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, a Lilian Weng explainer

Alphonse Mucha, Art Nouveau graphic artist. You have probably seen some of his work but may not know who he was until now.

I wrote some thoughts here about leveraging the Icelandic Mutation (that confers resistance to Alzheimer's) to cure the disease. Not as optimistic as I initially was for treating the disease but it continues to be the best we have to prevent it.

The difference between IQ and intelligence, and whether education increases them

Sasha Chapin does Janas

Using deep learning to model the hierarchical structure and function of a cell

How to replace your backends with postgres

The future of medicine looks less like "find small molecule that fits a pocket in a protein" and more like gene therapies, cell therapies, and pathway engineering.

ChatGPT and its lineage

Paper argues for understanding protein folding for first principles. My aesthetic says probably not.

There are various kinds of "fast aging" or progeroid mice. It's commonly agreed that these don't represent "real" aging but some do seem to be useful to model some parts of it.

New QRI paper on the "Slicing problem"

Ben Kuhn on staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Scientist goes around decapitating worms that grow back their heads, collects results

What does the NIF fusion achievement mean? From the point of view of eventual commercial fusion, not much.

The story of VaccinateCA

I ask Twitter about co-CEOs

A snippet from David Friedman's Legal systems very different from our own

I enable Extreme Taleb Mode in ChatGPT

What's cooler than diffusion models for images? Diffusion for proteins and songs. Diffuse all the things!

LLMs continue to take over biology

The insane adventures of Francis Galton