Jason Li

Torrential rain struck just as bride to be Isobel Roe stepped from her car, forcing wedding guests to form an umbrella convoy in dramatic scenes, but she says it was perfect. Read more on this Qweekend piece here: bit.ly/4pV1WsE

Why won't GPU manufacturers give us the VRAM we want? @intel can you please just make an Arc A770 with 80gb of VRAM? It can't be that hard. I swear I'll buy 8 of them. And @AMD too, why are you holding out on us?

A mind-blowing paper has come out today in @Nature In 2016, JC Venter Institute scientists trimmed a bacterial genome to its barest minimum required for life to synthesize what they called a "minimal genome" (science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…). Today, a group of scientists from Indiana University reports how that minimal genome evolved over 2000 generations in comparison to the non-minimal genome. The authors found that even when you reduce a bacterial genome to its absolute minimum where every nucleotide matters, the genome undergoes mutational events generation after generation as much as the non-minimal genome. One simply cannot stop the evolution. Just over 300 days of evolution (equivalent to 40,000 years in humans) the minimal cell has gained everything it lacked in fitness on day one in comparison to the non-minimal cell. When comparing the evolved traits between the minimal and non-minimal cells, the scientists found something striking. The evolutionary process increased the cell size of non-minimal cells but not that of the minimal cell. But that is not the striking part. The scientists were able to identify the key mutation that resulted in cell size evolution. And it turned out that the mutation that helped the non-minimal cells to grow bigger is the same that helped the minimal cells to stay smaller. Growing bigger had a survival advantage for non-minimal cells and not growing bigger had a survival advantage for minimal cells. So, the mutation had a context-dependent effect. This just demonstrates that the evolutionary effects on traits have no absolute direction. All that matter is what is beneficial for the organism's survival. The conclusion of the paper is metaphorically a quote from the Jurassic Park movie: “Listen, if there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us is that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but . . . life finds a way". (scienmag.com/artificial-cel…) nature.com/articles/s4158…

Exploring the MIT Mathematics and EECS Curriculum Using Large Language Models Presents a comprehensive dataset of 4,550 questions and solutions from all MIT EECS courses required for obtaining a degree arxiv.org/abs/2306.08997