Good post on what the meaning of heritability. Only a crazy person should do any given job A while back I noted that everything sleeps. Now here some recent work on the why. Memory in cells As I noted a while back, inflammaging is not an intrinsic feature of aging; rather it is a byproduct of industrialized lifestyles and most likely just obesity (which increases with age in industrialized countries) On China's shipbuilding industry SSC reviews Steven Byrne's work on AI Against outsourcing, for vertical in…

So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had 'the right size', their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up ("Huh? I thought"). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy c…

The term "agency" is popular these days. Though the term gets many definitions depending on who you ask, I'll define someone agentic as someone that both: Is aware of what's possible, beyond the obvious next step Gets what they want, if that's different from what their environment wants And I'll define an action as agentic if it's vastly more predictable from knowing the individual than from knowing the environment in which the individual is immersed. It's possible to have one, both, or neither.…

Why Pantone colors are so expensive A while back Scott Alexander gave some grants. Here's a status update on said grants. The Claude Bliss Attractor Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation The supply chain behind making a pill of clonazepam Some good advice on writing on the internet Palmer Luckey and the B-Boys Precise gene expression with gene circuits Nattokinase seemingly can reverse atherosclerotic plaque Combine drugs, get rich Why are aerospace parts so expensive? Scott on the missing heritabil…

Sasha Chapin on spiritual awakening Works in Progress links post 50 facts about construction Why aren't more companies working on atherosclerosis plaque removal? Prime Medicine's pipeline then ($16/share) and now ($1.2/share) Casey Handmer questions about AI in 2025 Make thee FDA great again On the importance of precise instructions New podcast, Development & Research; first episode on clinical trial efficiency The Tesla of stoves Owlposting on AI and its application to clinical drug development Patrick…

Retinoids (retinoic acid, retinol, retinal, tretinoin, adapalene, etc) are commonly claimed to both revert and also slow down skin aging. But this seems wrong to me. Reversing aging is quite difficult, and to my knowledge only a handful of things have enough data to support the claim of age-reversal (reprogramming being my go-to example). Slowed aging occurs in animals with caloric restriction and a few other things, but in general the default for both of these effects should be "no effect until proven…