Zachary Kurtz

Great energy tonight! Got to talk about lab automation, recent advances in bio foundation models and parenting in with some new and familiar faces. Biotech and AI is alive and well in NYC. Hope to make this a recurring meetup at @fractaltechnyc

@larryfink_jr @nabeelqu We need a document format that’s much more portable than pdf

@nabeelqu what should we have chosen instead of pdf?

Amusing how much the knowledge economy is being held back right now because we settled on crappy legacy formats like .ppt, .xls, .pdf, .docx and so on

@nanogenomic 🙌

@ledflyd And it was the best bin!

Extremely excited to announce LigandForge 🧬⚡ Generate high-quality peptides at over 10,000x - 1M the speed of state-of-the-art methods like Bindcraft and Boltzgen. Predict binding affinity with 83% correlation to experimental binding data. 150 protein targets benchmarked.

@adencle You might have something here

california is a paradise, which is the only reason it's not one; the ppl here haven't suffered enough. i propose we designate 30 days/yr for a geoengineered winter in which we learn to face the elements, shovel our neighbors' sidewalks, & rediscover the true meaning of Christmas

@owl_posting Best we can do is torrential rain and backed up sewers

coming to san francisco and seeing the ridiculous abundance of good weather has radicalized me. we need to terraform the new york metropolitan area. it can be done. what happened during the winter of 2025 can never be allowed to happen again

@AnthonyCastrio Evolution is incredible

TIL that humans are among the very top mammals for basketball. While we aren't the best sprinters, our slow-twitch muscles and unique ability to sweat allow us to drain baskets. Out of all players currently in the NBA, at least 99% are human.

@AnthonyCastrio @justalexoki As a follow up, what is the probability that at least two of them share a birthday?

@justalexoki If you showed up to a party and found out that everyone there was chosen as a random sample of 100 of your followers, would you enjoy that party?

30k followers special, ask me (my opinion on) anything! this might be your only chance to get a serious answer out of me

@helen_mrow @aakashgupta @zerohedge It's all engagement farming since 2022

A lot of the posts are insane larp and went from real people seeking help for actual problems that are nuanced to completely one sided insane abusive fanfic creative writing to elicit a response from the audience. The type of person who went to reddit for help are also going to be increasingly outliers. Usually people asking have already either gone to therapy or have asked their partner to and theyre at the end of their rope and its not posts like my s/o doesnt make the bed in the morning but i have to leave first, what do? Its tail end problematic behavior which in most cases is fanfic anyway.

50% of all relationship advice on Reddit is “leave.” 15 years of data, 52 million comments, and the trend line only goes one direction. A researcher filtered r/relationship_advice down to 1,166,592 quality comments and tracked what people actually recommend. In 2010, “End Relationship” sat around 30%. By 2025, it’s approaching 50%. “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%. Every category that requires patience lost ground every single year. The one category growing faster than “leave” is “Seek Therapy,” which went from 1% to 6%. The subreddit is slowly learning to say “this is above my pay grade.” Train a model on this dataset and it would absolutely tell people to break up. The training data is 50% “leave” and climbing. The model wouldn’t be broken. It would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe about your relationship. A 50% prior that you should leave, a 14% prior that you should talk about it, and a 6% prior that you need a professional. That’s not LLM psychosis. That’s the median human opinion on your relationship, backed by the largest advice dataset ever assembled.

@owl_posting @great_are_tits No, that was pretty clear 🤷‍♂️

@great_are_tits unfortunately i think i explained myself badly, it is an article about biosecurity

Wake up babe the owl will be splaining

Yes even having gone through that training myself, I’m excited about the possibility of scaling intelligence in ways that cause science to flourish without gatekeepers. It’s going to look like a lot more like these n=1 tinkering projects then the industrial scale science we’re used to (which will still leverage AI of course). Point is there is a need for both modalities since the tinkerers may not be done with enough rigor to make breakthroughs

You missed the point. Previously, this sort of research required extreme specialization following a long education. Previously, the number of people available to do such research was tiny and the demand for such research, not just in one niche in medicine but throughout medicine and throughout thousands of other fields, was utterly impossible to approach. Now, things are becoming quite different.

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

@perrymetzger @PatrickHeizer You missed the point I think - medicine is hard because the evidence provided in the article isn’t strong enough to conclusively say anything about the efficacy or replicability of the approach.

I have rarely seen a point since thoroughly missed. It’s as though someone said “I don’t see why this computer thing you have built is interesting. We have been calculating ballistics tables using mechanical calculators for a long time. It’s not very hard, and it’s not like you really need that many sets of ballistics tables”, or “we have had ways to pump water out of mines before, and so this steam engine thing is, at best, a bit of a mechanical curiosity.” Even if we accepted your (absurd) claim about what the important part is, it would still have missed the point; the dog is, after all, alive, no thanks to you and a treatment you didn’t provide for this animal in spite of saying it’s “easy”, and so it’s human friend went off and did it on his own because your colleagues couldn’t be bothered to help it.

@TylerAlterman Happens in midtown after every Rangers game

Today’s the day when loud people wearing green pour into Manhattan from Jersey and the suburbs, getting rowdy outside of “Irish pubs.” I like the way it changes the city’s energy away from pretensions of sophistication for a fleeting moment

@Aizkmusic Not in school but on the bus too school. Plus all the sequels and the whole Ender’s shadow series

Did people not read Enders Game in school?

@davidshimel @danielgolliher Such a great space. Studied for many grad school exams there

Earlier today I took the final exam for @danielgolliher 's liberal arts class in the magisterial Rose Reading Room at the NYPL. I never knew that I could experience ~*exam euphoria*~ but Daniel made it possible! Definitely take his class.

@LarryPanozzo @_kaitodev @LeonardVolner @karpathy Moving piles of sand back and forth to qualify for UBI

@_kaitodev @LeonardVolner @karpathy So glad AI has freed us to **checks notes** do far more manual labor.

5 minutes ago, @karpathy just dropped karpathy/jobs! he scraped every job in the US economy (342 occupations from BLS), scored each one's AI exposure 0-10 using an LLM, and visualized it as a treemap. if your whole job happens on a screen you're cooked. average score across all jobs is 5.3/10. software devs: 8-9. roofers: 0-1. medical transcriptionists: 10/10 💀 karpathy.ai/jobs

@LexerLux Cause they all had terminal cancer?

A rare type of Redditor that is unfortunately long extinct today.

We are looking for more hiring partners to join our internship program this semester! Our students are engineers, CS majors, PMs, designers, data scientists, and consultants who use frontier AI tools every day. DM me or message me here if your company is interested.

@KelseyTuoc Sure just solve the free rider problem once and for all

I doubt that anyone I know steals from Whole Foods, but the milieu that the article depicted, where it's normal for perfectly well-off people to steal things because why not, was really upsetting to read about, so I actually want to try to earnestly explain why you shouldn't do this just in case there's someone out there who has never had it explained to them. When a business opens - or really, as soon as a business starts making plans to open - a defining question for the business is how it will collect payment for the goods or services it provides. If you trust the people you sell to, you can be pretty relaxed about this; send people an invoice, most of them will pay it on time, any who don't will pay it a bit late. You have to think about convenience and mistakes but not about people trying to cheat you. This saves you so, so much defensive planning to make sure you get paid. It's so much easier. But if you're selling to the general public, you do have to think about people trying to cheat you. You have to structure the physical store so that it's hard for them to steal. You have to not carry some items that you'd like to sell, because they'd also be attractive targets to steal. If people swap price tags between items, you can't use stickers. If people put things on in the dressing room and wear them out, you need to pay someone a full time salary to monitor the dressing room. The world that we all live in is much poorer than the world we'd live in if people didn't steal. The stores don't carry things that they could carry if people didn't steal. They don't use pricing and inventory systems that would be way easier and more convenient if people didn't steal. But it could be much worse! If I walk down to my local Whole Foods today, items on the shelves won't be locked behind sheafs of plastic - that is only worth it when the background rate of stealing is much higher than it is at my local Whole Foods. When more people steal, businesses have to further intensify security, or go out of business. When you shoplift, you directly and unambiguously impoverish your community. You make prices higher for everybody else, you make stores less usable for everybody else, or you make businesses not viable that would otherwise be viable. The direct impact each time is small, but it's a lot larger than the direct impact of taking some trash out of the trash can to throw on the ground, or pouring just a tiny bit of poison into your local river, and most people have a deep, instinctive abhorrence of antisocially wrecking your community like that. So don't steal. The other thing that it seems possible some people might not understand is that while you might have a social circle that is incredibly nihilistic and cynical and thinks that everybody steals, in fact this is not true. Most people do not steal. Most people, if they learn that you steal, will lose more respect for you than you had to lose. I don't know anyone who has shoplifted except 'as a kid/teenager'. It is not always the case that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished but even before you bring the legal system into it, the risk-reward tradeoff of having everybody you know know that you steal things sometimes is absolutely terrible. Who would hire someone who steals things? Who would trust them around a vulnerable person? Who would want to live in a society with someone who will delightedly and routinely wreck it for the slightest personal benefit? I hope that "Gina" turns her life around. I hope that Gina realizes that she needs to. And if you have been told that it's just a corporation or that having ethics is lame or that if you think about it, other bad things happen too, like wage theft, so that means stealing is okay, I hope you really, actually, think about whether you'd accept any of those as excuses for anything else.

@thisischristina Need a mobile version!

What a time to be alive americanwetware.com/gel_invaders

@danielgolliher @united Enforcement of loud audio is always iffy

My new floor for an airline is: (1) banning/enforcing against a lack of headphones, and (2) Starlink internet. @united is looking great! (Screenshot below from their contract of carriage). This is a great step forward in policing anti-social behavior and improving the commons.