under the microscope

Brain scans can now see your mental imagery.

Who’s ready for this future? “Our proposed framework successfully reconstructed both seen images (i.e., those observed by the human eye) and imagined images from brain activity. Quantitative evaluation showed that our framework could identify seen and imagined images highly accurately […]

to your health

Interview with Whoop’s head of performance science.

Kristen Holmes is in an enviable position for many health researchers, given the large proprietary dataset she has access to. In addition to the data streams from millions of fitness trackers, the company has a pile date-stamped and labeled event […]

to your health

When co-pays kill.

“Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for […]

tech, startups, internet

The geopolitics of AI: May 2024.

“This sequence of events illustrates how the AI arms race is making geopolitical divides simultaneously more fraught and simpler. In its quest to defend US companies’ IP and prevent China from accessing the most advanced capabilities, the US government is […]

tech, startups, internet

Wisdom of the silicon crowds.

Human forecasting accuracy gets much better when aggregating predictions from a lot of individuals. LLMs are especially bad forecasters compared to these human crowds. But what about crowds of LLMs? “Our finding opens the door for simple, practically applicable steps […]

fun facts

Renaissance Technologies makes a lot of money.

Founder Jim Simons passed away this week, shortly after I finished listening to Acquired’s 3-hour review of the impressive investment firm he built. “RenTec’s alchemic colossus has posted annual returns in the firm’s flagship Medallion Fund of 68% gross and […]

fun facts

My face blind life.

Allison Sinclair has an extreme clinical level of prosopagnosia, face blindness. “Why, just this week I found out that the friendly strawberry blonde woman at work is not one person but two. No wonder our ongoing conversations get confusing!” ~ […]