Sean Howell (He/Him)

America’s national identity isn’t rooted in the land, a shared race, or scriptural revelation, but in the principles of our founding and an indefatigable optimism about the future. humanprogress.org/abundance-is-a…

Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.

There is nothing more amazing than a kestrel hovering in the air. It's like time has stopped!

I am glad you haven’t moved to texas or Florida. If you are going to stay in sf many cute spots are missed on your list. San Francisco Favorites app.foursquare.com/share/list/57f… Swarm/Foursquare has such a nicer UX than Google Maps for sharing lists and it can sort by distance as a lost versus map

I imported my Foursquare Data of 17 years into my OpenClaw and now I can make travel guides of all my favorite places in the world (all 5000+ checkins) Here's my fave spots in SF. OpenClaw/Hermes might make all those Download YourData links useful even for old dead sites

Red is correct if you optimize for yourself in isolation. But across a society or across compound choosing red on multiple different scenarios with the same binary live die questions and you get a world with enough food in Africa to feed the continent while people go hungry — because every foreign buyer pressed red. In fact in further questions like health care you might get cancer and can’t afford treatment. Thanks red, for showing your true colors and for forcing blue to put rules on the free market. We are at the optimal ratio at least 51% blue. In this scenario, blue is helping you to live and get your cancer treated. (I wish the color where green and blue)

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Ezra Klein and Stewart Brand: Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet nytimes.com/2026/04/24/opi… via @NYTOpinion

playing with Flipbook on a color e-ink tablet

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see. @eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

A children’s hospital in Pakistan infected patients with hiv from reused needles. #unaids and #who are important global institutions that are unresourced not over invested. Cutting global health budgets should not be on the agenda. youtu.be/Ro_5qE8IYog bbc documentary

@adityaag It sounds almost unhinged. The moats will be networks and distribution. What was old will be new.

The implications of "free" software are truly hard to wrap my head around. You don't like an interface? Just design and push a new one immediately. Performance is slow? Just re-factor the data layer with auto-performance optimization. Insane.

@sama My biggest fear is you walk eggs shells. The work ahead to make the world a better place is enormous.. I am so afraid of what is lost by the anxiety and even honestly fear this most create. Sending you and your family positive energy. Please continue your work.

I wrote this early this morning and I wasn't sure if I would actually publish it, but here it is: blog.samaltman.com/2279512

1 in 11 babies born in America this year will be screened by a genetic test that didn't exist a decade ago. Biotech startup @BillionToOneInc turned a simple but radical idea—detecting rare fragments of fetal DNA in a mother's blood—into one of the most widely used prenatal tests in the U.S. And they're not stopping there. The same approach could unlock something even bigger: early-stage cancer detection from a blood test, a breakthrough that could one day save millions of lives. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman sits down with founders David Tsao (@dtsao) and Oguzhan Atay (@oatay) to hear how they went from half a lab bench to a $4B biotech company, and why they believe this is just the beginning of what their technology can do. 00:00 – Finding One Mutation in Billions 01:00 – Detecting Disease From a Blood Sample 02:10 – From Lab Idea to $4B Company 03:05 – The Breakthrough That Made It Possible 05:15 – Building the First Test From Scratch 07:30 – One Customer and a Sales Crisis 08:55 – Inside the Lab: How It Actually Works 12:10 – Detecting Cancer From Blood 13:50 – The Path to Early Cancer Detection 16:05 – Why Early Cancer Detection Is So Hard

I want to know how many people have read a dictionary cover to cover and then who are those people?

On this #WorldHealthDay, more than 40 years into the HIV pandemic, while there is still no vaccine and no cure, we celebrate the power of science to save and improve lives. Inequality, however, still determines who gets infected, who gets treated, and who dies. Let’s #StandWithScience — and for equity, access, and the right to health for all.

I would rather read “crazy” @sama everyday of the week than half the tirades in media right now. OpenAI’s vision for the AI economy: public wealth funds, robot taxes, and a four-day workweek. His ideas aren’t off limits to anyone. Ai should uplift not doom techcrunch.com/2026/04/06/ope…

I really want to share this with my team but after some recent nextjs trauma I don’t think they will find this funny at all nerds.xyz/2026/04/cloudf… @WordPress @Cloudflare

Yes. Most of the programmers I know are having the time of their lives. They have literally never had this much fun with computers before now. There is a minority that is wringing their hands and feeling miserable. I do not understand them.