Is erithrytol bad? Is aspartame bad?
As I noted in my Alzheimer's series, a promising target to treat the disease is phosphoryated tau (the 'fire' the keeps the disease burning) as opposed to amyloid beta (the 'spark' that triggers AD but does not keep it going). A recent attempt at reducing tau
A reason why microbiome research is widely thought to be not of high quality: Small variations to sample preparation techniques seem to have large effects on the bacteria that end up being analized
"Fake work&q…
Scott's links post. A highlight is (13), an adversarial collaboration on whether there is gender bias in academic science (in hiring, grant funding, teacher ratints, salaries, etc).
Slow, Costly Clinical Trials Drag Down Biomedical Breakthroughs
Sasha Chapin on MDMA therapy
Chalmers wins long time running bet on whether consciousness would be understood by now
Matt Clancy and Tammy Besiroglu on AI and explosive growth
A weird fossil-inspired mansion in Joshua Tree
An economic analysis of Varda, the space ma…
[Note 2026-08-26: As of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident recently, now I don't stand by what I wrote in this essay. In the future I might be able to get back to it and see exactly where I went wrong in my thinking, tho there were already signs that something was off in the end of it (where I can't fully ground what I'm saying). Tentatively, I'll say my intuition regarding "what is constant during training doesn't get learned" is still right in isolation, but when models are given system prompts (Y…
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…