Links (92)

Book Review of Breakneck from Noah Smith, endorsed On China and rare earths Rotating detonation engines Progress in pan-cancer therapy DOGE and its consequences in the federal government The AI revolution in radiology that never was Pictures of the old and new colliding (bonus) Learning fashion like an engineer On testosterone measurement Huel is fine to drink, despite the high lead allegations. Here a trustworthy Huel enjoyer shows his blood tests. Towards Consciousness Engineering You can survive on one k…

33 Things I've Learned at 33

I just turned 33 and thought: What are some lessons I keep coming back to? What would I have told my younger self? Each of this could take an entire post to unfold and I don't expect them all to make sense to you. To some extent these say more about me than they say about the rest of the world. Don't take them as advice to follow, but meditating on their truth may be useful to you. Turns out it’s possible to talk to people for reasons other than learning new facts about the world. Some call this ‘vibing’…

Slutcon, or the attractiveness of embodied authenticity

One of the reasons I like living in the Bay Area are the social occasions one rarely finds anywhere else. One such recent one I attended was Slutcon (more on the event here). When I first saw the event announcement showing up on twitter, I bought tickets without thinking it twice. A heuristic I live by is living as if you're the main character in some novel and do what would go along with the overarching story while being fun to read. And in this case the plot demanded that I go. I didn't feel like writing …

Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes

Two scientists may look at the same data and draw different conclusions. Faced with a problem to solve they may see different solutions as the obvious way to go. The cause of this is scientific taste: one's crystalized collection of priors about how the slice of nature of interest works. I like to think of taste as tinted glasses: you can look at a phenomenon through different lenses and notice different things with each. These views are not to be thought of as right or wrong in isolation. Rather, they may …

From chaos, order: On the nature and measurement of biological aging

What is aging and how to measure it is an everpresent question in the field of aging research. Given the complexity of biology many give up on the task, proclaiming that "we" (either the field or humanity) don't understand aging. I don't. To me, what aging is is clear enough, and we can understand it as a fractal and emergent phenomenon within a system: there's aging of DNA, aging of cells, aging of organs, aging of organisms. To understand aging and measure it we have to be reasonably acquainted…

Links (91)

Lithium orotate seems to help with Alzheimer's Electronics components have gotten very very cheap in the past few decades On LLM adoption from Zvi Mowshowitz On the wild stories where someone that gets an organ transplant sometimes experience personality changes, and single cell learning. HIV drugs as potential anti-aging drugs Upcoming book about industrial efficiency Alternative to LASIK coming? A first person report of participating in a Phase 1 clinical trial In defense of the Amyloid hypothesis (See pr…