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…

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 own post. Instead I'll make some high level points and point to a number of recent writings that collectively express what I wanted to say. We are far from understanding all of biology, but that's okay Biology is hard to …

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 re…

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 bread, you're assuming the bakery you're going to is open, that they have the bread you want, and that you are not going to get murdered on the way there. You could, in principle, before taking any action, check on Google Maps that …