Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

I’m a molecular biologist, but I’m into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it’s most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.

Edit: typo.

Yes!

Oh. Ok then, we don’t have them in the UK in the city where I live.

Was it really AI powered? I’ve never used one (we’ve not had them in the UK) so I’m genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.

Does uni count? I synthesised aspirin.

Does biochemistry count? I exponentially copied very specifically selected short fragments of DNA. From 1 to up to 1,099,511,627,776 copies in just 2 hours. I’ve also very specifically cut and glued together DNA strands.

And at home, I just extracted juice from red cabbage and played with changing its colour by adding lemon juice or baking soda.

Hehe, what gives me a “high” after a workout is looking at the recording of my heart rate and seeing the peaks and valleys. I do HIIT so there’s a lot of them.

Yes. I can’t think of a better use for them than saving a life (or hopefully lives) at the time when not only they’re not going to be useful to me, but there will actually be no me to even be able to make use of them.

And I live a healthy life, so hopefully some of them might be useful whether I die of old age or any other cause (except falling into a meat grinder of course, then all this gym going and veg eating will be in vein).

Also, fingers crossed they’ll find a dope body who’s my HLA match and will need a brain transplant 🤞

It’s not universal though. I’ve been regularly doing 60-minute cardio workouts for the last 10 years or so. Not once did I experience the “runner’s high”. I’m pretty sure I’m an outlier though.

Also, because of increased healthy lifestyle awareness, we are actually ageing slower than we used to. The clue is in the cigarette the top cartoon smokes. Today we smoke less, we exercise more, we use more sunscreen and we eat healthier, all allowing our bodies to produce more firm collagen in less damaged skin cells.

Molecular biology. 4 digits.

I honestly have no idea what your first paragraph is about. It might as well be in Chinese.

I’m a molecular biologist. I was recently surprised when I told someone that RNA is a thing that all living thing are brimming with. He thought that RNA was something scientists invented in 2020s to use as COVID vaccines.

I also once worked with someone who had a degree in biological sciences and was shocked to learn that female cows have vaginas. She didn’t explain where she thought baby cows come from, but we decided not to push the matter and changed the subject.

It was years ago, but it was an unbranded, generic portable CD player. It was awful. It kept skipping forward and backward on the track whenever it wasn’t still, so basically “portable” was false advertising because it was only usable when sat still on a table. Since then, whatever I buy, I make sure it’s from a recognised brand that has some reputation to lose.

Will Smith eating spaghetti.

This year? Bold prediction.

Could you elaborate? I don’t have a deep knowledge of the field, I only write rudimentary scripts to make some ports of my job easier, but from the few videos on the subject that I saw, and from the few times I asked AI to write a piece of code for me, I’d say I share the OP’s worry. What would you say is something that humans add to programming that can’t (and can never be) replaced by AI?

I personally don’t have any of that but here’s what I would like to use it for. When I go away for, say, two weeks, I’d like to be able to randomly flick lights and TV on and off in my apartment to seem like someone’s home. Currently I do it by plugging floor lamps into timered power socket controllers, but they aren’t internet enabled so all I can do is program them to come on and off at specified times during the day, which an observant burglar could figure out.

I would also like to save on gas bills and turn the heating off when I go away. But if it’s winter time and I go away for 2 weeks, I hate coming back to a cold flat that take ages to warm up to comfortable temperatures. I’d like to be able to turn the heating off when I leave, and then back on, say, a whole day before I come back.

I think you’re amazing. Having faced such tremendous adversities at such young age, you still think that the main message you need to share is that life is fucking incredible.

I’m not a blogger or anything, so I’m sorry for posting a comment without any answers to the question in the title. But if the outlet you choose ends up being publicly available, please share the link. I would love to read whatever you think is worth writing down.

Yup, meaning of a lot of words with similar meaning gets eroded like that these days. I remember a medium sized twitch streamer one day being inundated by his viewers with subscriptions, follows, gifts, and what not, and he kept saying “you guys are actually insane”. And I kept thinking “what would you say if someone actually insane turned up in your chat?”

Can I submit an expression? “Have the work cut out for you”. My thinking was “there was a lot of work, but my boss said I’ll have the work cut out for me. Phew, now there’s less work after some of it being cut out!”