Progress links and tweets, 2022-10-05

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Announcements

• It’s time to build: Arnold Ventures is hiring a “VP of Infrastructure” to focus on “the drivers of supply-side bottlenecks”

• The World’s Fair Company has launched their poster series, Stories of Our Future (prints available!) (via @camwiese)

• Meta (Facebook) AI announces text-to-video. A bit rough but impressive (@MetaAI)

Links

• Patrick Collison interviewed by Ezra Klein (via @tylercowen)

• Charles Mann interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel (via @dwarkesh_sp)

• 10 years ago, it cost $10k to sequence a human genome. Illumina’s new machine promises $200 (via @emilylmullin)

• “We had to order a larger CT scanner when it was deemed unacceptable to send patients to the zoo” (Marginal Revolution)

Quotes

• “Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it… men will not tear rocks from their foundations by means of steam, and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass?” Byron, 1822

• Margaret Sanger’s incredible resilience and commitment to the cause of birth control

• Quote quiz: who lavished this praise on “American efficiency”?

Queries

• What are examples of inventions/​discoveries that were made by brute force search? (@_brianpotter)

• What are examples of modern monuments of progress? (@MoritzW42)

Retweets

• Technology as a whole is liberating and often enchanting (@atrembath)

• Davis Kedrosky thread on Sir E. A. Wrigley, legendary British demographer and economic historian (@dkedrosky)

[ChristianKl]

10 years ago, it cost $10k to sequence a human genome. Illumina’s new machine promises $200 (via @emilylmullin)

One interesting quote from the article:

While the San Diego-based company currently dominates the marketplace, some of the patents protecting its technology expire this year, opening the door for more competition. Ultima Genomics of Newark, California, emerged from stealth mode earlier this year promising a $100 genome with its new sequencing machine, which it will begin selling in 2023. Meanwhile, a Chinese company, MGI, began selling its sequencers in the United States this summer.

From another article:

Illumina shares fell 5% over the two days after the announcement, suggesting investors remain pessimistic about the company’s outlook amid its troubles with Grail. The stock has dropped 50% this year.

This looks like it might answer Gwern’s question from 2018:

This trend need not peter out, as the oncoming datasets keep getting more enormous; consumer DTC extrapolating from announced sales numbers has reached staggering numbers and potentially into the hundreds of millions, and there are various announcements like the UKBB aiming for 5 million whole-genomes, which would’ve been bonkers even a few years ago. (Why now? Prices have fallen enough. Perhaps an enterprising journalist could dig into why Illumina could keep WGS prices so high for so long…)

Illumina used patents to defy the god of the straight lines and now it seems their newly announced machine likely can’t match the price of startups.