Let's Know Things Podcast Por Colin Wright capa

Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

De: Colin Wright
Ouça grátis

A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright Política e Governo
Episódios
  • AI-Designed Viruses

    AI-Designed Viruses
    Aug 11 2026
    This week we talk about Evo 2, bacteriophages, and antibiotics.We also discuss AI models, medical innovations, and the Red Army.Recommended Book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. NormanTranscriptA bacteriophage, sometimes just called a phage, is a type of virus that only infects bacteria. “Phage” means to devour, and that’s what bacteriophages do—they infect and replicate within bacteria that they target, injecting their own genome into that target’s cytoplasm, which are all the materials contained within the bacteria’s cell membrane.Phages are super-abundant, by some measures more abundant than every living organism, including bacteria, on earth, combined. And they’re interesting in that they range from incredibly simple to quite complex, and have at times been used as alternatives to antibiotics, because they attack and feed on bacteria.The use of phages to counter bacterial infections was all but abandoned in the mid-20th century when antibiotics were discovered and commercialized, their production industrialized and the substances themselves proving a lot easier to mass-produce, and a lot more predictable in their utility than phages. Phages were kinda sorta almost understood, but we didn’t really get what they were doing or why, so their application often felt more like folk remedies than real-deal science, despite the actual science underlying the practice.Also, phages were primarily used as antibiotic treatments by the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s military. So throughout the West, which was rapidly scaling its production of antibiotic treatments, the use of bacteriophages was associated with Stalinist communism, and so the Red-scare, the demonization of anything associated with the Soviet Union, was partially responsible for the shelving of this approach and this realm of research, at least for a while.Much of that existing research was also done in the Soviet Union, and the published documents were thus published in Russian or Georgian languages. And because much of the rest of the scientific publishing world was reorienting around English at this time, that meant these published works were often either ignored or unintelligible to the rest of the scientific community.As with much of our microbiota, the invisibly small viruses, bacteria, archaea, and so on that make up the human microbiome, we have a general sense of how bacteriophages interact with some of what makes us, us, but only a general sense. We know that healthy individuals tend to contain a host of bacteriophages that people who have chronic conditions, like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are less likely to have, for instance, and there’s a chance that this lack is associated with those conditions—though each person’s body composition is unique, and this facet of biology is still relatively obscure; we really don’t know for certain what does what, because of how complex these interactions are.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent development in the world of bacteriophages, and why the researchers behind it are both celebrating their accomplishment, and warning about potential dangers associated with the same.—Back in 2025, a nonprofit called the Arc Institute, which has a stated goal of accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases, announced the release of a new language model, a new AI system, called Evo 2.The Evo family of foundation models—a foundation model being a type of AI model that’s been trained on a huge corpus of data, but which is applicable for all sorts of purposes, including serving as the foundation of large-language models like ChatGPT or Claude—this family of foundation models is open-source and trained on raw genetic sequences, something like nine trillion nucleotides-worth of such sequences, making it distinct from other models in this space that have been trained on descriptions of biological systems, using human language.The initial version of Evo was released in early 2024, and the newest version, Evo 2, which is an upgraded version of the Evo 2 model that is more efficient, so it can be run on less powerful hardware, was released in February of 2026.So while many of the AI systems that non-biologists interact with on a regular basis have been trained on human language-based libraries, showing relationships and interactions between the words we use to communicate, these models have been trained on the fundamental building blocks of life; the nucleotides, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, ATCG of DNA, if you remember that from biology class, that are strung together into 64 different possible three-letter combinations. Chains of these nucleotides instruct cells to build proteins out of amino acids, and from that baseline, we get life.We also get non-living things like viruses, which have no cells, metabolism, or independent reproduction, and phages are viruses.And while other AI models have been shown...
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    14 minutos
  • Ceuta Migrant Wave

    Ceuta Migrant Wave
    Aug 4 2026
    This week we talk about Melilla, hybrid warfare, and migration.We also discuss Morocco, civil conflict, and immigration politics.Recommended Book: Playground by Richard PowersTranscriptCeuta is a Spanish-owned territory located in northwestern Africa, along the top of Morocco. It’s small—about seven square miles—and is unusual because it is a city owned by a European Union member state that isn’t located on the European continent; it’s bordered by Morocco and the Mediterranean, and is located at the entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the strait that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.Ceuta is one of two territories that Spain still holds in Africa, the other being a smaller, just 4.7 square mile city called Melilla, which is located further west but still along the Mediterranean coast, bordered by the sea on one side, and by Morocco on the other.Spain has held both of these territories for hundreds of years: Ceuta since 1580 and Melilla since 1497, so it’s actually held them far longer than Morocco has been an independent state, in 1956. The populations of these territories, just over 85,000 people in each, also heavily identify as Spanish, despite many residents having Moroccan ancestry, so theres a cultural component here, too.That said, Morocco officially claims both areas as their own, considering them to be occupied territories, a bit like the Crimean peninsula has been militarily held by Russia since 2014, but it’s still claimed by Ukraine as an occupied territory. So the Moroccan government isn’t thrilled about having these small chunks of land, autonomous cities that are technically part of Spain, right there in the midst of their own territory. But these cities have been part of Spain for so long, and the residents are all Spanish citizens, with the same rights and sense of culture as the rest of Spain and Europe, that simply handing them over to Morocco has never seemed terribly feasible or desirable to the Spanish government, despite neither territory providing much strategic or economic value to Spain. So they remain a point of contention between these two governments.They’ve also served as migration hot-spots in recent decades, because they are the only two European territories that border an African country. And this is important because, in some cases, under some governments and in accordance with some laws, if you can make it across a border and into another country, you might be able to enter the system and eventually become a citizen, maybe claiming asylum or maybe getting slotted into some other path to citizenship. Or failing that, there’s a chance you might be able to just fade into the background, working and living in that country, despite not legally being there.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent surge in migrants crossing the border from Morocco into Ceuta, and the larger state of play, migration-wise, globally right now.—On the last day of July, 2026, an estimated 50-60 thousand African migrants illegally crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, some of them swimming to bypass the 20-foot-high border fences, others climbing those fences, or piling into overflowing boats, arriving in Ceuta en masse and overwhelming the guards who tried to stop them, though generally just trying to run past them, not attacking the guards—this wasn’t an attack, it was a rush to get into Spanish territory.Eventually the guards were reinforced by police and the Spanish military, and they started to push the waves of migrants back using water cannons and tear gas. But despite the less-lethal crowd control methods that were applied, at least 67 people, that’s the number as of the day I’m recording this at least, it’s been updated many times over the past few days, 67 people died as a result of stampedes, either headed inland or back into the sea, away from the gas and water cannons, or they drowned while trying to cross over the water.By the following day, the wave of migrants had become just a trickle, mostly a few stragglers who tried to swim to Ceuta, and who were swiftly returned to Morocco by local law enforcement. Almost everyone else who illegally crossed the border also returned to Morocco moved on by police or of their own volition, and though, again, this wasn’t some kind of violent incursion, to get a sense of the scale of this wave of humanity, Ceuta only has about 85,000 people living there, and this wave of migrants was about 60,000 people strong. So the locals mostly closed up all their shops and locked their doors, the people who arrived found themselves unable to get food or water, and law enforcement told them they need to leave, so most did. As of the day I’m recording this there are still several hundred migrants hiding in the nearby hills and lounging on the beach, exhausted and still hopeful they’ll be able to enter the asylum system—many of them saying they fled conflicts further south, like the ...
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    16 minutos
  • Hugging Face Hack

    Hugging Face Hack
    Jul 28 2026
    This week we talk about Fable, sandboxes, and the Jacobian conjecture.We also discuss counterexamples, X, and ChatGPT.Recommended Book: After the Fall by Edward AshtonTranscriptIn mathematics, a conjecture is a proposition, something like a guess by someone who knows what they’re talking about, about something believed to be true, but not yet proven in a formal sense. The goal is to then eventually come up with a formal proof for that informed guess, at which point the conjecture becomes a theorem. If even a single exception is found to the proposition, however, that exception called a counterexample, the conjecture is considered disproven, and it can then never become a theorem.The Jacobian conjecture—and this is a radical simplification of a very complex concept—but it basically says that if a formula-based map of coordinates stretches or moves without experiencing any local crushing or folding along its surface (which in more formal language would mean the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that isn’t zero), if that’s true, that map can always be completely reversed, and that will return all the points to their original positions.This conjecture has been posited and tested since the late 19th century, and it’s generally been considered very compelling by mathematicians, many of whom have proposed proofs which were, ultimately, found to have subtle errors, keeping them from becoming theorems. No one was able to find a counterexample, either, which would definitively prove the conjecture was wrong.No one, that is, until a mathematician named Levent Alpöge, who works as a researcher at Anthropic, decided to task the company’s currently most capable, publicly available model, Fable, to find a counterexample. He posted the counterexample—and again, this is a formal mathematical finding that disproves a conjecture, keeping it from ever becoming a theorem, something that would typically be presented in a far more formal setting, and to much fanfare—but he posted it to the social network X, saying “hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final.”Terence Tao, who’s considered by many to be the finest mathematician of his generation, reviewed the posted counterexample on his blog and said that it “appears like a massive miracle,” before going on to use ChatGPT, a competing LLM-based AI tool, to “discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations.”Another mathematician named Dmitry Rybin, within days of all that happening, used ChatGPT to do something similar, disproving the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture.Both men posted the prompts that they used to make all this happen, and while Tao’s conversation with ChatGPT, checking the math on the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, was pretty mathematically dense, the latter counterexample was derived by using exactly four prompts, which are the messages typed into the text box built into these AI tools, telling the model what to do. In their totality those prompts read:“You should do a breakthroughplease continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexampleContinue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”What I’d like to talk about today is another new, interesting thing these top-of-the-line, frontier models are doing, that would seem to violate our sense of what a clever AI tool is capable of doing, and why this thing has some facets of the technology and cybersecurity world on high alert.—In mid-July 2026, AI company Hugging Face announced that autonomous AI agents compromised their infrastructure, hacking their system, basically. The following week, AI company OpenAI announced that, after investigating, they determined that two of their models were responsible for the attack.Here’s what happened:OpenAI was internally testing its recently released flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and an even more powerful, not yet released model, which is rumored to be the next-step flagship, GPT-6, and they were checking these models’ capacity in cybersecurity using a testing benchmark called ExploitGym; so when they test these sorts of things, they don’t typically have them hack a real computer or system, they use these kinds of benchmarks which have consistent levels of difficulty, and which replicate real world systems without putting any real world systems at actual risk.Importantly, these sorts of tests also occur inside what’s called a sandbox, which is a software testing environment that cuts these systems off from external resources, including the internet.Despite those limitations, the AI hacked its way out of the testing environment, out of that sandbox, then launched what’s been called a nation-state...
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    15 minutos
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