to detect five facial SNPs and showed each could be detected independently. Sprayed onto a surface, these cells would capture SNPs and, once sequenced later, reveal who passed through.
This is not science fiction. The authors say it directly in the paper: “we demonstrated sentinel cells on a set of five human SNPs associated with human facial features. One could record this information in a single cell or consortium, recover the DNA, and use artificial intelligence to rebuild the predicted face.”
Much more: nikomc.com/essays/underra…
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@paperX_Art The description of the response your brain gives you from light entering your eyes seems to be quite an experience. Without taking from it, how much is your brain making up for you? Imagine a real painting created by a machine and someone made you believe it was a lost Monet…
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This ragebait is super lame. Congrats you tricked a bunch of people and got a viral post.
Actual Monet/impressionist paintings look totally different in real life anyway vs photos on a screen, focusing on "visual elements" is missing the point of Monet's work entirely.
The average person's (and probably AI also) understanding of Monet's work is completely removed from the real thing, reproduced probably from photos to merch to screens, edited and reshared. To even debate whether an AI prompt in Monet's style would be "inferior" is such a joke.
The point of Monet's work is that he captured a sensory "impression" of fleeting moments en plein air (outdoors). As he aged, his vision deteriorated and his work was way more abstract, most probably wouldn't immediately associate with his more famous pieces. But what made his paintings amazing were the emotional tons of shifting light, reflections, and atmosphere. Not waterlilies themselves or some arbitrary "style".
There's a huge damaged Monet piece titled 'Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows' that's part of the Matsukata collection in Japan. They actually tried to digitally restore the piece using pre-LLM AI back in 2017 and referencing black-and-white photographs taken before it was damaged.
I saw this digital restoration in person in 2019 and it's a totally different from of art to Monet's work, you simply can't reproduce the way light interacts with pigments vs light being projected from leds. That being said, it's a million more times more interesting as a piece of 'art' than whatever LLM prompted slop. ntt-east.co.jp/art/monet-e.ht…
𒐪@SHL0MS
i just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
Markdown vs HTML. Every time we go from a semantically dense to a semantically sparse format, we lose. Even more today where less tokens from the same content is way better. I can understand we need a better markdown. I can't understand we should replace it with HTML.
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@CanJohnUncu @shae_mcl Quality of the data and metadata. More detailed descriptions than are currently available in metadata of the databases.
Reference datasets to test AI approaches against.
Infrastructure for maintaining all of that.
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
It’s estimated that the Protein Data Bank (PDB) cost around $13B to create. Alphafold was only possible because of it. If we want ML to solve biology, we should be funding the creation of databases and the development of new assay technologies. ML is nothing without data.
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As one of the authors of the clustering software Alphafold used, I always felt that the contributors to and curators of the databases needed to be highlighted more.
Not only are we standing on the shoulders of giants, it is also a gigantic effort we are standing on.
Shae McLaughlin@shae_mcl
It’s estimated that the Protein Data Bank (PDB) cost around $13B to create. Alphafold was only possible because of it. If we want ML to solve biology, we should be funding the creation of databases and the development of new assay technologies. ML is nothing without data.
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
Genau, während Kosten, Zeitaufwand und Risiko des Regelungswirrwarrs Transaktionen innerhalb der EU Grenzen trifft, wird das von ausserhalb unterlaufen.
Großteil der Kosten zahlt der Käufer, bzw. führen zum Verzicht, finanzieren aber nur Struktur, nicht Ziel (Entsorgung).
David Domjahn@domjahn
Wir (pokefy.de) verkaufen gerne in Europa. Und hören trotzdem damit auf. Was kostet z. B. ein Paket nach Österreich? 14,50 € Porto. Realität für uns als Gewerbetreibende: 135 € pro Paket bei gerade einmal zehn Sendungen pro Jahr nach Österreich 2025. Dabei sind wir nur eine kleine GmbH aus Deutschland mit vereinzelten Kunden in Europa. Unser gesamtes jährliches Aufkommen für den EU-Export liegt bei etwa 100 Kilogramm Verpackung. Nicht Tonnen. Kilogramm. Die Rechnung für Österreich allein: Wer als ausländisches Unternehmen nach Österreich verschickt, ist gesetzlich verpflichtet, die Entsorgung der Verpackung zu lizenzieren und dafür einen lokalen Beauftragten zu benennen, der die Einhaltung der Vorschriften garantiert und dafür haftet: - Porto (10 Pakete à 14,50 €): 145 € - Jahrespauschale Verpackungsbeauftragter: 450 € - Notarkosten für die Vollmachtsbeglaubigung: 150 € - Opportunitätskosten: 600 € Und das ist nur Österreich. Frankreich verlangt z. B. ein eigenes Logo samt Anleitung auf jedem Versandkarton, sonst drohen empfindliche Bußgelder. Spanien, Italien, Polen: jeweils eigene Anforderungen, eigene Register. Ab Mitte 2026 kommen mit der EU-Verpackungsverordnung #PPWR weitere Pflichten hinzu. Konzerne verteilen solche Fixkosten auf Millionen Sendungen. Für kleine Unternehmen und Selbständige wird daraus ein reales Exporthindernis. Das ist kein Versehen des Gesetzgebers, sondern ein struktureller Konzentrationsvorteil zugunsten großer Marktteilnehmer. Dahinter steht ein System mit eigener Ökonomie: Wer Verpackungen in Verkehr bringt, muss deren spätere Entsorgung lizenzieren. Allein in Deutschland fließen dabei jährlich Milliardenbeträge an Lizenzentgelten an marktbeherrschende Entsorgungsunternehmen. Diese profitieren dabei mehrfach, über Lizenzgebühren beim Inverkehrbringen von Verpackungen über die Abholung und Verwertung der eingesammelten Rohstoffe. Komplexität ist dabei kein Fehler im System; sie ist Teil des Geschäftsmodells. Besonders grotesk wird das im Vergleich mit Plattformversendern aus Fernost. Millionen Kleinsendungen fluten den europäischen Markt bei erkennbar geringerer Vollzugsintensität. Der europäische Mittelstand wird kontrolliert, weil er greifbar ist. Der ursprüngliche Gedanke hinter der @EUCouncil war ein anderer: ein gemeinsamer Binnenmarkt, der Grenzen abbaut statt neue errichtet. Stattdessen: 27 nationale Compliance-Silos, die kleinen Unternehmen den Export systematisch verleiden. Was sich ändern müsste: 1. Eine zentrale EU-Registrierung statt 27 nationaler Alleingänge 2. Eine De-minimis-Regelung für Kleinversender 3. Konsequenter Vollzug gegenüber Drittstaatsversendern statt Belastung des europäischen Mittelstands Wir ziehen uns deshalb vorerst auf Deutschland und die Schweiz zurück, weil wir unsere Energie lieber in Produkte und Kunden investieren. Die aktuelle EU-Bürokratiearchitektur erleben viele Unternehmen nur noch als Belastung. Wir sind Unternehmer und keine Verpackungsjuristen, @vonderleyen , @DIHK_News, @MarkusFerber , @svenja_hahn , @nicolabeerfdp , @ANiebler Gerne reposten - es betrifft den Mittelstand generell.
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
Andy Hauser retweetledi
85 children. Eighty-five. That is how many kids are currently sitting in Islamic Republic jails facing a death sentence. Where are the "human rights" groups? Busy counting their funding? If you stay silent now, don't bother speaking ever again. #stopExectionsIran
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
Esta figura muestra datos de un gravímetro cuántico (que mide la fuerza de la gravedad con altísima precisión) instalado en el Zugspritze (la montaña más alta de Alemania). Aquí vemos cómo cambia la gravedad con el tiempo, debido a efectos muy interesantes. ¡Hilo!
Español
Andy Hauser retweetledi
Andy Hauser retweetledi
هنوز غم #مهدی_کبوک تموم نشده بود،
مادر دیگر عزیزی با بغض تماس گرفته و میگه تو کلانتری ۱۶ نفر(!!!) به پسر ۲۲ سالهاش تجاوز کردن! این دیگه فقط غم نیست. یه تاریکی کثیف و بیانتهاست که به جونمون افتاده. ولی خشم ما آتیش شده،
آتشی که نمیزاره فراموش کنیم و ساکت بمونیم!فقط انتقام!💔🕊🥀
فارسی
@World_Data_A Graphs are from 2020, with a 1.6 degree Celsius szenario, which we have easily passed.
There is nothing new about electrical vehicals or Windmills.
Countries with low CO2 like Germany is loosing its chemical plants to e.g. china with a four times higher CO2 in production.
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World history: The power of crossovers
Major technological transitions follow an X-shaped pattern, where new systems scale as old ones decline
History rarely moves in straight lines. It moves through crossovers, moments when one system replaces another.
From energy to industry, from transport to electrification, the same pattern repeats:
The rise of the new + the decline/destroy of the old
Today’s transition (energy system)
Data shows a clear structural shift:
- Renewables vs fossil fuels: Solar and wind rise sharply, and fossil electricity declines
- Electrification vs molecules: Electrons (electricity) replace fossil-based energy carriers
- Efficiency vs waste: Useful energy increases, and wasted energy declines
Source: @RockyMtnInst
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
A response to recent reporting in Germany, in service of clarity and accountability:
First, it’s important to be precise when it comes to critical infrastructure like Signal. Signal was not “hacked” — in that our encryption, infrastructure, and the integrity of the app’s code was not compromised.
However, sophisticated attackers have engaged in a harmful phishing campaign, posing as “Signal Support” by changing their profile display name and using social engineering to trick people into handing over their credentials — information that allowed these attackers to take over some targeted Signal accounts. This is something that plagues any mainstream messaging app once it reaches the scale of Signal, but we know how high the stakes are given the trust people place in us.
In the coming weeks, you’ll see us rolling out a number of changes to help hinder these kinds of attacks.
Because we don’t collect user data, what we know about these attacks comes from the victims of phishing. And from what victims have told us, the attacks followed a broad pattern: after tricking people into revealing their Signal credentials, attackers then used those credentials to take over their account and also frequently changed the associated phone number. Because such a change results in de-registering your Signal accounts, attackers prepared people for this by telling them that being de-registered was intended behavior, and that all they would need to do is “re-register,” or, create a new account. When they moved to create a new Signal account — one that was now decoupled from their hijacked account — the victims thought they were logging back in to their primary account. As a result, many didn't notice the takeover. The compromised accounts were then weaponized to target the victims' contact lists by posing as the owners of the account.
We understand the trust that people put in Signal, and how devastating this kind of social engineering can be. While it’s true that all messaging platforms are susceptible to scammers and phishing that betrays people’s trust and convinces them to “unlock the front door” where no backdoor exists, we are looking to do everything we can to help people avoid and detect such scams.
For the time being, please stay vigilant against phishing and account takeover attempts. Remember that no one from Signal Support will ever send you a message request or ask for your registration verification code or Signal PIN. For an added layer of protection, you can enable Registration Lock in your Signal Settings (Account -> Registration Lock).
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Andy Hauser retweetledi
A message to the 150+ journalists present at Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent press conferences in Europe.
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