Péter Szilágyi

blog.dark.bioDark Bio Platform Hands-onEverything to build on the Arks, from emulators to AI agents

Two years of my life, open for you to play with 🤓

Dark Bio@dark.bio

Good morning everyone, release time 🔥 The Ark Emulator is effective immediately available for anyone to download & run: - Pair it with the Ark Companion mobile app - Manage data and run apps through the Ark Hub - Build new apps against your own genome blog.dark.bio/2026/10/12/d...

16h

Look ma, the Ark can tell the color of my eyes! 👀 Fun fact, as trivial as this is, it's actually a demo of app composability. It's 3 apps collaborating: 🧬 One pulls data from the DNA, no interpretation 🧮 One does statistical analysis, doesn't know DNA 🔗 One combines them

16h

Why is this a big thing? Because in the medical world, you only have monoliths. Proprietary pipelines that do everything. Which means it's mostly gate-kept. With composability, it's the OSS movement all over again. Everyone brings a tiny bit, and we build a new world together.

Yesterday I told Claude I need a holder for Ark components (was annoying to keep them bubble wrapped). Should fit 20, make it stackable. Oneshot. Didn't even do a test print, rolled the 15h final print.

Fun fact, I also told it to do one for the PCBs and it pushed back that PLA doesn't discharge electrostatically, so it would fry my boards! 🤯

My accountant was starting to threaten me that year end is coming for Dark Bio and we'll need to soon do the books =) Spent two days setting up Hermes with a combo agent, non-sensitive stuff on frontier, invoicing and customer data on local LLM (sloooow). It's... beautiful 😍

Well, this is another first for us! 😇

Dark Bio@dark.bio

We will be attending Devcon 8 in India in a couple weeks with two talks! To commemorate it, we'll be *gifting* away one (1) special edition Founder Ark. It has the Devcon 8 logo etched on, and has the unique serial number founder-devcon-8.

Seems I'm giving a talk in two weeks! Come say hi ;)

blog.dark.bioArkOS 0.13: Variants and SamplesTwo new variant slots, public samples and new example apps

Busy week :) You can now test if you should run sprints or marathons; and if you're doping, whether you'll get caught or not! 🙈 Joke's aside, it's been a fun week shipping these!

Dark Bio@dark.bio

Thrilled to announce a new release! We've added support for two new genomic data types and published apps to showcase them: a doping tester and a sprint vs. marathon selector! You can also seed your Ark or Ark Emulator with sample genomes for testing.

Also, if you're curious, I also wrote up a short explainer on what 3 different genomic data files are and why they are important to you :) Go have a read!

Provisioning a new Ark into Dark Bio the ecosystem is a huge PITA. Burn the secure boot key, burn the bootloader, flash the OS, have the ark generate it's own identity key, sign the Ark's key with my own manufacturer key, enroll that onto the Ark, register it into the cloud...

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It's sooo beautiful 🥰. It pre-checks the board for any supply chain funny-business (like pre-inited keys); then asks for all my passwords, keys, etc in advance. Downloads and checks all bootloaders, firmwares, signatures, etc. Then when I finally confirm, 1-2 min and done. 🤯

There are unfortunately a few manual steps I need to do physically on the board, so I can't mass onboard devices yet, but going from a few hours of super stressful work to 2-3 mins / board is salvation :D Thank you Claude and Astra for your contribution.

No worries it you mess a step up, at worse you brick a $150 CPU. All other steps can be recovered with a lot of elbow grease. 🫠 I wanted to write an automatic provisioner for like forever, but it's an entire damn project in itself. So yesterday I told Claude to do it.

The OpenSNP project was a public collection of genetic data and annotations contributed by its users. - Wikipedia: "The website and all data was deleted on 30 April 2025." - Claude: "I'm rebuilding it file by file" It couldn't do this 6 months ago, what changed? 🧵

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So now Claude could extract the annotation database, pull the file list and then just crawl the internet archive for everything else. Some users deleted their data so they were not part of the last dump, but they can still be pulled from older internet archive copies.

There was a saying that "once on the internet, always on the internet". Claude just made that feasible, and it's quite amazing and scary how it can puzzle together broken bits of information to reassemble the full picture.

OpenSNP hosted the genomic files one-by-one for download, so all of it was picked up by the internet archive. That's the simpler part. But there were a lot of annotations too, which were not individual files, but in a database. Those were never something the archive could pull.

OpenSNP had an endpoint to bundle everything up as a mega zip, 60+GB. That was too large for the internet archive, so it just stored the first 2GB and discarded the rest. Guess what's in that corrupted partial zip file? Yup, the entire annotation database and genome index.

The ApoE Alzheimer risk test in the sequencing[dot]com marketplace costs $39. Here's the entire, literal analysis code that's needed on @dark.bio for the exact same. You can run it *today* against your own genome, for free. Go buy me a coffee. 😋

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Released back to the Ark Hub vs stashed away on the Ark Companion for later:

gist.github.comDark Bio ApoE Example AppDark Bio ApoE Example App. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

- Wait what, this can't be true? - Build and run it yourself!

This is how it looks when the app asks for permission to run and when the report comes back in for you to release:

Half a year ago I asked various AI agents to generate some 3D print models for me. They failed miserably. Today I asked Claude to make me a jig for laser etching Arks... got it ready for slicing and printing. 🤯

blog.dark.bioDark Bio Platform Hands-onEverything to build on the Arks, from emulators to AI agents

Two years of my life, open for you to play with 🤓

Dark Bio@dark.bio

github.comDark BioMaking genomics cypherpunk. Dark Bio has 15 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

One way you can support our project with zero effort, is to give us a few stars on GitHub! It helps raise awareness and open the door to getting our OSS tools upstreamed into mainline Homebrew and similar package managers! github.com/dark-bio

discord.ggJoin the dark · bio Discord Server!Check out the dark · bio community on Discord - hang out with 26 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Let the flood gates open 🙈

Dark Bio@dark.bio

Good morning! We've decided to open up our Discord chat room for the general public. It's mostly silent, but come joins us and ask questions if you're curious. discord.gg/u4Qzy7PEV9

youtube.comDark Bio: Ark I - From Nature to analysisYouTube video by Dark Bio

We didn't do it because it was easy, we did it because we thought it would be easy. 🙈

Dark Bio@dark.bio

It's been a long journey, but the dream is becoming reality: from Nature article to genetic analysis, at home.

- Claude: This timeout mechanism can hang. - Me: Noo? Why? - Claude: On non-win7 Windows a timeout > 49.7 days gets converted to INFINITE. - Me:

22 Sept

Ahahahaha... Astra: "You need to make xyz change." Claude: <does the change> Claude: " I wrote all of the code. GPT's part was advice you passed on, not code." <- not wanting to credit Astra in the commit =))

21 Sept

One more teaser before my talk on Wednesday in Zürich 😋 cc @dark.bio

19 Sept

You might want to know that Claude silently doxxes you in the background without telling you. 😵‍💫 "One correction first: my probe script put your email address in the User-Agent header, so the ~370 census requests to [...] carried it. I shouldn't have done that without asking."

16 Sept

Today I bricked 2 founder Arks with a firmware update. 3 hours of debugging later, it's a FAT filesystem "quirk". Atomic file replace: - Create a .tmp file, write it, sync it. - Delete the old file, rename .tmp. - Sync the folder. Yank the power. FAT destroyed the partition.

16 Sept

On FAT, a file is actually registered in two completely different places inside the filesystem. When you rename a file, a folder fsync updates one of those tables, but not the other (dooh). Power cycle it, and next write will cross file boundaries =)

16 Sept

The correct way to rename a file on FAT: - Fsync the file - Rename the file - Fsync the file again, dooooh - Fsync the folder /smh

Ooooh, Ark CLI, I have spoilers for that ;)

Dark Bio@dark.bio

ArkOS v0.11.5 out, available via the Ark Hub and the Ark CLI.

Doing my slides for next week... Healthcare institutions: "Your data is safe with us!" Somehow also healthcare institutions:

Kek, from ChatGPT: "UK Biobank explicitly says there was no hack; de-identified participant data had been improperly exposed"... ok then =)

Péter Szilágyi reposted

Dark Bio

@dark.bio

luma.comAgentic AI in Health: From Decentralized Data Ledgers to Lab-in-the-Loop Discovery · LumaThe RoX Health team is inviting you in Zürich for an interactive, high-signal evening exploring how agentic AI and frontier models are reshaping both ends of…

We will be doing a meetup presentation in Zürich on the 23rd of September about agentic AI in health. If you're around, pop in and say hi! Note, spots are limited and registration is vetted (not by us, we take no blame, we're just there to speak 😅).

Been using LLMs the entire year, but yesterday was the first time I sent them out bug-hunting proper in my codebase. Well... we're fucked. They traced a way to brick an Ark, going from the mobile app, through the cloud, laptop it's plugged into, firmware, USB stack, kernel.

The bug was simple and fixable, it was mostly about user input validation that I haven't really hardened against at all (I'm busy proving the system works). bsky.app/profile/kara...

Péter Szilágyi@karalabe.bsky.social

Today I learnt, so today you will also learn :) See this emoji? 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦... it's 25 bytes. The record is 👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏾 at 41 bytes. Most UIs / libs limit *characters* on input fields, not bytes, so a 32 char limit can be 1.3KB! But most libs will fly it through... until something deep explodes.

That said, the fact the LLM saw this line: format!("{} \u{00b7} v{} \u{00b7} {}", carrier, revision, name) And managed to escalate it across the stack into a full on denial of service exploit blew my mind.

14 Sept

13 Sept

😇

13 Sept

Can't get enough of this 🤩 Works with emulators too 😎

11 Sept

Dark Bio teaser ;) - "Ser, what do I see here?" - "The tool through which AI operates your Ark!" 🤯

9 Sept

Presented without comments 🤡

7 Sept

We've got a shiny new toy out :) If you have a genuine Ark, it's immediately available. If you don't (yet... yet?... yet!), then it also supports emulators that will roll out soon-ish (couple weeks).

Dark Bio@dark.bio

We've just published the new version of the Dark Bio: Ark Companion mobile app on both AppStore and PlayStore. - Supports pairing Ark Emulators (if you don't have a genuine device) - Supports pairing multiple devices (why settle for one when you can have 3) Emulators soon-ish™

4 Sept

Today was a good day for science... all pushed to prod (12 hours of work, nuked my entire weeks worth of tokens).

1 Sept

Oh lookie, a new version of my #Rust COBS library. Now with SIMD/NEON, gaining about 10x performance vs the old version (and a lot vs the Rust ecosystem standard) :)