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Talk given at Codebar Festival.

If you wish to see my slides in their full glory, they are available on Slideshare.

In short, if you need engaging in-depth articles on your scientific project, your research breakthrough or the grand new technical/space/molecular/medical thing you are building, you can hire me! (Semi-)Popular science writing I do a lot of what I call “(Semi-)popular science writing”. My recent article dissecting the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine has racked up over 1.5 million views (so far), and it has done the rounds of the pharmaceutical world where it got favourable reviews.

In previous posts I described how the two currently approved mRNA vaccines both use ‘modified nucleosides’ to enhance their efficiency. Meanwhile, a company called CureVac has created an mRNA vaccine that uses regular, unmodified, RNA. It is currently being tested in large scale trials. In this post I explain what the challenges are with this plain RNA approach, and we reverse engineer quite closely what CureVac has done with regular RNA to (hopefully) deliver an effective vaccine.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Periodically I read about governments or institutions wanting to stimulate innovation, often to achieve a certain (worthy) goal. Frequently, the far larger amounts of money that other countries or continents are spending on innovation are then bandied about as justification. And I die a little inside every time that happens. Money and innovation have a very intricate relation.

Rendering optimizations that come naturally.

There are lots of calls to invest in improving cybersecurity. But it struck me that it doesn’t work like that. Not getting hacked is not so much a question of buying the right stuff. It is a question of doing the right things and understanding what you are doing. It is easy to demand that people ‘invest’ in something. You can even supply them with the money to do so.

January 2021 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling up and down.

Your work inbox is probably not a place that sparks joy. It’s full of people asking you to do things, complaints that something hasn’t been done, and 571 messages marked urgent. In fact email is usually considered to be a hindrance, with many productivity guides recommending...

A walkthrough of my task management system

A step by step tutorial

While working on Pebble, we ran into a lot of issues as we tried to enable messaging from the watch. For example, we never figured out how…

Hi everyone, With apologies for flooding the airwaves and timelines with way too many posts and tweets, here’s one more post, the last COVID-19 related one for a while. I’ve been trying to provide high quality answers to the many questions I receive via email and various social media. I’ve also been trying to help many many people that found worrying news online & sent it to me, either for reassurance or simply to challenge me.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Hi everyone, This is a transcript of my presentation over at the European Microwave Week 2020, actually held in 2021. You can find the video here and the slides here. I’d like to thank Frank van Vliet, general chair of the EMW, for inviting me to do this talk. The words have only been edited lightly - it is still presentation style, so here and there the sentences are not written like how they’d be in a more formal piece of work.

Translations: 中文, 日本語 As a followup to Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, here is a look at the genetic code behind some of the other vaccines. I recommend at least skimming the earlier post before delving into this one, unless you are already fluent in modified mRNA bases and protein expression mechanics. To get an extremely full background on all vaccine work, I kindly refer you to excellent posts from Derek Lowe and Hilda Bastian.

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Türk / український / Markdown for translating Dobro došli! U ovom postu ćemo, znak po znak, ispitati izvorni kôd vakcine mRNA BioNTech / Pfizer SARS-CoV-2.

December 2020 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI and technology; major new site feature: fully-generalized recursive popups.

An oft discussed hypothesis is that certain apps, usually Facebook, listens to and analyses your surroundings for ad targeting purposes. It has never been conclusively proven that Facebook does this, but there are plenty of people on the internet with anecdotal stories of ads appearing for products they’ve only discussed IRL. In iOS 14 Apple added indicators to highlight when an app is using the device’s microphone or camera. Since I have access to a decently sized collection of app privacy details I decided to have a look if any apps admit to this behaviour.

Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade / tomasprsimoes@gmail.com). Feel free to contact me if I made a mistake. 25th of August 2017: This page has led to a two-hour presentation called DNA: The code of Life as presented at SHA 2017.

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / English / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Türk / український / Markdown for translating Pozdravljeni! V tem članku bomo črko po črko pregledali izvorno kodo cepiva BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA.