Links for April

wolves, mold, WTO, chili dogs, intelligence, evolution, glue, taurine, typing, Hall, Meitner

dynomight.net/links-2

(1) Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi

You probably heard that Colossal Biosciences recently reconstructed the DNA of dire wolves and created live dire wolves, bringing them back from extinction. But have you heard that also they did no such thing and you’re a bunch of chumps?

Jeremy Austin, Director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA:

I think a lot of scientists are going to be scratching their heads, saying, “Look, you’ve got a white, gray wolf.” That’s not a dire wolf under any definition of a species ever…

Nic Rawlence of Otago University:

So what Colossal has produced is a grey wolf, but it has some dire wolf-like characteristics, like a larger skull and white fur.

They extracted fragments of dire wolf DNA from fossilized remains, and then found 20 gene edits they could do to make gray wolves look more like dire wolves. (Five of those were apparently needed just to make their fur white.) That is cool. It’s a step towards bringing a species back from extinction. But it’s not bringing a species back from extinction. Save your applause for someone who actually does that.

(2) Aspergillus niger (h/t Parsimony’s Panpharmacon )

Citric acid is what makes lemon juice taste like lemon juice. It’s used as a flavoring or preservative in lots of food. So when you drink your delicious lemon seltzer, it’s comforting to remember that what you’re tasting came from black mold.

Aspergillus niger is a mold […] found throughout the environment within soil and water, on vegetation, in fecal matter, on decomposing matter, and suspended in the air.

[…]

A. niger causes a disease known as “black mold” on certain fruits and vegetables such as grapes, apricots, onions, and peanuts, and is a common contaminant of food. […] A. niger is classified as generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in food production, although the microbe is capable of producing toxins that affect human health.

[…]

The production of citric acid (CA) is achieved by growing strains of A. niger in a nutrient rich medium that includes high concentrations of sugar and mineral salts and an acidic pH of 2.5-3.5. Many microorganisms produce CA, but Aspergillus niger produces more than 1 million metric tons of CA annually via a fungal fermentation process.

(It’s fine.)

(3) Landmark ruling on the WTO national security exception

Tariffs are in the news. These raise many questions, but what I want to know is: Aren’t there treaties? What about the treaties?

Well, The legal pretext for the American tariffs is that they are being done for “national security”. In some cases, this pretext seems quite thin. The US put equal tariffs on Mexico and Canada, supposedly in response to fentanyl coming over the border from those countries. But here are the amounts of fentanyl intercepted at the border from these countries in 2024:

Still, it doesn’t seem crazy to argue that you need to maintain some industrial base for the sake of national security. Recent history unfortunately shows that brutal land wars between rich countries still happen and still require enormous quantities of matériel. According to some sources, Russia is using around 10k shells per day in Ukraine, while after several years of ramping up production, the EU hopes to produce 5.5k shells per day in 2025 and the US 2.5k. In 1995, the US could make 22k shells per day.

Anyway, to make weapons, you need a long supporting supply chain. And in WWII, all sorts of peacetime manufacturing was converted to making weapons. And what about trucks? Or food? You need food for war, right? If you make exceptions for anything related to national security, that seems to make existing treaties meaningless.

Well here’s a story most people haven’t heard: In 2014, Russia started blocking the transit of various goods from Ukraine through Russia. Ukraine protested to the WTO that this violated the commitments Russia had made to join the WTO. Russia responded that they were doing this for national security, and so the WTO didn’t even have the authority to review their actions. Many countries filed opinions.

The WTO finally held in 2019 that it could review the decision, meaning countries can’t totally “self-judge” what counts as national security. But they also said Russia’s actions were fine.

Apparently, the the national security exception exists because the United States insisted on it during negotiations for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade back in 1947.

As far as I can tell, the only countries that have filed WTO complaints against the US for the recent tariffs are Canada and China.

(4) In 1982, John Mellencamp released Jack & Diane.

A little ditty ‘bout Jack & Diane
Two American kids growing up in the heart land
Jack, he’s gonna be a football star
Diane’s debutante, back seat of Jacky’s car
Suckin’ on chili dog outside the Tastee Freez

And in 2021 Tom McGovern presented a version with these lyrics.

A little ditty ‘bout Jack & Diane
Two American kids growing up in the heart land
Jack, he’s gonna be a football star
Diane’s debutante, back seat of Jacky’s car
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog
Suckin’ on chili dog

Some people noticed that as early as 2012, Clownvis Presley had been performing a version of this song with most of the lyrics chili-dogged. In the comments, Tom says:

I’ve gotten a handful of comments blaming me for stealing this bit from a performer named Clownvis. I hadn’t even known who he was before I shared this video, it gained traction, and the accusatory comments started coming in.

[…]

I would never, EVER intentionally steal another artist’s bit. Rather than leaving more angry comments, I ask you to consider that two creators can arrive at similar (dumb) ideas independently.

Really? I won’t say it’s impossible, but that’s… quite a coincidence.

I think this kind of borrowing could happen by accident. Maybe someone saw Clownvis in 2012. And they repeated it to Tom at a party in 2017 without attribution. And then Tom forgot hearing it, but the idea lurked somewhere in his brain to be “discovered” anew. I follow a lot of blogs, and I’m constantly paranoid that I might be unintentionally stealing things.

(5) Capital, AGI, and human ambition and The Intelligence Curse

The resource curse is the observation that countries with lots of natural resources often end up paradoxically poor. Say you live in a small poor country with lots of diamonds, and say you want money. Then you can do this:

1. Get a bunch of guys with guns.

2. Go to the capital and shoot anyone who doesn’t do what you say.

3. Go to the diamond mines and shoot anyone who doesn’t do what you say.

4. Take the diamonds from the mines, sell them.

5. Use the money to buy more guys with guns, leave the rest of the country to rot.

That’s checkmate. Everyone else is too immiserated to do anything. You have all the money and power, forever.

On the other hand, take a country that’s rich because it has a modern diversified economy. If you send guys with guns to take over Apple and Goldman Sachs and kill everyone else, you will soon find that Apple and Goldman Sachs aren’t worth very much.

So maybe that is why governments are relatively friendly to their populations. Not because of democracy, but because you can’t steal the money without strangling the money printer.

The idea advanced in these posts is that maybe AI will be like oil or diamonds: Maybe it will create incredible amounts of wealth, but do so in a way that doesn’t require the cooperation of a large educated workforce. If so, then power and wealth may end up in the hands of a small number of people (entities?) who have little incentive to use them for the common good.

But hey, Norway has lots of oil.

(6) The Selfish Machine (h/t Steven Pinker)

This post argues that AI by default has no reason to try to take over the world. Why would it? It has no reason to do anything other than what it’s programmed to do. Danger only arises if AI is allowed to “evolve”. If that happens then it would—almost by definition—make the AI aggressive and expansionary and “grabby”.

I find this insightful and helpful. But I find myself more worried, not less. How is “evolution” different from “recursive self-improvement”? It seems like there will be strong incentives to allow recursive self-improvement. If even a little “evolution” accidentally creeps in, won’t it get amplified?

(7) Which adhesive should I use?

As a fan of redneck engineering and “stuff with high ROI”, I feel like this chart is an underrated triumph of civilization:

(That’s just a small part.) I used to have a mental model where “glue is easy but weak”. Glue is strong. But you must use the right kind, and you must follow the instructions, because atoms are weird and the universe has a lot of detail. For example, wood glue is insanely strong and can fix approximately all broken wooden things, but you must use a clamp, and you must glue long grain to long grain.

(8) Do taurine and glycine provide answers to the mammalian gallbladder and kidney mysteries?

This is my kind of blog-post. Ultra obscure question, tangled and triple-caveated discussion, no clear resolution. If writing reflected real life, this is what 90% of science blogging would look like.

(9) Dynomight dangerous typing app

Sometimes, when I have an idea for a post, I want to write a rapid prototype to sort of see what it looks like, expose weaknesses in my argument, etc. But I have perfectionist tendencies. (That sentence was re-written 19 times.) These make it hard to write quickly.

So—this is embarrassing to admit—I sometimes resort to using a webpage where if you ever stop typing for more than a few seconds, everything is permanently deleted. This is very effective. Make an outline, set the app for 15 minutes, and viola: Prototype done.

But I recently wondered what happens to the text I type. The page has no privacy policy and the code is unintelligible. So I thought: Why don’t I ask an AI to create my own better version?

The result is here. It has a pleasing brutalist design, and definitely doesn’t steal your precious gibberish typing. This took like 5 minutes.

Obviously, I’ve seen many people show off similar things before. But I didn’t really appreciate it before trying it myself. So if you haven’t done so, I encourage you to try something similar. You need no programming skills, just ask for a “single file of HTML+CSS+Javascript” doing whatever you want, paste the code in a file named i♡dynomight.html and then open it in a web browser.

Anyway. LLMs are text models. So how do you use them to create text? Do you have them write for you? No! Boring. What you do is you train them to follow instructions and write code and then ask for a program to manipulate your ape-brain so you’ll keep physically hitting keys on your keyboard. There’s some kind of lesson here.

(Picture courtesy of The BS Detector)

(10)

I was actually so impressed by that AI-generated app that I went and bought a Google Play card with cash so I could subscribe to Gemini without linking my identity/banking details/etc. But when I added it, Google said “we need more information” and demanded pictures of the physical card and purchase receipt. And when I sent those, Google waited several days, and then said, “Thanks for doing everything we asked, according to our systems, something is wrong, go fuck yourself.” I guess they’re keeping my $25.

(11) Kevin Hall is retiring from the NIH

Kevin Hall has worked at the NIH for 21 years. He was first author on what I consider possibly the best ever nutrition study, published in 2019. This found that ultra-processed food causes weight gain even when energy density and macronutrients are matched. Since then, he’s continued to work on the subject and I’ve eagerly awaited the results.

Hall is a real scientist who does real science, which means sometimes getting results that don’t fit with your preconceptions. In recent work, Hall tested if ultra-processed milkshakes might cause addiction through a dopamine response. Surprisingly, they did not.

Because this didn’t support the new Secretary of Health and Human Services’ theories about addiction and unprocessed food, he was apparently barred from speaking with reporters and worried that officials might soon interfere with his experiments. If he resigned later, he would lose health insurance for his family, so he decided to accept early retirement now. Not encouraging.

(12) Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was born in 1878 in Vienna. She was the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna. After this, she moved to Germany and began a long collaboration with Otto Hahn. She later became the first female professor of physics at the University of Berlin. Following the Nazis rise to power, she fled to Sweden, but continued to collaborate with Hahn and in 1939 was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission.

Hahn won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1944, without Meitner. This is now widely considered one of the Nobel committee’s biggest mistakes. Many people offer tidy narratives: Sexism, antisemitism, etc. After the records were made public 50 years later, it appears to have been a mixture of many things, summarized as, “disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste”.

Meitner famously refused to have anything to do with the making of the atomic bomb.

What I find cool is: 1939 - 1878 = 61. She was 61.