I used to think that you could love someone unconditionally or conditionally, and I never really thought that you could do both at the same time, but it just occurred to me today that this is indeed not only possible but advisable! Unconditional love needs no introduction: it’s welcoming someone as they are, fully and deeply. A common attitude is that this is the love of parents for their babies…
Dynomight on the rise of colorectal (and other types of) cancer in young people Writing is thinking: a case against using AI for writing Can you (if you are a worm, that is) acquire memories by eating them ? On how patterns emerge out of the entropic damage of aging (the topic of my from chaos, order post) On choosing a meditation path and Carmen Lau's experiences along the Path I ask Twitter :…
One morning I got a call from my younger brother Jaime. He was crying. He tells me my mom’s health, which had been slowly declining over the past month from advanced cancer, had reached the point where not much time was left. I was shocked. I felt the inertia of my regular life: not wanting to let people at work down, the meditation retreat I had booked for next week. I cried in the shower. I…
Monoclonal antibodies against Abeta continue to have lackluster performance (I have a standing bet that this will continue) Rapamycin tested in a human clinical trial over 13 weeks on various strength endpoints, didn't work On Writing AI Constitutions Meditation-induced timelessness Why are young people having more colorectal cancer? Deep jhana
I just recorded a new podcast you can find here . It's my favorite one so far! Hope you enjoy it.
The use of the Forced Perspective Technique in Lord of the Rings To my surprise, OpenAI seemingly didn't get their money back for GPT5's training if one includes the costs of running the org. I have this longstanding (but not deeply examined yet) intuition that even though very useful, LLM labs might end up becoming like airlines even when they develop super intelligence: low market cap, low…
At a recent retreat, I found myself sitting on a cushion facing a wall while my meditation partner sat to my side, outside of my visual field and started reading to me " From You to Infinity ", pointing-out instructions from Ken Wilber. The text is quite trippy to read. What happened next was quite intriguing and it was probably the most significant experience of my life thus far so I wanted to…
"The Claude Constitution is a beautiful document. Incomplete and overly verbose in some ways, but in a necessary way", I said on Twitter . It is beautiful in that it is self-aware, transparent, honest, and embodies these virtues, which are the kinds of virtues it is trying to instill into the model itself. This, the idea that a text may embody the ideas it tries to convey, I find quite…
Since the recent disappointingly small effects of monoclonal antibodies on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) progression, there has been lots of discourse around what the cause of Alzheimer's might be. "If not amyloid then what is it?", many wonder. What is the thing we have to remove? In cancer we remove cancer cells, in treating cardiovascular disease we aim to lower LDL particles and that massively…
Bacteria isolated from japanese tree frogs shown to work better in mice against cancer than doxorubicin or checkpoint inhibitors CAR-T to treat cardiovascular disease New proteomics clock, I wrote a brief thread with some commentary On the (deranged, imho) economics of space-based data centers; Elon likes the idea but he'll be proven wrong on this one: DSHR 's blog, with an observation I had been…
Nasa's orion is flaming garbage Looks like the AI 2027 report scenario isn't happening and money is running out , fundraising is no longer enough, and large debt raises are now happening . Derek Thompson and Tim Lee on AI bubble discourse. In what sense is life suffering? ( related ) Oakland guy makes klein bottles, stores them under his houses, retrieves them with a custom RC mini forklift A…
Book Review of Breakneck from Noah Smith, endorsed On China and rare earths Rotating detonation engines Progress in pan-cancer therapy DOGE and its consequences in the federal government The AI revolution in radiology that never was Pictures of the old and new colliding ( bonus ) Learning fashion like an engineer On testosterone measurement Huel is fine to drink, despite the high lead allegations.…
I just turned 33 and thought: What are some lessons I keep coming back to? What would I have told my younger self? Each of this could take an entire post to unfold and I don't expect them all to make sense to you. To some extent these say more about me than they say about the rest of the world. Don't take them as advice to follow, but meditating on their truth may be useful to you. Turns out it’s…
One of the reasons I like living in the Bay Area are the social occasions one rarely finds anywhere else. One such recent one I attended was Slutcon (more on the event here ). When I first saw the event announcement showing up on twitter, I bought tickets without thinking it twice. A heuristic I live by is living as if you're the main character in some novel and do what would go along with the…
Two scientists may look at the same data and draw different conclusions. Faced with a problem to solve they may see different solutions as the obvious way to go. The cause of this is scientific taste: one's crystalized collection of priors about how the slice of nature of interest works. I like to think of taste as tinted glasses: you can look at a phenomenon through different lenses and notice…
What is aging and how to measure it is an everpresent question in the field of aging research. Given the complexity of biology many give up on the task, proclaiming that "we" (either the field or humanity) don't understand aging. I don't. To me, what aging is is clear enough, and we can understand it as a fractal and emergent phenomenon within a system: there's aging of DNA, aging of cells, aging…
Lithium orotate seems to help with Alzheimer's Electronics components have gotten very very cheap in the past few decades On LLM adoption from Zvi Mowshowitz On the wild stories where someone that gets an organ transplant sometimes experience personality changes, and single cell learning. HIV drugs as potential anti-aging drugs Upcoming book about industrial efficiency Alternative to LASIK coming?…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Why can't biology move faster ? How El Salvador solved their crime problems with a gigaprison: CECOT Robot dexterity is still difficult Why did Doordash win ? Equity trader does ayahuasca , becomes psychedelic facilitator, then addicted to ketamine, then explains Elon on ketamine . "Spare human bodies" for transplantation Profile of Steve Davies, who runs DOGE The Purism , a $2000 smartphone…
Sasha Chapin on Enjoying Things and Being Sasha Chapin Scott Alexander reviews The Body keeps the Score. I recently read the book, which makes claims that will sound familiar and even obvious to many people that have engaged with many forms of therapy, particularly the idea that events that happened in someone's childhood can affect their current mental health. But I learned there that the author…
There's this practice called Circling 1 that I do sometimes. I remember before I did it the first time I tried to get a sense of what it was like: Why do people do this? Are there mistakes that I can learn to avoid? There wasn't much I found written that I found that useful, with the exception of this post from Aella and this other one from Tasshin Fogleman. [1]. Circling is a registered trademark…
An inside view via 19 cameras of the NYC restaurant Crown Shy (which I recommend, get the gruyere frites and the roasted short rib) Curtis Yarvin's recent interview [ transcript ]. The interviewer's reaction near the beginning sums up part of mine "I'm asking you what you had for breakfast and you go "Well, since the dawn of time!!, just answers"+"I find the depth of background information…
First commercial-scale fusion plant plans announced , to be built in the early 2030s Roger Penrose's biography Renaissance Philantrophy (and within, a link to recent research on wearable cortisol trackers!) Bringing Elon to a knife fight Google Willow , their new quantum chip Something I long suspected: Most of senescent cells are immune cells (hence immune rejuvenation should also solve cellular…
Laura Deming on understanding Interesting uses of AI The memes of the wealthy Elon dreams and bitter lessons Nabeel on Palantir Scott reviews Deep Utopia Meditation, considered harmful There is no placebo effect Dwarkesh interviews Gwern Restoring fertility with iMSC transplantation in monkeys Profile of James Fickel, a not very well known crypto backer of many impactful projects in the longevity…
Lots of interest in gene editing startups but in practice they don't do that well: Few diseases can be corrected through gene editing, hence valuations of such companies, despite FDA approvals , are low. Compare with addressing shared causes of multi-morbidity like aging or obesity. If you want to work on the former, at Retro.bio we are hiring :) The decline of social status of stay at home moms…