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…

In a post in my Alzheimer's series I discussed the not-so-promising monoclonal antibodies against amyloid beta. There are a few other therapies one could discuss, especially tau antibodies, but first I wanted to examine a particular one that has nothing to do with the most popular approaches currently on their way to the clinic. This is a relatively shallow examination of the topic, focused on the question of whether it works, and less so on how it works. That intervention is GENUS, or Gamma Entrainment Usi…

Rain is a startup that fights wildfires. They now have a second version of their system, a large unmanned drone. I was not particularly enthusiastic about that first drone, but their second iteration looks promising. I amended my wildfires post accordingly. Orexin and the quest for more waking hours (thread) Scannell on predictive validity in drug discovery Matt Levine on crypto. I didn't learn anything surprising (been following the space for years), but the piece hits some of the themes I had in mind for …

In a previous post I explained the basics of Alzheimer's disease and the current state of the art in our understanding of it. I focused on the amyloid-tau story while hinting at the fact that there are other factors worth exploring. I mentioned the "repeated failures of Alzheimer's drugs in the clinic". This post is about that. I mostly focused on the Aducanumab case, with solanezumab and lecanemab as contrasts. These trials have been used as evidence against the amyloid cascade hypothesis (ACH). …

This post, and some that will follow are my attempt to reconcile the repeated failures of Alzheimer's drugs in the clinic with the evidence that the general consensus in the field that the amyloid cascade hypothesis (ACH) is true. Ultimately, what is really causing Alzheimer's, and how might it be stopped? This post will not critically discuss evidence for or against the ACH, rather it will explain what the current accepted definition is, and how it came to be. I know everyone wants to read an analysis of c…

The story of the "Corporate Memphis" (aka superflat) art style Recent interview with Laura Deming Yann LeCun on the future of AI The rise and fall of Cryptokitties (not surprised) Software engineering at Google, the book Interview with Flexport's Ryan Petersen Ezra Klein-Patrick Collison interview (Alex Berger comments on a thread, I comment below) Interview with David Holz, founder of Midjourney "This document is my attempt to keep a thematic list of all the problems that affect academic res…