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 there about "situational awareness".
AI risk discourse is so back, and I haven't blogged in a while, so now it's a good time, there was something I've been thinking about for months that I had to put in writing at some poin…
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 State of Crypto report
Treating sarcopenia with AAV
Shake a mouse's brain with ultrasound, get them to sleep and reduce their body temperature
Derek Lowe on the recent collapse of BenevolentAI (related tweet by me)
Small LL…
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 of age-related somatic mutation burden
Sarah Constantin on AI Doomerism. TLDR: AGI is further away than the doomers think (And I agree).
In contrast, Richard Ngo's list of predictions for AI in 2025. One of them im particul…
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 PARPA)
A proposal to accelerate funding decisions at the NIH
The coming of local LLMs
What's the most beautiful place of worship in the world?
New FROs launched!
Dialogue on Viriditas
No physicists? No problem: (advances in) Deep s…
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 Sam Rodriques
Relatedly to that last post, the Wigner Friend experiment
Making transparent mice
Natália Mendonça's critique of Slime Mold Time Mold's series of explainers of obesity in the US
Reducing the cost of Perturb-seq by 4-20x…
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 longevity: diet, exercise, and supplements. Hence many have focused on the specific supplements that Johnson is taking. Andrew Steele, author of the primer to the longevity field Ageless did a video going over the key points of Blueprint…