Robert Love

Scientists often make breakthroughs by synthesizing ideas across papers. In our new paper, we ask whether a language model can anticipate this process: given two parent papers, can it generate the core insight of a future paper built on them? 🧵⬇️

And we returned to the surly bonds of Earth after touching the face of God

The article also cites a shared interest in libertarian politics and PGP as if that doesn't describe everyone on the Internet in the 90s The linguistic analysis is interesting but you can't use it to single out one individual

So is the Strait of Hormuz open today?

Can someone please do this for Boston?

In a randomized controlled study of 1,298 participants, performance of humans when assisted by an #LLM was inferior to the LLM alone when assessing 10 medical scenarios. nature.com/articles/s4159…

Many are wondering "what Google saw" that caused them to revise their post-quantum cryptography transition deadline to 2029 last week. It was this: research.google/blog/safeguard…

Pretty astonishing. In Texas, between 10:00 am and 4:00 p.m., 80-90% of electricity comes from carbon free sources. And storage is already a significant contributor in the early morning and evening

@mattyglesias I dunno Blake sounds sarcastic?

Multiple lines of evidence are converging on the idea that viruses you picked up decades ago might quietly be driving age-related diseases. We've known for a few years that EBV raises MS risk 32-fold, and that molecular mimicry between an EBV protein and nerve insulation likely triggers brain autoimmunity. What remained unclear was why some people persistently carry EBV and others don't. A new paper in @Nature from the @RyanDhindsa (whose lab has been supported by @impetusgrants) and @CalebLareau labs answers that at population scale. They mined ~735,000 human genomes for traces of Epstein-Barr virus, using reads of viral genomes that existing pipelines were throwing out as junk, and found that ~10% of people carry detectable EBV DNA in blood. Carrying persistent EBV is associated with variable antigen processing, and the broader genetic architecture of viral persistence shares a component with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes. Meanwhile, a separate line of very recent evidence is also pointing in that direction. The shingles vaccine, targeting another persistent herpesvirus, is showing ~20% dementia risk reduction in quasi-randomized studies which has been replicated across multiple countries. There seems to be more at the intersection of immunity and age-related disease than we initially thought.

@cojobrien 2024 was a long time ago

Another narrative violation: Young computer science graduates were employed at near record-high rates in 2024. The main driver behind the elevated unemployment rate: the share of CS grads who aren't even in the labor force has fallen by half over the last decade.

Salaries for early-career STEM graduates continue to climb. Young computer science grads in 2024 earned a record-high 63% premium over the typical graduate, up from 47% in 2009.

Micron’s $100B megafab in NY is at risk of delay due to just 6 “concerned citizens” and their frivolous lawsuit. (1/10) 🧵

@tszzl Top brass is bimodal: Within minutes or not at all. Personally I like to reply within seconds every once in a while to keep folks on their toes.

messaging the top brass: guaranteed response within a few hours, p90 is under 5 minutes. messaging mid level: you may never get a response

We distinguished complex whale vocalizations using a model trained on birds. We leveraged Google DeepMind's Perch 2.0 bioacoustics foundation model's transfer learning capabilities for classifying complex whale vocalizations to accelerate marine insights.

@patrickc Greater alcohol consumption when traveling, especially to Europe?

I gave OpenClaw an export of my Apple Health data and asked it for some interesting analysis of heart rate vs travel data. It figured out that it could approximate my location from workout GPS annotations plus time zone stamps from other logged datapoints and then produced a bunch of interesting charts.

Link: anthropic.com/engineering/bu…

😲😲😲 "I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V."

@mattyglesias I don't know how you deal with the quality of replies on here, man.

@mattyglesias Greatest place on Earth nine months a year.

@paulg Appraisal reports, particular real estate

The sweet spot for present-day AI seems to be projects that were constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text. That's why it works so well for programming. Basically programmers produced valuable text. But there are lots of other projects with this quality.