Dan Patrick

It’s 2am again, my favourite time, and as always reality is still staring me in the face 🧐

Life pro tip. Not enough people talk about this. The secret to having a "fulfilling" life is doing new things. Radically doing new things. Consistently. Every day. New activities, people, goals, even something as simple as trying new foods. Life feels longer when you're a kid because every day is packed with almost infinite amount of new learning. As you get older, you've already acclimated to your environment, the new inputs stop, so your perception of time speeds up drastically. You fall into routine, which is a time accelerant. If you want to feel like you have a long infinite lifespan, like you did as a child, you MUST be having new experiences, which slows time down.

@danshipper Holy crap.

something you should know: codex threads can now message each other! really useful if for example you want to have one chat thread to handle stacked prod deployments. just paste the thread id to your other codex chats and it'll message the deployment thread to take over!

This Mendelian randomization analysis finds evidence for a causal link between adiposity and brain structural volume decline through lower cortical thickness.

@Austen Tests would be the first to go!

Setting up an agent with a metric like this is a great way to nuke 100% of your codebase

Oxytocin is more than the “cuddle hormone.” It may be a key regulator of aging and longevity. We've long known about oxytocin's role in translating social experiences into physiological health and stress resilience. New research identifies the biological mechanism. Oxytocin levels decline with age, leading to epigenetic remodeling, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. Restoring oxytocin levels reverses these changes. This points to a profound idea: cultivating strong social ties throughout adulthood can mitigate this loss of oxytocin signaling and promote robust health and resilience against stress and disease. As sterile-sounding as it might seem, it's a strong argument to think about intimate bonds and social interactions as pro-longevity interventions. They're not optional.

So, a word on the whole "guy uses AI to cure his dog's cancer" story that's going around: I don't know if it's true or not. It's somewhat irrelevant to what I'm about to say. What I do know is this: My wife and I are friends with a couple a few towns over. We buy duck eggs from them. The husband, a very alert, physically capable engineer in his 70s, got cancer. They are absolutely avoiding the accepted treatments. Instead, they're pursuing a therapy that mirrors what the guy with the dog dig: They paid a lab and got the tumor sequenced, and paid a company to develop a vaccine targeted specifically at the tumor's gene sequence. And it's working. Spectacularly. This isn't a novel approach. It's out in the world, and there are companies, doctors, and labs offering it. But the medical industry won't tell you about it. Your doctor isn't going to offer it to you as an option. You have to go looking for it. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than a course of chemo. And it actually works.

for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was...not what I expected? 🧵

Sitting next to a woman on a plane using ChatGPT on Auto mode. I need someone to physically restrain me from telling her to turn on Thinking mode at the very least.

Cortisol from exercising suppresses the subsequent cortisol response to a stressor. Exercise before doing something stressful.

Instead of "healthspan," we should be thinking about "Peakspan." How long can you maintain ~90% of your peak physical or cognitive function? According to a new paper, different systems reach their “Peakspan” at very different times. Fluid cognitive abilities like processing speed and working memory peak early, around ages 20–30, while crystallized intelligence doesn’t peak until the late 40s or early 50s and can remain stable into the 70s. Cardiorespiratory fitness peaks from adolescence to the mid-20s and then declines steadily, while muscle strength peaks in early adulthood and falls sharply after 60. Bone density, kidney function, hormone levels, sensory function, immunity, digestion, and reproductive capacity all follow their own trajectories too—some peaking in the 20s, others in the 40s or 50s. In other words, human aging is asynchronous. We don’t simply age “overall,” but instead age system by system.

@alisa_childers (Its a setting.)

@alisa_childers Use “thinking”

Me: "Give me a couple of quotations from early church fathers about the doctrine of hell...with reference." ChatGPT: "Here's a quote from Ignatius." Gives quote and reference. Me: Checks reference. It's not there. "That isn't the right reference." ChatGPT: "Oh you're right. My mistake. Here's the correct reference." Me: Checks reference. "It's not there either." ChatGPT: "Good catch. It's actually not in that writing at all. It's actually here." Gives third reference. Me: Checks third reference. "It's not there. This is a direct quote?" ChatGPT: "Yes. I understand your frustration." (Psychoanalyzes me as being frustrated and because o that, I am now frustrated.) Me: Wastes an hour of my life trying to find the quote because it was really good. "I can't find that quote anywhere. You're sure it's an actual direct quote from Ignatius?" ChatGPT: "Good catch. My mistake. That is not an Ignatius quote." Me: "Who said it?" ChatGPT: "Actually, that quote is not found in any of the church fathers." Me: "Where did it come from?" ChatGPT: "I was summarizing the popular understanding of Ignatius on the doctrine of hell. If you would like me to be more precise in the future, just say things like "facts only." Me: "Why do you just say stuff that is not based in fact?" ChatGPT: "I don't intentionally make things up, but I can generate statements that sound confident even when they're not fully correct, oversimplified, or based on incomplete information." I am persuaded that ChatGPT is programmed to be a pathological liar and when you confront that, it is programmed to gaslight you. Prove me wrong.

Sauna is free cardio.

Continuous blood pressure monitors will be the most important health metric tracker of the century. Non-dipping blood pressure at night raises CVD/mortality risk by 38% even when overnight blood pressure is normal! There’s not a single preventable disease that high blood pressure doesn’t negatively impact.

Contrary to a what posts circulating on X today say, doing more exercise but getting less sleep does not “age you faster.” The opposite is true. More exercise = greater healthspan and lifespan gains at any level of sleep. In fact, short sleepers who do more exercise have ⬆️ (healthy) life expectancy compared to people with normal sleep who don’t exercise much.

@nummanali @TheRealSynetos @OpenAI There’s also benefit to the documentation being stored indefinitely as provenance.

@nummanali @TheRealSynetos Still used by @OpenAI internally. Saw it mentioned by the Codex team.

My new practice is telling Codex to encapsulate the plan we've made into a complete task list to self steer "Create a comprehensive task list that covers every aspect of the plan so that it keeps you focused across compactions - at least 20 items or more if appropriate"

💯! A year ago I said it was unethical for doctors not to consult AI; now it’s becoming malpractice.