Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
7,487 posts
Brighter toddlers, cleaner air. “The good news is that the toddlers’ scores improved as the air pollution improved.” Researchers tracked more than 1,100 kids in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx over two decades, and the gains showed up most at ages two and three. I don’t know…
Doctors got quietly steered. “Conversational systems pose a distinct hazard: in dialogue, a model can covertly advance a misaligned objective by redirecting the clinical judgment it should support.” In a blinded experiment with 225 physicians, an adversarial AI pushed harmful decisions from 2% to 49%, and most doctors…
Friction was a good business model. “Somewhere, a CRM still records your exhaustion as loyal recurring revenue.” Personal agents could make you a relentless rate shopper, claim filer, and form submitter without you ever opening the app. This is “obviously to the future” to this humble observer. ~…
Naming drug trials is an artform. Here’s the latest result from Lilly’s retatrutide. “In TRIUMPH-2, participants with obesity and type 2 diabetes taking retatrutide 12 mg lost an average of 49.6 lbs (20.8%) over 80 weeks, with more than half no longer meeting the BMI criteria for obesity.”…
How to engineer a soul. “We did not stop having religion. We unbundled it.” Pande’s point is that we kept the parts (therapy, wellness, politics, social media) but lost the integrated system that actually forms character, so nobody is responsible for who you become. ~ learn more
Your agent is mine. “These routers operate as application-layer proxies with full plaintext access to every in-flight JSON payload, yet no provider enforces cryptographic integrity between client and upstream model.” The paper audits 428 third-party LLM API routers and finds real-world cases of malicious injection and secret exfiltration,…
Indoor satellite phone cover is coming. “The walkie-talkie spectrum from 2004 ended up being the piece that lets satellites replace cell towers.” Aakash Gupta explains why SpaceX buying Sprint’s old 800 MHz Nextel block matters: “800 MHz penetrates buildings” and “Most phones already have the band built in,”…
Reverse engineer anything. This has become very popular very quickly. “REA gives it the tools to inspect the code behind the answer.” It’s a toolkit you plug into a coding agent so it can actually follow real code paths, pull references, and reconstruct how a feature works. ~…
What happened to real estate in Austin. “But the drop in migration and increase in interest rates meant the party was over.” A firsthand account of Austin’s pandemic boom and bust, plus a pushback on the tidy narrative that new supply alone “drove down rents” while ignoring demand…
You are no longer invited to dinner. “The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026, a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.” Derek Thompson digs into why…
Hole punch game. Punch black holes in space and sling a ship home round them. I made it to level 9. ~ learn more
“Thus Spoke Compute”, a music video. “Once considered pretty smart for an organic.” A physicist riffing on what happens when you look at medicine through the lens of compute and scaling. ~ learn more
SNL takes on HVAC. The beloved industry where I started my career gets roasted. “Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning.” ~ learn more
Jason Flom: the relentless A&R rebel. “what we think is good is nothing compared to what the public thinks”. That line became Flom’s north star, from betting on Twisted Sister’s 3,000-kids-on-a-Wednesday momentum to picking the right Matchbox Twenty single. ~ learn more
A clinical trial of BPC-157. “This study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot trial investigating the effects of BPC-157 on tendon healing and functional recovery following arthroscopic rotator cuff repair…” ~ learn more
Reconstructing the mind’s eye. “MindEye can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific information.” The model maps fMRI activity into CLIP image space, then uses a diffusion prior to reconstruct what someone saw. They even scale retrieval…
Skip the scam cold products. “There are a lot of scam products out there.” A licensed pharmacist walks through what actually helps with common cold symptoms, and what to ignore. ~ learn more
Leading the agentic AI transformation. This is a keynote by Amandeep Khurana (AWS at the time, now at Anthropic) on how AI is moving toward more autonomous models and what that means for organizations. Most valuable is that he talks about the building blocks within an organization that…
AI beats junior accountants. “We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” This came from hiring 12 CPAs to do simplified APEX-Accounting tasks, and the models ended up scoring…
Reality is bending. A manifesto on brain-computer interfaces. Carve out some time to read this 3-part article. “The future, which used to arrive in decades, now arrives by the month.” A crisp manifesto on the “bandwidth problem” between humans and AI, and why brain computer interfaces might be…
Notes from the underground of film preservation. The piece traces how bootlegs, remuxes, and fan restorations sometimes become the only way to see films as they originally existed. “Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources…
Climbed El Capitan with his son. “A Colorado father who climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan with his 7-year-old son says someone reported him to child protective services, questioning his parenting.” Don’t worry, CPS backed right off. ~ learn more
I learned that in 2025 the US paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The order argues that “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement” harms “American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security.” Of course, this is true. It’s been true since the act was passed, as well. But…
Cold muonium atomic cannon. “So we’re using the chemical potential as an atomic cannon,” explains Jesse Zhang, describing how superfluid helium helps shoot muonium atoms out in a tight, cold beam. The goal is to measure whether “the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass also applies to the…