CF

Red head has extreme melanoma risk...crazy what insights LLMs can produce these days. Kidding aside seems worth doing

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

I paid about $200k in taxes (not including payroll taxes) I deserve a little card like when you donate to charity “Your tax dollars paid for -1 Receptionist salary at the CIA -4 minutes of F-35 training -100 prison jumpsuits & -1 month of a Somali daycare center”

NASA ran a study on a potential trip to Mars and found the most important trait for team dynamics was humor

Again, this is just a case of there being nothing wrong with the argument, but something still being subtly wrong with the way it’s presented, something off. I don’t understand how there could be a software engineer alive who didn’t already believe that there existed bugs in very old, well-tested software that had never previously been discovered. And I fail to understand how anybody would have any intuition other than that advanced LLMs would be able to uncover such bugs. I feel like you could put two and two together on this the first time you ever watched an LLM spit out code.

There was this 99-year-old person whose story is astounding. The most accomplished people in his field showed up to his funeral. John Collison interviewed him at 99 (still incredibly sharp). A book of his speeches changed millions of lives. And on top of all that, he co-built a $1tn corporation. 'My mind is fine, but I'm short of a prodigy. Yet I've gotten results that are prodigious. So how did I achieve all of this? With a bunch of mental tricks'. And those tricks came from: - Physics: Inversion, square-cube law. - Psychology: conditioned reflexes, biases, incentives. - Biology: Natural selection, ecosystems. - Economics: Principal-agent problem, comparative advantages. - Field-agnostic: look for big nuggets of gold, find out what works and do it. - Mathematics: Decision-tree theory, Bayesian statistics. The more time elapsed, the better this man seemed to become. Compound interest was working in his favor. And it operates at extremely high rates in mental territory. He was never in a rush to get rich because he knew he'd get there. In his 80s, he was still extremely active: - Bought equity in banks during the '08 crash and BYD. - Took one idea from a magazine he'd been reading for 50 years, turned $4M into $80M. Gave that money to Li Lu, who turned it into $400M. This man learned from the wisest people in history. Applied the ideas of Cicero, Franklin, and Confucius. Admired the greatest nation-builder of all time: Lee Kuan Yew. Just flabbergasting. He really just learned from everything that's out there.