2026-02-23
it’s like that
Corrado Nai in Asimov Press on agar and its use as a cell culture medium. Regarding how alternatives like bacterial cellulose are unsuitable as replacements due to not being as cheap or readily available as agar, it seems to me this is likely a result of agar being good enough suppressing demand. If agar prices were to rise significantly for whatever reason1, then there would actually be a reason to start mass-producing alternatives.
There is some very excited discussion around a piece by Alap Shah for Citrini Research about how AI automating white-collar work could induce a financial crisis2. Personally, although plausible, it seems to me that their scenario doesn’t really seem to make much sense. Because if everyone who is currently making over 100K gets fired and needs to find a 40K job as a result of firms being able to produce more goods with fewer people, then what that actually implies is that everyone who is making 40K should then be able to afford the lifestyle previously limited to those who had 100K jobs. Really there are just two issues: firstly that in a software-only singularity the supply of some goods may remain relatively fixed despite highly inelastic demand, and secondly that ensuing deflation will cause negative effects to stock prices. These all seem readily solvable, the first by investing more in manufacturing and housing now, the second by generating inflation through means such as basic income. What’s more implicitly stated is that a lot of these people making over 100K live in the United States and Europe, and a lot of the people making 40K work in factories in China, and will it primarily feel like the status of the latter is rising, or that the former is falling? It seems to me that status anxiety is really what is making most people worried about AI; people are really fighting for the right to keep grinding and performing.
Oz on the debate between Cass Sunstein and Becca Rothfeld on the aesthetic of liberalism. Personally it seems to me that they are both right: the aesthetics of liberalism include the iPhone, Amazon boxes, Uniqlo, and everything else which is streamlined for mass production and global consumption. But it also represents access and availability to what is complex and rare: fruits out of season, Etsy handcrafts, the food scene of New York, and being able to visit and see all the cathedrals of the world.
Sam Matey review of How the World Made the West, an argument that the Enlightenment has many fathers.
Austin Vernon on current progress in geothermal energy engineering economics.
John Hawks describes his theory on the mixed pedalism of humanity’s intermediate ancestors between historical great apes and humans, undergoing multiple waves of transition and interbreeding over time.
Perhaps as a result of a significant increase in experiment throughput due to wet lab automation.