hlyos

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!

This is Farzapedia. I had an LLM take 2,500 entries from my diary, Apple Notes, and some iMessage convos to create a personal Wikipedia for me. It made 400 detailed articles for my friends, my startups, research areas, and even my favorite animes and their impact on me complete with backlinks. But, this Wiki was not built for me! I built it for my agent! The structure of the wiki files and how it's all backlinked is very easily crawlable by any agent + makes it a truly useful knowledge base. I can spin up Claude Code on the wiki and starting at index.md (a catalog of all my articles) the agent does a really good job at drilling into the specific pages on my wiki it needs context on when I have a query. For example, when trying to cook up a new landing page I may ask: "I'm trying to design this landing page for a new idea I have. Please look into the images and films that inspired me recently and give me ideas for new copy and aesthetics". In my diary I kept track of everything from: learnings, people, inspo, interesting links, images. So the agent reads my wiki and pulls up my "Philosophy" articles from notes on a Studio Ghibli documentary, "Competitor" articles with YC companies whose landing pages I screenshotted, and pics of 1970s Beatles merch I saved years ago. And it delivers a great answer. I built a similar system to this a year ago with RAG but it was ass. A knowledge base that lets an agent find what it needs via a file system it actually understands just works better. The most magical thing now is as I add new things to my wiki (articles, images of inspo, meeting notes) the system will likely update 2-3 different articles where it feels that context belongs, or, just creates a new article. It's like this super genius librarian for your brain that's always filing stuff for your perfectly and also let's you easily query the knowledge for tasks useful to you (ex. design, product, writing, etc) and it never gets tired. I might spend next week productizing this, if that's of interest to you DM me + tell me your usecase!

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people: Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing. Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.