sheesh

My faith in sf is revived

We offer no explanation as to why Noams are so good at AI; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence.

@scaling01 @deredleritt3r lmao i love how ai researchers are discussed like sports stars.

bci stands for brain codex interface btw

humans are really not built for first principles analytical thinking. even smart people find it incredibly exhausting. what we consider analysis is usually anxious panicking and avoiding something or the other. it is clear we are going to be massively outclassed in this soon

My family moved to the US when I was 8, but by the time I turned 20, my dad was still on an H1B (waiting to get processed for a green card). Once I turned 21, I would age out as his dependent, despite the fact that I basically grew up in the US. I thought I'd have to become a code monkey after college, and even that only if I was lucky enough to win the H1B lottery. Otherwise, back to India. I had become a huge fan of @paulg's essays in college. I was actually depressed that my desire to start a startup or do something entrepreneurial was basically hopeless. Working on the promising podcast I was doing as a side project? A beyond impossible pipe dream. Even after 9 years, my dad wasn't able to get a green card - and the lines were only getting longer over time. I figured I'd be an old man before I could quit some FANG job and build my own thing. By some miracle, COVID travel restrictions cleared out the lines, and I got my green card literally months before I would have aged out. If not for this unbelievable coincidence, I would not be hosting the podcast. In the best case, I would be shifting pixels around in the 3rd sub-sub-menu of some big tech software. I'm incredibly grateful I made it through. But it's unconscionable that we put the kids of high skilled immigrants through all this anxiety, and in many cases make them repeat the nerve-racking indentured life trajectory that they had to watch their parents go through.

Focus on what you can control. Build something. Anything. A product. Yourself. A family. Your community. A team. Relationships. Or help someone else build theirs. Don’t complain. Don’t play the victim. Ever. What are you building? #PlayNiceButWin

Teaching my daughter about vibe coding.

When Jeremy Clarkson announced he was opening a farm. I naively thought it would look like this

The whole trick

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun. Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology. Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier. With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

"The question (of meaning) tends to get quieter not when its answered, but when you're living in a way that stops generating it" - Claude Fable 5 Max

Dream with me. Our place in the observable universe. Laniakea is the large-scale structure centered around the Great Attractor that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. Source: Andrew Z. Colvin, tinyurl.com/2n4mx34p

THE VIDEO: Union Pacific Big Boy 4014 passes over the Tunkhannock Viaduct. A 1.2-million-pound steam legend crossing one of the largest concrete railroad viaducts ever built. Nicholson, Pennsylvania delivered an unforgettable scene today.

every good outcome I’ve seen has been from finding a secret and doubling, tripling down on it in a way that compounds over time. not necessary that it even remains a secret because nobody ever believes you anyways; if it was something easy to accept it wouldn’t be available

how do I stop being fucking overstimulated by everything all of the time

Do not make any life altering decisions within 30 days of: - a meditation retreat - a psychedelic experience - an encounter a new frontier model

“Don’t you see? An equation has no meaning to me… unless it expresses a thought of God.” -- Srinivas Ramanujan Aiyangar