Get a jump on summer problems with new fruit fly research
PLUS 5 More Things to Worry About, Another De-extinction story and Menu Mistakes
Many apologies for the delay of this week’s tonic. Not my best effort. Spent yesterday with my son in Washington, before a full day of flying back to Vancouver today. Almost back full-time on the job on Salt Spring. Just a few days more in Vancouver visiting friends.
Guess the new product
Answer on Thursday
MAIN COURSE: If you wonder why fruit fly populations explode, turns out they are getting drunk
I’m tired of new research about surviving rocket trips to Mars. I want leading edge studies that effect real life. My real life. Finally I found a good ‘un.
My wife and I live on a rural acreage and our garden needs a lot of help. That is why we are serious composters, creating our own rich fertilizer. Our healthy life style involves eating plenty of vegetables and fruit, whose remains quickly fill the compost bucket we keep in the kitchen before we hike down the hill to our custom 3 cage…..blah blah blah; enough of the virtue signalling already and get to the story.
Every summer by early July our kitchen is alive with the little critters. I have to use my trademarked vacuuming-them-out-of-the-air system to keep them down to a dull roar. A recent study tells me into why this happens.
Fruit flies are one of the most common lab creatures because of their simplicity, rapid reproduction, and completely mapped genetic structure. It has long been known that fruit flies are very fond of fermented food, especially fruit as in their name. Yeast is an important part of their diet. This latest study took a closer look at their eating and mating habits.
There is something more going on in the rotting raspberries and putrefying peaches. Males fruit flies, particularly those who haven’t mated yet - they are on a tight timeframe as they are lucky to live 10 days - seek out alcohol to help them get jiggy. Turns out one of the chemicals that their ultra fast metabolism breaks methanol into is a complete aphrodisiac to the female fruit flies. It increases their pheromones. Which explains why when our fresh fruit consumption goes up our kitchen fly population booms. We are in effect creating a swinger’s bar scene in our compost bucket.
The researchers played all sorts of lab based tricks on the little devils to prove that they actually do know what they are doing. They head for the alcohol every time. Just like human males.
But the similarity with our species ends there. Human males end up in various stages of drunken stupor which nearly all woman find unattractive and distasteful. “Male fruit flies, essentially, know when they've reached the optimal level of inebriation to attract more females and successfully mate, before they become so intoxicated that they repulse the females, or approach other males by mistake.”
So much for the sophistication of human evolution.
SECONDI - 5 More Things to Worry About
The latest OpenAI image generator has cracked a long term image problem. It can now spell and properly place text. One important and growing use case that early users jumped right on: falsifying documents. You are only limited by your imagination and access to appropriate paper stocks. Receipts, birth certificates, and passports are all in play. No more trips down seedy alleys in the wrong part of town to visit chain-smoking fraud artists. I seldom give outright advice but if you are in an Accounting department I would increase the auditing of expenses reports. A 2015 study found that 85% of people would cheat on business expenses. I don’t know which is worse the increasing AI capabilities or the intrinsically suspect human nature.
As people adopt AI models quickly, many people replacing Google and other search tools with AI prompts are just getting the same old same old. People think that because AI responds in a nicely worded text formulation they are getting something substantively different. Wrong! Turns out AI is just ripping off Wikipedia, the very flawed online encyclopedia. AI bots are constantly crawling Wikipedia and demanding the most arcane information for their greedy maws. “Wikimedia found that bots account for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews.” It is costing a lot to comply. When Wikipedia tries to defend themselves, they find out that AI crawling is fast and loose with the truth, ignoring robots.txt directives and trying to disguise themselves as human visitors. I don’t know which is worse intrinsically suspect human nature or the artificially learned suspect human nature.
I’m not American but I would be concerned if I was, as the dodgy DOGE-ists are going to have a hackathon build to a giant API (a well defined technical path to get access to data) for IRS information, including sensitive personal information. This effort is being led by the CEO of a healthcare startup, whose experience is irrelevant for this type of project. Hackathons and minimum viable product concepts are terrible ways to develop such a sensitive product. Look for a substantial increase in the number of scams using stolen IRS data over the next 12 months. I don’t know which is worse the intrinsically suspect human nature or the energization of this nature with a fews breaths of the air just north of San Jose.
I have been writing about the cybercrime boom for sometime, pointing out how it isn’t made up of tortured teenage geniuses or bad foreign actors but ordinary run of the mill criminals. This article outlines brand named SaaS (software as a service) cybercrime tools suites for these ordinary crooks. They are based on weaponized LLMs (large language models). Turns out the the more fine-turned and narrow focused a LLM is, the easier for these value added crime syndicates to jailbreak. Perfectly priced for the newly laid off (whose numbers could be increasing in the near future) to get into a different career. For a remarkably low $75 per month you get purpose-built strategies such as phishing, vulnerability scanning (looking for naïve hackable systems) and exploit generation (code to hack the systems you have found). Compare that price to Microsoft Sales Professional at $65 per month, whose support won’t be as good as these new SaaS products. This is a new path for solopreneurs, so jump on Telegram as a new career awaits.
The next step for cybercrime is rapidly descending the development pipeline. Researchers have demonstrated that the new AI agents are capable of executing complex security attacks and that we should expect to see these attacks soon in the real world. How comforting! However, they will impact jobs as they will likely replace human experts for certain cybercrime activities. But our newly minted cybercriminals from point 4 above will likely see these capabilities - like full ransomware - added into their cybercrime suite, but only as part of a upgrade to a premium bundle.
EXTRA HELPINGS: Dire Reporting on De-Extinction
With each new project the de-extinction movement is getting more press coverage. Much of this is due to a savvy PR program launched by the biotech company engaging in this research. But the announcement in much of the press that the dire wolf, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago, is back is quite misleading.
Colossal Bioscience - no arrogance or ego at this firm - analyzed the dire wolf’s genome. Based on that they then made 20 genetic edits to a similar species, the grey wolf, to bring back certain features, such as size and colouring. So really this is just the next step up from the 2 gene edits that made a woolly mammoth mouse ( one more picture of these adorable little guys below). They haven’t regenerated a live dire wolf specimen from the ancient genetic material.
It is believed that the dire wolves died out with the extinction of megafauna that they were likely well adapted to hunt, at the end of the last ice age. So even if these researchers did completely recreate the dire wolf species where is it going to fit in our current ecosystem. Or is it going to be one of the many freak animals at some new zoo of de-extinct species we are going to create. Just because we can.
No I have settled in my mind which is worse.
Human Nature. It is behind all of this.
MENU MISTAKES
Obviously this start-up did not see the latest research that the atmosphere on Mars is full of toxic dust.
I will be back on Thursday with a revised Thursday Tidbits. Looking forward to getting all the way home on late Friday. Thanks again to everyone for reading this newletter. I appreciate any and all feedback
I know I got the answer right...........
The circle of life.
Fruit flies getting tipsy on your compost, AI forging your passport, and cybercriminals offering better customer service than Microsoft. Nature is healing!
And de-extinction? Please. We can’t even keep regular wolves from going extinct, but sure, let’s Jurassic Park a dire wolf into a world where its food source is… checks notes… also extinct. Bold move. - What next, dinosaurs? oh wait.......
Human nature is the worst—but at least we’re consistent David.
Happy Thursday eve
Well, that explains a lot with the fruit flies. Every year, I deal with an infestation. I use canisters with holes poked in them, filled with vinegar, to trap them. They're so tiny, they get in anywhere—sometimes even hitching a ride on fruit and vegetables from the grocery store. It's always surprising how many end up in those canisters. They really reproduce fast. Honestly, sometimes I just want to lock myself in my house and shut out everything happening in the outside world.