biocompute

London, UK
Joined October 2020
I’ve wanted to do this for a decade. But I never did - I refuse to give any company my DNA. It is me. So this week I sequenced my genome entirely at home. Literally on my kitchen table. I never exposed my DNA sequence to the internet. Not at any point. I used a MinION to do the sequencing (it’s smaller + weighs less than an iPhone). I used open-source DNA models for the analysis (Evo2 and AlphaGenome) running locally on a DGX Spark and Mac Studio. I traced mechanisms behind my family’s multigenerational autoimmune conditions that no clinician has been able to understand. When I set out to do this I didn’t know if it would actually work. It does. Your genome is the most private data you will ever have. You probably shouldn’t let it leave your house.
I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!
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Replying to @experilearning
I think this is a brilliant analysis. I’m writing up a series of arguments along these lines that will explain what AI is good for & what it is not good for when it comes to science but I cannot fault the spirit in which this was written!
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The UK was home to some of the world's most important technoscientific discoveries. But the architecture through which we currently pursue research is broken. Lovelace is the blueprint for fixing it. Now is the time to make it a reality. @Lyan82 and @AnEmergentI
New from @instituteGC: a proposal for Lovelace Disruptive Invention Labs Is a better science possible, & how can we build it? 🏗️ Britain should pioneer a complementary model for research at the intersection of science & engineering – inverting core assumptions of modern public R&D
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"Britain created the modern world. "This country gave us so much of what not only we, but the world, values today." @matthewclifford reminds us that Britain has an exceptional history - so we can have an exceptional future. 🚀🇬🇧🚀
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Fortunately we do have this in biotech because we benefit massively from automation and miniaturization (cells are small!) - reductions in input costs, expensive labor costs, lab sw footage needed, etc, etc. Just need to have the will to build out and make the jump off the lab bench.
Nearly a year since my manifesto. Most people don't realize how little advanced technology actually helps. There is no magic bullet. We have no Moore's Law to save us in the metal making world.
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Welcome to SoTA Letters IV Writing Life From the Ground Up, Ola Wlodek @ola_wlodek Becoming Hardware Scientists, Calum Drysdale & James Baghurst @CalumDrysdale, @experilearning Introducing BAGEL for Protein Design, Jakub Lála @jakublala Replicating Five Peer-Reviewed Papers in Five Hours, Jessica Rumbelow @JessicaRumbelow Food Assembly Robots, Ivan Tregear @IvanTregear Extracting Chemical Data, Samuel Munday Reclaiming the British University, Adam Rochussen @AdamRochussen A Tale of Three Computers, Oliver Johnson Building AI within Government, Incubator for Artificial Intelligence @i_dot_ai The Alignment Project, AI Security Institute @AISecurityInst Read this edition here: sotaletters.substack.com/p/w…
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SoTA’s Human Augmentation Hackathon, 26-27th July We’re seeking new tools that foster human-AI symbiosis. What you build will expand our capabilities, rather than writing us out of the story. Success will be judged against the following criteria: - Is your demo better than alternative methods of achieving the same result? - Would your demo be worse without the AI component? - Would your demo be worse without a human? Read the latest letter to SoTA and register to join below
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The UK's Driving Test Booking System is broken. Join us to make a positive change.
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Tweet #1: @zdrks tells me I should Tweet! I am skeptical, but he is smart, young, and unschooled! I should listen!
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Jamesb retweeted
probably the most futuristic-feeling learning tool I've ever made. highlight as you read, the system generates high-quality flashcards about those highlights, and periodically asks if you want to review the suggestions. you can save, delete, edit, or improve them with AI
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Thrilled to have taken 2nd place at this fun event, hacking with the brilliant @experilearning. The pain of getting a UK drivers license is still here. There is a better way and we should change it.
The Rebooting State Capacity Hackathon is complete! SoTA’s developers, engineers, researchers and technologists worked alongside civil servants to build solutions to critical government challenges this past weekend. Kicking off with interactive sessions led by @PalantirTech and @PUBLIC_Team, there was a huge amount of energy dedicated to unlocking progress and leveraging tech to boost state capacity. Brilliant testimonials from frontline operators who tried out the prototypes, and now meetings being booked across UK government to discuss next steps… Congratulations to the winners: 1. Treasury Busters (£1,000) - Single source of truth to build and approve/reject business cases for major infrastructure projects in months, not decades. 2. DVSA Reimagined (£500) - Streamlined process for most young people’s first touchpoint with the government, getting their driving licenses. 3. A1 Voice (£250) - Smart voice-mailbox for NHS hospitals, managing the over 10,000 phone calls per day to clinical departments. And to the winners of the @BasisCapitalLtd Prize (another £1,000) for Outcompeting the Government: A1 Voice again, who managed to engage 17 departments across 6 trusts! Some honourable mentions: - SCYLLA - Remote seabed sensing for critical undersea infrastructure using backscatter - Hacknee - Collective intelligence for local council decision-making via prediction markets - Fighting Crime, One Query at a Time - Automated analysis and reporting to democratise access to crime data - Pranav - Visual odometry for mapping GPS-denied environments - Seaguard - Small-vessel maritime detection using computer vision Thanks to our partners for Rebooting State Capacity: @10DowningStreet, @i_dot_ai, @delian_ai, @BasisCapitalLtd, @PalantirTech, @elevenlabs, @PUBLIC_Team, and SCOPE, along with all the departments, agencies, and individual civil servants who provided challenges as a foundation for the hackathon.
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I'll start. SuperMemo is probably the oldest program I still use. I still keep a dedicated VM just so I can run this old Delphi UI. (it's essentially advanced anki, still haven't found a program better than it)
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New Anglofuturism episode! Calum and I interview Josef Chen, pioneer of restaurant robotics. We touch on: ➡️ Josef’s remarkable ascent from child-labourer potato peeler to founder of a cutting-edge robotics company ➡️ The workings of his automated salad bar in Bloomsbury ➡️ Britain’s tragic misallocation of what should be top engineering talent ➡️ Why specialist robots will outperform humanoid robots Links below. ⬇️
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Can someone help her get an internship this summer? She's looking for physics-related things. She's in her penultimate year of high school, and wants to do Physics at university. She's incredibly bright and does things like this on her own volition.
My little sister put together a hand-tuned acoustic levitator at home
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i collected some low-hanging fruit in the SRS ecosystem — solid list of ideas that you could build to move memory systems forward.
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Replying to @zdrks
our ability to solve hard problems has increased 1000x only the will, the courage to attempt them lags behind my friend
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A comment from Poincaré about Hilbert - Formalization captures the logic of deducing new facts and rules from existing ones, but doesn't say anything about where the initial starting set of facts/rules come from.
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Phenomenal response, from the founder of Deepseek, on moats
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Jamesb retweeted
Another podcast with @justinskycak, hosted by me and @experilearning. This time we focused on Justin's productivity and his approach to learning new things. He is predictably great on these topics. Lots of practical value here; I hope you enjoy. (link in next)
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Replying to @zdrks
A good heuristic for projects is the prompt distance - if the prompt distance between a blank page and your finished project is one, the LLM will one-shot it, you will learn nothing, and it can't be very interesting because it's too easy to find, pick something harder
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