Nish

How I know it's still early days for biology:

"Techbio"

@owl_posting very glad you did too!

happy two year anniversary to owlposting.com it is simultaneously the highest-EV and also worst thing ive ever started in my life. the pro of online writing is that ive made a lot of friends due to it, and the con is that the psychic tax of maintaining it is bizarrely high for what ostensibly is a little essay every few weeks. i strongly suspect that nobody who regularly writes online has a baseline emotion state that is envious. if i had to do it all over again, im not sure i would, but im still happy i did. it's kind of like having an extremely annoying child

conviction almost killed our company. for 2 years, we built tech that no one else had ever attempted. but the smartest thing we ever did was walk away from it. my co-founder, sahaj, and i had spent years building a wearable device that could read your brain. the idea: control your phone or computer without saying a word out loud. no awkward "hey siri" in public. just think it, and it happens. the technology was working. but when we finally connected it to siri, alexa, and chatgpt to test it out, we had to face a hard truth: none of us actually wanted to use our own product. walking away from two years of work is one of the hardest things i've done as a founder. but here's what that moment actually taught me: the best product decisions come from humility, not conviction. you can spend all the time you want designing something perfect. but the most valuable thing you can do is ship a quick experiment, feel it yourself, and be willing to acknowledge the hard truths. that's how we found wispr flow. not through a grand vision. but from walking into our own office one day and seeing half the team talking to their computers through $10 mics and realizing: the behavior change was already happening. we just had to get out of the way and build around it. if you're building something and wrestling with when to stay the course versus when to change direction, i think you'll find something useful in this one. link to the full podcast in comments!

@sdamico I think it's actually a monotonic trend. something like a text-based version of this phenomenon is happening: borretti.me/article/coarse…

It’s absolutely crazy that as the models have gotten better, it’s still possible to divine LLM smell from long tweets and threads

@zxlava @catehall Yes, eg UC Berkeley's CS/EECS enrollment suddenly more than doubled after the movie, introducing enrollment caps etc. It was pretty chill before that; I took several CS classes when I was there despite not being in the major

@catehall Startup founder

What are other good examples of a piece of media convincing people to go after a particular career? Something lots of people do, not “astronaut.”

I want to host a small, ~5 person, 'simple questions for biology' hangout this Saturday, at 1:30p Come if you are a beginner / visual thinker, are willing to do an hour of somewhat guided self study, and want to learn one cool thing about biology! RSVP here (if it fills up and adds you to a waitlist, I'll let you know about future sessions if I do them): luma.com/2ft62qxw more info: the format: we go to a park, and talk/teach each other about biology! my goal will be for you to leave having learned at least one cool biology fact, but trying out this format so no guarantees. come prepared to do active learning / not just be lectured at! please come if you are: a beginner (no biology experience required!), interested in biology but not yet knowledgeable, especially if you play a lot of videogames and are a visual/spatial thinker!

@DavidSHolz would love to hear your take on why this happened: borretti.me/article/coarse…

you can still use all our old models on our website - everything back to midjourney v1

big congrats to @armandcognetta and team! excited for what they will build

@beckypferdehirt @AsteraInstitute congrats @beckypferdehirt!! excited for the awesome science that will come from Radial.

Big news! I’m joining @AsteraInstitute as CEO of Radial, their new life sciences division. How we fund, do, and build upon science has long needed an update. At Radial, we design, fund, and operate programs that tackle foundational scientific problems while simultaneously testing better ways to do science.

Huge milestone by the @OctantBio team. Congrats!!

@owl_posting true infohazard: a low oura ring score

i kinda dont believe in infohazards. everytime someone says they are about to say one, so ooooooh dont repeat it to others, it's either something so insanely far off in the future as to not be a concern or something a dedicated bad actor would stumble across pretty fast. the whole concept feels like it is treated with a form of reverence that does not concern itself with demonstrated/plausible harm, but rather the harm that could exist in the most maximally uncharitable version of the world and human agency. i get it in the sense of 'it is worth being paranoid about scary things', but i think you can start extending that argument into all sorts of zany areas. perhaps the chupacabra really does exist. has anyone seriously looked into it? maybe SCP-2521 too? it's all possible. of course, maybe im simply not high up enough to be told the Real infohazards. im willing to accept that too

@jamescham Am trying out a product that does this

I would love a version of cowork that allowed me to access the other models.

@bryan_johnson cool, so how come lithium isn't currently mentioned at blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/blogs/news/bry…

We’ve spent decades treating lithium as a heavy duty psychiatric tool. New evidence suggests it’s actually a foundational brain nutrient and that Alzheimer’s may essentially be a localized lithium deficiency. By using the Orotate salt, we can bypass plaque-induced transport blocks and restore brain levels with 1mg. I’ve been supplementing low dose (1mg/day) lithium for years. More evidence now suggests it was the right decision. Here’s why lithium is potentially beneficial and how we arrived at this decision years ago. The study unequivocally demonstrated lithium deficiency in the brains of patients with cognitive impairment, providing mechanistic evidence of its role as a driver of disease onset and progression. It validated our choice of Lithium Orotate as the optimal form of lithium supplementation for preventing and slowing the progression of dementia. Lithium has long been a foundational ingredient in my protocol, utilized in a low-nutritional dose. This was based on our comprehensive analysis of various population studies supporting its safety and potential benefits for brain health and mental well-being. Establishing a direct mechanistic link: beyond its known effects on mood and well-being, the study forged a direct and mechanistic and progressive connection between lithium brain deficiency and cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer's disease. Optimal form of lithium: the study revealed that lithium orotate, the specific form of lithium salt I have been using for years, is superior in avoiding blockage by existing plaque, thereby achieving the highest bioavailability, greatest plaque reduction, and cognitive restoration in previously lithium-deficient mice with pre-existing cognitive impairment.

@nanransohoff yes I've encountered a few. will DM you as I look them up

Purely out of curiosity…is there anyone working on a ‘not-harmful’ alcohol alternative? Tbc I'm not anti-alcohol, but it seems like a better alternative should be possible/isn't totally out of the question (maybe we just haven’t tried very hard?). Properties I'd want it to have: (1) Has ‘feel good’ effects for 1-2 hours (2) Has negligible negative health effects (3) Has a “social”/ consumptive form factor (more like a drink, less like a pill) (4) Could even have different types of the 'feel good' effect (more or less energetic, for example) Seems like the market could be very big if done well...

Google has shipped a CLI for Google Workspace (Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, …) Huge! Written in Rust, distributed through npm & skills.sh $ npm i -g @⁠googleworkspace/cli $ npx skills add github:googleworkspace/cli 2026 is the year of Skills & CLIs github.com/googleworkspac…

@jrkelly @Ginkgo @OpenAI congrats on the launch!

Excited to launch the @Ginkgo Cloud Lab service today! Recently, GPT-5 ordered experiments from Ginkgo's autonomous lab in our work with @OpenAI below -- now we're making our lab available to users (or their AI models) in the cloud to order lab experiments and get back data online. Play around with it now! You can ask our agent about your protocol and it will do its best to evaluate if we can run it and what it would cost. cloud.ginkgo.bio/protocols To start we've launched 3 Ginkgo Certified Protocols, two around cell free protein expression and one to make bacterial pixel art 😀 We will be adding new protocols weekly -- at first ones we certify, but eventually users will order whatever experiment they want as long as we have the needed equipment on our autonomous lab! We hope that Cloud Labs will someday allow anyone to be a scientist with their own lab just like personal computers and cloud data centers democratized programming and the web. More in thread 🧵and happy to answers Qs if you post!

What’s wildly under discussed is network effects for software for bio. The issue is that selling to one customer does not inherently increase the chance of selling to the next customer. How Certara ($400M revenue public bio software company) gets around this is by selling software to regulatory bodies like the FDA and EMA. From here they have a network effects bc pharma and biotechs want to have the same software as regulators. And after the initial Certara contract, upselling of preclinical software is possible. Network effects matters for bio software too.

Exactly why we need engineering in biology

@gao_zibo I actually find notion calendar to be quite snappy fwiw, and I have several calendars across 5 different accounts synced. boots up from cold in ~3s for me could it be hardware- or config- specific?

Notion Calender is the slowest mac app I've ever used. What's your favorite calendar app that's not gcal?

The Grail test (Galleri) appears to have a statistically significant drop of around 20% in metastatic disease in the most deadly cancers, while missing its primary endpoint. For some perspective, if that translates to survival, that could likely be as impactful than all the new cancer therapies of the last 15 years. Combined. I will still get mine every 6 months. The power of early detection is huge, and this is nascent. ARCH has an economic interest in the royalty, but my mom, dad, and all my grandparents had cancer, as did I. In advance, I will tell those who question my motives to go f$&k themselves now, so I don’t have to respond individually.