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 …
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!), going into the minutiae of various foundational papers and talking points. The points I make throughout my work are sometimes rarely found elsewhere in writing though they are often discussed in person in the metascience community (…
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 ecosystem does not discriminate against novel research. Regardless of their prior opinion, I expect no one will change their mind based on this paper.
Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational…
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 AlphaFold). In an even earlier tweet, I asked Twitter if we had learned anything new from LLMs yet, as opposed to LLMs telling us what we (the internet) already knew; the conclusion being that we have not. Nostalgeb…