mRNA vaccines. You can literally code a vaccine now. That's just mind blowing to me.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Especially impressive when you consider the etymology of the word "vaccine" and realize that a century ago vaccines were created by incubating them in a cow
I'm holding a small device in my hand that gives me access to all of humanity's knowledge.
Granted, I'm using it to dick around on Lemmy, but..
To be fair there's plenty of knowledge on Lemmy as of today... And porn, lots of porn.
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The technology behind it isn't new, but The Thought Emporium is a Youtuber who:
1: DIY-d a genetically modified virus to cure his own lactose intolerance (successfully)
2: Is currently working on a biological computer that runs on animal neurons.
3: Has livestreams where the viewers submit ideas (like making tomatoes spicy) and he designs DNA to accomplish it.
Also he helped shut down a scam health product that contained radioactive material which isn't particularly futuristic (actually it reminds me of the "radiation is good for you" craze in the early 20th century) but I wanted to mention it anyways.
Every time I think about doing something illegal or hear about people from only a few generations ago doing something fun but slightly illegal.
Then I think. There is no way you could do that now the police would use all the surveillance that is everywhere and if I got caught their wouldn't be a slap on the wrist and grow up. But it would be a serious issue for my future jobs and going to other countries.
Makes me think I'm in a futuristic movie. Just not one of the happy ending ones.
You are not wrong.
When I was in junior high a bunch of us bussed to school and had to stay for lunch. All the rooms were locked so if you forgot a book in your classroom or wanted to get something from the band room you had to ask the lunch lady for the keys. They would always tell their eyes and sigh and make you wait forever then give you the keys like fifteen minutes before lunch was over.
I day a bunch of us from grade 7-9 worked a plan. A kid asked for the keys to get their forgotten lunch from a classroom at the very start of lunch after complaining their stomach was upset.
They got the keys and said they were going to use the washroom first then get their lunch. The master classroom key was removed from the ring.
Another student was in the next stall in the bathroom closet to the entrance by the office left unlocked. We were allowed to come and go. They took the key under the stall and ran outside, jumped on a bike another kid had unlocked and biked to a convenience store that cut keys.
Key cutting was done and paid for. The key was returned to the ring and the ring was given back to the lunch lady. The kid got a hard time for being gone so long but insisted it was from an upset stomach and they had been in the bathroom all along.
Now, we had a key and could come and go as well pleased within the school. The grade 9s held the key, very few people knew about it, and it was passed down each year.
If you tried to pull that crap now you'd probably get caught on video or something.
This is great. I actually love these stories. Hope more people share.
One I heard recently (I lived in Sydney for a bit) was in the 80's you could just grab your mates and some beers and walk over the harbour bridge.
It was so easy.
The amount of bank robberies commited in Germany in the 70s and 80s with a toy gun and a bicycle as a getaway vehicle. Or how every European country had active domestic terror cells Just bombing Shit occasionally and you couldn't do fuck all about it.
Go even further back, before finger prints. You could just go around murdering people.
"Anyone seen who did it? No? Ah well, case closed."
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I listened to Mr. Krabs sing Billie Jean.
Meme technology is about to get SciFi.
I had to listen myself, for those curious.
There's a huge rabbit hole of this stuff if you dig deeper.
On one hand I like were using it for memes and shit posting
On the other, we're about to fake some incriminating evidence and just keep making dead musician albums forever because someone owns the rights to the voice.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/KRevRFvJv_M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Being trans always was such a cyberpunk concept to me. When I was a kid was like "people can change their gender? Cool"
We can say that... it was a sign lol.
When I was a kid there was only one openly trans person I would ever see. A man at the library who wore women's clothes (to put it in the terms we would have used then). They didn't try to be feminine beyond the clothing. Very occasionally some makeup. Legs were not shaved etc.
I was at the library on a weekly basis and saw this person all the time but it was just this one person. My mother told me not to stare or make fun of them and that they weren't hurting anyone and could dress how the pleased.
Now, some forty or more years later I frequently encounter non-binary people, trans people, etc. I follow the same method my mother taught me. They are just people living how they want.
It is interesting to be that William Gibson had trans characters in Johnny Mnemonic, for example, written in 1981. That's around when I would see that person at the library.
Every time I hear about World Coin scanning people's retina's for $50, driver monitoring tech inside new cars, or Amazon asking people to pay for things with palm prints I feel a bit like I'm living in the Minority Report. Does that count?
cyberpunk without any cool aesthetics.
The future isn't necessarily positive I guess
Driverless cars, VR and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we're living in the movie Total Recall.
Usually total recall reminds people of something else
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Everything going on in biology, but the existence of of Nana and Lulu especially. The first genetically altered humans are starting school pretty soon.
Say what now?
Google says the twins plus one other 1 yr younger child child were edited embryos using crispr to prevent them from getting HIV from their father(s). Which was and is unethical. They are supposedly doing fine.
Yeah, the dude just kind of went rogue. One of them was fully edited, while the other has a blend of original and altered cells, because surprise surprise China's maddest scientist did a bad job. If they're still doing well that's good, because it wasn't certain there would be no side effects.
I'm glad they and any kids they have will be around whenever we start discussing doing it properly. And yes, Dr. He Jiankhui went to jail.
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Data compression. Something about "making less data out of ... The same data" is really mind blowing, & the math is sick
It is not that complicated, to make a simple example with strings: AAAABBBABABAB takes up 13 spaces, but write (compress) it like 4A3B3AB take up 6 spaces compressing it more than 50%.
Now double it like AAAABBBABABABAAAABBBABABAB with 26 spaces and write it as 2(4A3B3AB) with 9 spaces it takes only 30% of the space.
Compression algorithms just look for those repetitive spaces.
Takes those letters and imagine them being colored pixels of a picture to compress a picture
Once you get into audio, images and video it revolves a lot around converting temporal and/or positional data into the frequency domain rather than simple token replacement.
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Turns out we can express most of proteins, some of the time, and then isolate them. This includes enzymes, when isolated these can do things like they naturally do but now in flask, but also they do things that aren't remotely natural but are useful for us. These things are pretty fragile usually so then some of these can be modified so that they are resistant to higher temperatures, detergents etc. This is not only the nerdy shit like advanced chemical synthesis - lots of dishwasher tablets and and washing powders contain enzymes that cut proteins into pieces (like subtilisin), so in some cosmic sense dishwasher digests your leftover food off plates
Enzymes are still proteins, and have all problems of proteins. Turns out, you can just take the most important part out of enzyme, make it, or something functionally similar out of completely synthetic parts, and it still works. Sure, it's not as active or selective, most of the time, but it's resistant to things that would absolutely shred proteins. This is called organocatalysis and it was subject of 2021 Nobel Prize
Sometimes you want to take an enzyme and make it not work. We also have a tool for that: first you have to get structure of that enzyme, or some receptor protein, and by looking how a small set of random molecules lodges in it you can make a very selective, very potent ligand, sculpting it atom by atom with no knowledge other than protein structure. If you have time and resources, this can be made to work for almost any protein (that can be crystallised)
Smartphones. The sheer fact that we're able to fit these cameras, computer chips, and everything else into these thin glass slabs is still mind-blowing to me.
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Decoding animal communication and interspecies communicstion with AI.
https://lemmy.world/c/digitalbioacoustics
(Which way should I be sharing community links on here?)
Should really be using the "! link", not URLs. While both work on mobile apps, on the web version the URL redirects to the community's instance.
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The idea of me typing a prompt and AI generating a piece of art is incredible.
The LANDSAT program. Not exactly new since it's been going for about 50 years, but it's still fascinating and maybe more relevant than ever with concerns about climate change.
We can get different types of data about a landscape from the different parts of the light spectrum. For example, telling coniferous and deciduous trees apart based on how they reflect light. Imagine echolocation on steroids, using light.
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Modern cell phones. It's crazy that I basically never need a computer now. My phone is so diversely useful. I spend more money on phones than computers now. It's also the best camera I've ever had! Phones are just so cool lol.
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AI generated images/voices and deepfakes. I really am worried about it becoming difficult to figure out what is real on the internet in the next 10 years.
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JWST
I walk into my house and start dictating to a speaker sphere what lights to turn on, what to set the thermostat to, and to turn on the tv. And she answers. Just like in sci fi movies.
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The Internet, but I'm old.
We have phones as powerful as computers in our hands when 20 years ago that was impossible. The exponential growth of computers and smartphones is mind-blowing. And the amount of technology that has bloomed from all of that
The DNS it's so mind blowing to think about how we are able to map so many domains to so many ip adresses so smart and stable
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Lithium polymer batteries that make advanced computing portable. We wouldn't be able to create multi function cell phones without the battery power and longevity of those batteries. Star trek tricorders are going to be the next big tech coming to the generation after Gen z.
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Voyager 2
Blows my mind every fucking time I read about it.
Props to the USA/NASA and their engineers for achieving something so long lasting with technology from ~50 years ago.
Vegan Feta cheese
CoViD mask usage
PV panel price reduction
IPCC cooperation and language
Gamified drone wars producing music videos
PrEP
Micro SD cards, 1TB that tiny, for $50
Someone else here mentioned the Steam Deck as a powerful handheld on the go, I want to do a similar approach.
Playing PS1 games with a Miyoo Mini, I swear my child's dream was to play PS1 games in a handheld sized similar to my Game Boy Advance from that time, now we can do it in even smaller devices! (And this one isn't even the tiniest lol).
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