JasperGo

AIs Are Ex­pert-Level at Many Virol­ogy Skills

• JasperGo 4 Apr 2024 9:40 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ran­dom ad­ver­sar­ial thresh­old search en­ables au­to­mated DNA screening

  Great to see the preprint! Kevin Esvelt also explains the approach in his EAG Boston 2023 talk (starting around 20min):

• JasperGo 3 Apr 2024 11:47 UTC

  2 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: JasperGo’s Quick takes

  No wonder Bulby is unhappy; they’re missing a good chunk of their head!

  Thanks for digging into the repo

• JasperGo 3 Apr 2024 10:11 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: JasperGo’s Quick takes

  Does somebody have the image file of the sensitive, sentient lightbulb that visited the forum dropdown menu two days ago?

  

• JasperGo 26 Mar 2024 8:36 UTC

  43 points

  13 ∶ 4

  on: An­nounce­ment on the fu­ture of Wytham Abbey

  That’s really sad to hear! Given the number of events hosted there and the renting costs of alternative venues, it seemed like a solid investment (while also being much more picturesque, of course). So, I’m also hoping for a post-mortem with more details.

• JasperGo 13 Mar 2024 19:31 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: Fo­cus on broad (and pas­sive) defense tech­nolo­gies for biosecurity

  I’m personally not that worried about substitution risks. Roughly: The deterrence aspect is strongest for low-resource threat actors and—from a tail-risk perspective—bio is probably the most dangerous thing they can utilize, with that pesky self-replication and whatnot.

• JasperGo 7 Sep 2023 9:11 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should UV sta­bil­ity of plas­tics be a con­cern for far-UVC adop­tion?

  Hi Sean,

  Thanks for the write-up and opening the discussion. I agree that material degradation is something that should be thoroughly investigated. Caveat: I’m not a polymer engineer and have read/​seen a few papers/​talks on the topic, but I’m by no means deeply familiar with all the material types, etc.

  Re. the Boeing study (working link, btw): The study used fairly low doses per disinfection cycle but simulated 25 years of service, totalling >108 J/​cm² of far-UV exposure. Still just about a third of the bus study exposure, but already in the dose range where the bus study measured only marginal effects of additional far-UV on colour or mechanical properties.

  Still, I don’t find myself overly worried (but again, not an expert and I also don’t have regulator-brain, so interpret this accordingly).

  Far-UV doesn’t penetrate deeply and will likely not affect the mechanical properties of solid plastic objects. The bus study found effects in thin sheets of fibre-reinforced materials (in some directions), and I don’t doubt that, but in what situations is a 10% decrease in failure strength of thin polymer layers that relevant for consumers or regulators? I genuinely don’t know, and there might be specific circumstances in which parts must be replaced more frequently, or the plastic type needs to be switched, but I don’t think this will matter a lot in most settings. E.g., Boeing found “no adverse impact on the mechanical properties of thermoplastic and textile materials” in the airplane setting at the dose where the bus study already saw decreased tensile strength. I’m very interested in hearing counterexamples, though!

  But ultimately, both Boeing and the bus study have only tested the materials present in those surroundings. Looking around in my office or the office of friends, I’m not sure how many of the materials overlap. There’s some testing behind closed doors from lamp manufacturers, but no public database of common materials and the impact of far-UV on them. We eventually want and need such a database to make the far-UV implementation as pain- and seamless as possible for building operators, etc., but I’m not sure how much the average office worker or regulator cares if the back cover of their monitors starts yellowing faster (like you said, open question: Market research opportunity!).

  And in the beachhead markets for far-UV (long-term care homes, ICUs), the cost–benefit calculus is favouring far-UV so much that a premium for far-UV coatings will happily be paid if yellowing is even something they care about. And the plethora of single-use plastics are not affected.

• JasperGo 4 Aug 2023 9:52 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Do you know Biose­cu­rity Level 3 (BSL-3) Ex­perts?

  While I moved away from the wetlab during my virology PhD and dodged the BSL-3 bullet, many of my colleagues and PIs have or had their fair share of experience. Feel free to PM me!

• JasperGo 3 Aug 2023 16:24 UTC

  14 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jmd’s comment on: Thoughts on far-UVC af­ter work­ing in the field for 8 months

  That’s likely an even smaller issue. Far-UV inactivates the transient microbiome on the upper skin surface but not in the pores where the majority of the bacteria live. It’s also strictly line of sight and the skin is pretty wrinkly and only small areas (e.g., back of the hands) are exposed and you constantly re-seed your microbiome from other parts of the body. There’s prelim data from hairless mice which found no changes to the microbiome.

• JasperGo 3 Aug 2023 8:43 UTC

  2 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Thoughts on far-UVC af­ter work­ing in the field for 8 months

  Everything touched by the immune system is complicated, agree. But I strongly suspect the net balance will be highly positive, still:

  a) As you wrote, seasonal respiratory disease is a massive problem, in the order of trillions of dollars of health and economic damage every year

  b) There is some cross-reactivity, yes, but the tail events will be too different from what we usually have. Frequent common-cold exposure will not be the thing that protects us from a GCBR. Neither will the original antigenic sin play a role, as that usually requires quite closely related strains to matter. Overall, your immune system will be a bit less-well prepared for this particular pathogen family that you haven’t encountered in a while, but that’s also the case for any other sufficiently different pathogen.

• JasperGo 1 Aug 2023 8:13 UTC

  18 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Thoughts on far-UVC af­ter work­ing in the field for 8 months

  Re. cost reductions: That’s a bit tricky. With the current lamp tech (KrCl excimer lamps), 20x is not on the table. Their cost floor is closer to ¹⁄₃ of the current cost. Next-gen (read: solid-state) emitters can achieve 20x in principle but are often still bottlenecked by fundamental academic research; we’re eventually talking about ~5–10 years and 10s to 100s of M of $ to get to fab scale. There are two startups around a different promising approach that might be a bit faster but will require the same money.

  For any technologies that have a market, $100M of investment are doable, but far-UV faces a bit of a circular problem: Missing data (safety/​effectiveness) → No official recommendations → No market → No emitter R&D and high product prices → Insufficient deployment that limits real-world data. There are now some market-shaping initiatives that will hopefully ameliorate this dynamic so that R&D money flows naturally. But as Max wrote, OP will hopefully also address some of those points after their RFI.

  Re. IAQ: The ozone/​VOC data are still somewhat contested and in flux, so it remains to be seen what the far-UV impact on real-world IAQ will actually be. But you’re generally right; it’s best to view the IAQ interventions holistically. Ventilation/​filtration can complement far-UV, and the best deployment scheme will depend on the environment. But I still don’t worry too much about cost/​flexibility limitations, as most environments in which far-UV would be first installed already have decent air handling systems (hospitals, airports, etc.)

• JasperGo 24 Jul 2023 5:49 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: JasperGo’s Quick takes

  Thanks, that would be great!

• JasperGo 21 Jul 2023 8:21 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: Ju­lia_Wise’s Shortform

  Oh, I love this. Are there more examples of beautiful poems with some sort of EA-connection?

  Howl is often mentioned, of course, but I’d really love some moving lines on the far future or animals or whatnot.

• JasperGo 21 Jul 2023 8:10 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: JasperGo’s Quick takes

  I’d really like to see a detailed write-up or resource collection on market-shaping. Approaches, best practices, etc. At least in biosecurity, more and more interventions are at a stage where the technical feasibility is more or less known (e.g., PPE, far-UVC), and the major bottlenecks can only really be solved by shaping the underlying market.

JasperGo’s Quick takes

• JasperGo 20 Jul 2023 8:12 UTC

  8 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: An EA’s Guide to Visit­ing New York City

  Great guide; thanks for the write-up! My only gripe is that you posted it a month too late, and I had to plan my visit without it. Still loved it and will come back next year :)

  Generally, more groups should do such guides. Visiting big cities with a bunch of EAs is, imho, just great fun!

• JasperGo 11 May 2023 7:04 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Max Görlitz’s comment on: MaxG’s Shortform

  I’m not sure whether, for example, Arcadia fits that bill of no-strings-attached funding given their research agenda on non-model organisms. But it’s definitely a new science org. Something like Hypothesis Fund (https://​​www.hypothesisfund.org/​​) maybe.
  I’d recommend having a look at the Overedge Catalogue (https://​​arbesman.net/​​overedge/​​)

• JasperGo 3 Feb 2023 9:05 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Ger­many Meetup for EAG Bay Area attendees

  I think you meant 12pm to 4:30pm. The calendar event currently starts at midnight.

• JasperGo 22 Sep 2022 7:40 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sum­ma­riz­ing the com­ments on William MacAskill’s NYT opinion piece on longtermism

  I’m not sure if I expected more positive comments. Some of the comments certainly disagree heavily (“ivory tower BS”, “future people don’t matter”), but most of the skeptical clusters don’t seem to fundamentally disagree with longtermism. Maybe learned helplessness (or Cheems mindset, sure), or something akin to a filter bubble where you learn about global problems but are not exposed to the (admittedly) fringe approaches to solving them. The climate movement is, for example, very good at spreading doom despite a non-catastrophic outlook. I wonder how much future optimism/​progress propaganda à la OWID would help to move the opinion of young, liberal, academic people

• JasperGo 2 Sep 2022 8:07 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How To Prevent Wars

  Hey Trev, certainly an important topic! However, I downvoted because the post doesn’t meet the standards I’d like to see from a post.

  • Your core argument and claims are packed into fluff which distracted me and made it harder for me to follow.

  • You make a lot of (imho) insubstantial claims without backing them up or citing and engaging with any previously published research on that (not very small) field: “wars are sparked when people follow egoistic/​convenient motives”, the whole EvoPsych claims, etc.

  • The conclusions seem vague/​not actionable/​wrong: “Promote atheism”, “realise that status exists”, “shame soldiers”.

  I’d recommend reading more EA forum posts and familiarising yourself with the style of posts that people would like to read before (re)posting tangentially related essays.