Clouds in Finland (1908) by Konrad Krzyżanowski
- Links in Progress: Snakebites, Pig Hearts, and More
- 50k people die from venomous snakebites every year just in India. the century-old method for creating antivenom is injecting venom into a large animal, and bleeding that animal to harvest its antivenom. UDub used AI instead.
- we have a new vaccine against Ebola that reduces chances by 84% in Democratic Republic of Congo
- genetics, not diet or exercise – are the biggest predictor of which mice live longer
- 6bil male chicks are killed in the egg industry each year. in ovo sexing tech (identifying sex of chicken before it hatches can avoid this) just entered the US market, Germany and France enacted a ban on chick culling in 2022.
- 500k Americans have lung cancer at any given time. a mutation called EGFR drives faster tumor growth, common in Asia.
- Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family paid 7.4 bil settlement with 15 US states for lawsuits around opioid crisis
- second pig-to-human heart transplant failed, the pig was gene edited, adding genes that help with inflammation and blood clotting, and deleting the ones that trigger human immune responses. he died 40 days post-surgery
- Chinese biotech has 6280 drugs in development, a 1200% increase over 10 years ago, and 2/3 as many as US
- OpenAI and Retro Biosciences trained an AI model to design transcription factors that are highly capable at converting regular cells into stem cells.
- Stuff you should have been taught in college but weren't
- most hiring managers of fresh grads are looking for ambition and self-awareness. someone who is agentic and understands their strengths and weaknesses.
- build a track record
- make the first line item of your resume strong enough to get the second
- 2-3 years in a particular job before switching shows commitment, unless you get a much better offer your existing employer is unable to match
- doing only what you're told doesn't generate exponential value, understand how you fit into your team and how your team fits into the org as a whole, use your technical skills to analyze this complex machine
- understand what the bottlenecks are and go fix them. they're ugly annoying problems that are low prestige and dirty work. this is the best place for new hires to cut their teeth, learn the ropes, understand how things really work, to build a reputation for getting stuff done.
- IC vs management:
- IC: obsessed enough with your technical field to remain an authority, and your company is big and stable, and your technical field doesn't suddenly become obsolete, it's a great life
- management: higher stress and greater responsibility -> higher comp, and skills are more legible and portable outside a company
- direct feedback can hurt your ego, but it's a sign you care more about your feelings than about being excellent
- it doesn't matter how good you are at your job, building trust with your management is the most important thing
- always make your boss look good
- build resilience and develop emotional maturity
- if you're ambitious and dedicated, you're signing up for more and larger failures. all successful people have cultivated the ability to persist through substantial discomfort, and to never give up
- favorite interview questions: "what's the most expensive thing you've broken?"
- get rejected more, whatever it takes to get over the part of your ego that presupposes that the universe owes you anything for existing
- "everything in our world was built by someone, who had a vision for what the world could be and worked tirelessly until it was so."
- deliberately and consciously set yourself challenging tasks and retrospectively grade your performance.
- Personal moats in the 21st century
- the ability to read long-form content
- write frequently, encourages structured thinking, helpful for communicating concepts
- a healthy body: sleep enough and well, don't overeat carbs, make time for exercise, work hard and smart, get used to eating healthy food
- get lucky: constantly hunt for golden opportunities. expose yourself to new and interesting people
- generate unique ideas: think about what you'd improve in the world, notice things that annoy you and how you'd fix them.
- be skeptical and optimistic: don't just nod when someone says something. think if what they're saying is correct. get in the habit of judicious thinking.
- embrace adventure: act when you find hidden gold. don't worry about the potential downside and forget the upside
- get busy: get in the habit of doing stuff. do anything you enjoy that also provides value to other humans. do it as much as possible.
- know your mind: what you need is emotional stability, identify your own emotions and in the third person and not get caught up in them. meditation helps. once you're self-aware you can exploit your personality to your benefit. reflect on what motivates you and use that to hold yourself accountable.
- develop an inspiring environment: surround yourself with people who motivate you, or read about great people. talk to people to define and sharpen your thoughts
- Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
- what's odd about you is what's interesting. just try to amuse yourself
- the more you incorporate everything you love and that comes easily for you, your style emerges
- people sound more like themselves in chat messages, the format also encourages you to write from emotion, write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.
- write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter, write to experience what you care about in higher resolution – write to enhance your feeling of aliveness
- a good essay is an interesting mind wrestling with a problem in somewhat real-time
- a simple format: "here is a problem I had and here's how I solved it" or "i haven't solved it yet but these are some reflections"
- write a hundred pieces, each time take one thing and make it better
- read kafka's diary, he didn't rewrite sentences, he flipped pages and start new drafts from scratch
- edit once you have a good draft – find sharper words, but don't edit too much
- writing & worlding – laurel schwulst
- "the 'extended mind thesis,' originally established by philosopher and cognitive scientists andy clark and david chalmers in 1998, shares that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain, or even the body, but extends beyond and into the physical world."
- i.e. this blog holds important information about my life, if one day i lose this blog, according to this theory, i'm losing part of my mind.
- writing as a sensory organ, we notice vibrations in our daily lives, things that we notice over and over again.
- how a professional translator uses LLMs for translation
- "When I am unable to think of a good English version for a particular sentence, I give the Japanese and English versions of the paragraph it is contained in to an LLM (usually, these days, Claude) and ask for ten suggestions for translations of the problematic sentence. Usually one or two of the suggestions work fine; if not, I ask for ten more. (Using an LLM as a sentence-level thesaurus on steroids is particularly wonderful.)"
- life is more than an engineering problem
- it's theoretically possible to build digital entities that have subjective experience, but we don't have a good idea how, and it's not by making LLMs bigger. "It's like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words 'Baby don't hurt me' on them. It doesn't matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything"
- thought experiments often have a science-fictional feel, they are far from reality to highlight the issue. if set in the actual world, it has a contrived quality: famous "trolley problem" is supposedly set in the actual world, but it describes a situation that is extremely artificial; in the real world, we have safeguards precisely to avoid situations like that
- science is not just a body of facts, but also a process, a way of understanding the universe. take light-speed travel, it's impossible, but it reflects the general worldview of science: the idea that the universe is a complicated machine that we can deduce principles by which how the machine works, and develop technology based on those principles.
- scholars believed the perfect language was spoken by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden or by angels, but a perfect language is impossible. it's not a problem of any language when you can't convey something, it's a problem of the language itself.
- the crucial distinction between tools and beings: "AI systems lack preferences; that is true of the systems we have now, and it will be true of any system we build in the foreseeable future."
- on art creation: we can't separate process from result, "Art is all about context. It's not an activity like tightening bolts, where I don't really care whether someone used a conventional wrench or a pneumatic wrench, as long as the bolts are tight."
- brain computer metaphor problem
- "There are many ways in which it is obvious that the brain is not like a computer, but because the computer metaphor is so prevalent, we overlook those differences."
- "Computers consist of software running on hardware, but there is no distinction between software and hardware in biological systems."
- Good Taste
- "if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones"
- don't fight, flight (or freeze) your body and emotions
- fight, flight, and freeze are natural fear respones helpful for physical danger, but often are maladaptive when dealing with emotions
- for procrastination: instead of guilt-tripping, practice self-compassion, identify the specific source of your fear (e.g. fear of disappointing others, perfectionism, past failures)
- for better body awareness: practice mindful observation of physical sensations without judgement, start with safe controlled stressors (exercise soreness), focus on discomfort rather than resisting or distracting from it
- for emotional processing: notice your typical patterns, do you tend to push (fight), avoid (flight), or shut down (freeze)
- for relationships: work on being self-sufficient enough that you don't put your self-esteem in others' hands, practice being okay with hearing "no"
- for healing and growth: treat your wounds like a hurt kitten – with patience and care, don't force recovery – pushing yourself to "get over it" can be counterproductive
- Solar AI Nowcasting with open climate fix
- what? using gen ai to forecast cloud formation hours ahead of time, allowing solar to be more efficiently integrated into the grid through better predictions of intermittent supply.
- who? electricity grid operators, solar farms, solar and storage sites, and smart building operators.
- why? unpredictability of solar power generation creates challenges in efficiently managing power generation, while ensuring end users have an uninterrupted supply of electricity
- input data: recent satellite imagery, live solar power generation data and numerical weather predictions (NWPs)
- how far? minutes to hours into the future
- capturing four markets:
- grid balancing: accurate forecast -> manage grid stability and integration of increased solar capacity
- solar farm operators reduce cost when selling power into grid, losses due to solar forecast errors cost 5% of revenue (£25M)
- smart homes: help homeowners with solar panels optimize energy, saving costs and reducing reliance on non-renewable energy sources
- energy traders: forecast balance of supply and demand to make the best hedging decisions. all wholesale energy supply and generation companies have energy traders; in addition to independent trading firms.