Laura Deming on understanding Interesting uses of AI The memes of the wealthy Elon dreams and bitter lessons Nabeel on Palantir Scott reviews Deep Utopia Meditation, considered harmful There is no placebo effect Dwarkesh interviews Gwern Restoring fertility with iMSC transplantat … | Continue reading
Lots of interest in gene editing startups but in practice they don't do that well: Few diseases can be corrected throuhg gene editing, hence valuations of such companies, despite FDA approvals are low. Compare with addressing shared causes of multi-morbidity like aging or obesity … | Continue reading
On August 25th I found myself sleeping under a tent at Black Rock City (BRC), the temporary city where Burning Man takes place. It was my first time going. A month before that I had no plans to get there though earlier in the year I had thought of going but made no definite plans … | Continue reading
Jean Hebert, who proposes the stepwise replacement of brain tissue, has now joined ARPA-H Why does Ozempic cure all disease Scott Alexander on Nietzschean takes on morality, with an additional take from David Chapman, You should be a God-Emperor Radiant, company started by ex-Spa … | Continue reading
AI companies need to make a lot of money for the current market state (NVIDIA going to the moon) to make sense. Right now it's far from that. Interview with the current co-CEO of Netflix Lambda School, a scam A tour of Starfactory, with Elon Advantages of incompetent management B … | Continue reading
Michael Lewis (author of a recent book on FTX)'s Blind Side Xylitol bad? Demons and Internal Family Systems GLP1 analogues do not cause muscle loss in excess to what one would expect via caloric restriction. And we know that in that case one can avoid that to some extent by a hig … | Continue reading
Some debate over the merits of Minicircle, the gene therapy startup. It's a case of "in theory, it shouldn't work", with "working" defined in the most damning way: probably not even raising follistatin. The debate over the usefulness of healthcare, Scott and reply from Robin Hans … | Continue reading
In defense of Academia The Breslow saga Interview with Scott Alexander On Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks An interview with the founder of Cyclarity, a company working on reversing atherosclerosis On East Asian drinking culture The ultimate lab leak debate Why did supersonic airline … | Continue reading
I just published this article in Asimov Magazine called Making Cells Young, go have a look! :) | Continue reading
Docusign has over 7000 employees. Someone on the internet periodically discovers this fact and wonder how could this be! What are those 7000 employees doing? The first part to the "What are they doing" question is "Sales", but that's not the full answer. Per their latest 10K fili … | Continue reading
A critical(!) review of Scaling People, a book by Claire Hughes Jones that I liked (ie I liked both the book and the review) though I am not as critical as the review is. CHJ 's book remains one of the best attempts at making the tacit art of management legible. What happened to … | Continue reading
"The startup burnout to spirituality pipeline is strong for a reason.": A glimpse of absolute perfection Short term twin study on the impacts of a vegan diet in healthy-ish patients. Compared to control, patients in the vegan diet saw decreases in fasting insulin, weight, and LDL … | Continue reading
The title of this post will spark some controversy. But it is, under a reasonable interpretation, not false, just spicy ️. It make sense to start from the perhaps less controversial view that "rapamycin is an aging drug" and explain why that is wrong as well. My issue with those … | Continue reading
Sometimes one reads discussions of causality in academic papers. Expressions like "this gene causes that" or "Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by XYZ". Or of course, "We don't know what causes X". Recently I found myself thinking about these two statements: We don't know what c … | Continue reading
Tales from the patient side of oncology clinical trials Hackernews compilation of "things that don't scale" Colonoscopies, do they work? Future House, new FRO-like organization launches to work at the intersection of AI and biotech Tattoos are made of macrophages that constantly … | Continue reading
Back in 2020 when I wrote the Longevity FAQ I had a section on telomeres and some cursory examination of how much they might matter for aging. Now that I know more it's time to revisit it, including also some historical notes and some papers that came out after I wrote that FAQ. … | Continue reading
Target-based drug discovery hasn't worked that well historically. Metformin, most likely not a longevity drug Anduril Interesting new paper on LLMs being dumb in an weird way: training a model on "A is B" does not necessarily confer the knowedge that "B is A"; another LLMs are le … | Continue reading
I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk. I liked the book's little anecdotes describing the way Elon is in his high and lows. I didn't come out of reading the book thinking that one has to be yelling at people and being obnoxious to get things done, though certain … | Continue reading
I've written in the past a couple of blogposts on education and learning: these two on Bloom's two sigma and mastery learning, and spaced repetition systems (SRS) are the main examples. Something I noticed today is that on the one hand I have these blogposts, and I find SRS valua … | Continue reading
Stuart Buck's personal metascience history Heidi Williams on accelerating scientific progress Claire Hughes Johnson interview Ben Reinhardt on K-99 The placebo effect, less real than it originally seemed The allele in the DEC2 gene that lets humans sleep less (which I have!) make … | Continue reading
Is erithrytol bad? Is aspartame bad? As I noted in my Alzheimer's series, a promising target to treat the disease is phosphoryated tau (the 'fire' the keeps the disease burning) as opposed to amyloid beta (the 'spark' that triggers AD but does not keep it going). A recent attempt … | Continue reading
Note: What's discussed in this post will seem extremely niche to most people, but the links throughout the post add the necessary context, so make sure to read those! If you want to read something before reading anything else, read this with particular attention to what is said t … | Continue reading
Scott's links post. A highlight is (13), an adversarial collaboration on whether there is gender bias in academic science (in hiring, grant funding, teacher ratints, salaries, etc). Slow, Costly Clinical Trials Drag Down Biomedical Breakthroughs Sasha Chapin on MDMA therapy Chalm … | Continue reading
Review on the role of the microbiome and gut barrier dysfunction in aging Gene therapy, now available in cream format On post rationalists DOE funding research in LENR ("cold fusion") Building a better NIH Patrick Collison interviews Sam Altman Good critique of a16z's dishonest S … | Continue reading
Per one of the few people working at the intersection of LLMs and cybersecurity, we're far from everything getting hacked by AutoGPTs. Related: Microsoft Security Copilot Most US colleges have abandoned standardized testing. Mistakenly. Movies that "go hard" Mitigating the role o … | Continue reading
Links Nikunj Koathari's H1B-to-US-residency guide The present, past, and future of pharmaceutical blockbusters Experimental gene therapy trials, happening in the charter city Prospera Estimating ChatGPT's inference costs Ben Reinhardt launches Speculative Technologies (previously … | Continue reading
A gene therapy to reverse wrinkles in mice Winner takes all science The moonwalker shoes Running Twitter on a single machine At last, partial reprogramming extends lifespan in old mice A catalog of big visions for biology and can we build a consciousness-measuring machine? From S … | Continue reading
Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree and Kernel recently (a year ago) embarked in what seems one of the most (or perhaps, the most) ambitious program to slow down (and attempt to reverse) aging: Blueprint. On its face, Blueprint seems like a prescription for good health and longev … | Continue reading
Initially I wanted to write a longer piece on the broad topic of "Bio and ML" but it started to grow too many threads, getting into predicting ADME, reproducibility and translatability of animal research, and how optimistic should we be about organoids. Each of these could be its … | Continue reading
A video explainer of Helion's approach to fusion. Here at Nintil I first covered Helion in 2014 where I noted that their estimate date to commercial fusion back then was 2020 and estimated cost per kWh was $0.04. Unclear what those numbers are right now. What are diffusion models … | Continue reading
Ben Kuhn thinks dispensing life advice is underrated and that we should do it more. In that spirit, here's some of it. When making decisions we take a lot for granted. Most of this is fine, and it's not really feasible to avoid making assumptions completely. If you go out to buy … | Continue reading
Introduction Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu (N-Q) recently published a lengthy essay (30k words) on meta science. Over the past year or two I have been publishing here on meta-scientific topics as well, totaling around 80k words (at this point these are more books than essays!), … | Continue reading
Are technologies inevitable? Scott Aaronson and Tim Nguyen "Quantum Computing: Dismantling the Hype" & "Refuting Weinstein and Wolfram's theories of everything" France has a meta-court Neurosymbolic reasoning making progress New meta-science research showing that the scientific e … | Continue reading
In a previous Links post, and in a recent tweet I expressed my relative lack of excitement about what a lot of people are doing with what I called "the AI stuff" (narrowly, large language models and diffusion models, collectively "generative AI"; excluding e.g. Tesla's FSD or Alp … | Continue reading
Rain is a startup that fights wildfires. They now have a second version of their system, a large unmanned drone. I was not particularly enthusiastic about that first drone, but their second iteration looks promising. I amended my wildfires post accordingly. Orexin and the quest f … | Continue reading
In a post in my Alzheimer's series I discussed the not-so-promising monoclonal antibodies against amyloid beta. There are a few other therapies one could discuss, especially tau antibodies, but first I wanted to examine a particular one that has nothing to do with the most popula … | Continue reading
In a previous post I explained the basics of Alzheimer's disease and the current state of the art in our understanding of it. I focused on the amyloid-tau story while hinting at the fact that there are other factors worth exploring. I mentioned the "repeated failures of Alzheimer … | Continue reading
This post, and some that will follow are my attempt to reconcile the repeated failures of Alzheimer's drugs in the clinic with the evidence that the general consensus in the field that the amyloid cascade hypothesis (ACH) is true. Ultimately, what is really causing Alzheimer's, a … | Continue reading
The story of the "Corporate Memphis" (aka superflat) art style Recent interview with Laura Deming Yann LeCun on the future of AI The rise and fall of Cryptokitties (not surprised) Software engineering at Google, the book Interview with Flexport's Ryan Petersen Ezra Klein-Patrick … | Continue reading
The "what is aging" question is a recurrent one in geroscience (I have my own take here), but everyone would agree that if we take something that we deem old, do something to it, and then we have no way of telling that apart from a younger version of itself, then it's fair to say … | Continue reading
Common tech jobs described as cabals of mesoamerican wizards Is the cell really a machine? AI scaling might hit a plateau soon as we run out of data. Large language model skepticism, from the same author. Organ problems? No problem! An Israeli company wants to grow embryous made … | Continue reading
You have arrived in the Bay Area after a multi-hour long flight from somewhere afar. You conclude California is the best place on Earth and you feel you belong here. Then you realize it's hard to stay. I am a Spanish citizen and I live in the US. For a long time I had wanted to c … | Continue reading
Summary Existential risk due to artificial intelligence (hereafter AI risk) is worth taking seriously A common reason why it is not taken seriously is that arguments or scenarios that illustrate the risks from AI contain many "sci-fi" elements that many consider highly implausibl … | Continue reading
OpenPhil's report on the social returns to research. Seems about right. Themes in Elon Musk's emails Don't be dumb Talk to each other clearly Self-management Micromanagement is good How common is independent discovery? Pick a discovery or innovation at random, and the probability … | Continue reading
For those diet coke drinkers among you, yes aspartame is perfectly fine. It probably is not some kind of secret nootropic either. IVF is a procedure commonly associated with infertility treatments as a last resort option. It is also a requirement if one wants to do any embryo scr … | Continue reading
I've seen "Ineffective Altruism" used a couple of times to poke fun at EAs. I remember the first time I saw the phrasing I jumped to some state inbetween of amused and confused. Ineffective Altruism sounds jocular (who would oppose something effective!) so what must be going on i … | Continue reading
Unsurprisingly, human capital matters more than buildings for scientific output. Also, some evidence for the Newton hypothesis. Equipment Supply Shocks. And how Steve Jobs got a law changed to be able to get every school in California a computer. Inside Fast's (An apparel company … | Continue reading