“Blogs have shaped our philosophical worldviews, found us careers and friends, and changed our lives.” Write Carol and Austin Chen. “But many great bloggers have stopped blogging. … So we’re launching the Blog Revival Project, to crowdfund $1,000+ bounties for good bloggers.” We plug ADS who they already have on the list and would consider pledging towards Troof and Max Goodbird.
People on twitter have discovered a compact, visual way of representing recipes as a small card-sized image. The source, unsurprisingly, seems to be cookingforengineers.com, but already people are innovating — see for example this project and this project.
a theory of invention; or why you’re an inventor too
“Potatoes and corn for dinner” diet — “Last time, I tried the ‘potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner’ diet, and I lost 1.10lb per week for six weeks. This time, I thought it’d be fun to try a ‘potatoes and corn for dinner’ diet, and I’ve lost weight at the same rate: 1.10lb per week!” Perhaps surprisingly, he was eating American-grown corn. One strike against the idea that corn is somehow to blame for obesity. Also not to bury the lede, Panda Express for lunch every day?
If you’ve worked with AFFF firefighting foam, or you live somewhere with PFAS in the water, there’s a good chance your levels are high even if you’ve never been tested. Grain Laboratories is enrolling fifteen adults with elevated serum PFOS for a twelve-week NeutraOat pilot. You’ll get two PFAS panels and two wellness panels, one set before dosing and one after. You keep your own results, and the combined results tell us whether NeutraOat is worth a larger study.
NeutraOat is a modified oat fiber that’s designed to selectively bind PFAS and certain other environmental toxicants in the gut, preventing them from being reabsorbed and reducing their levels in the blood. Following successful in-vitro tests in a simulated digestive system, we are now running a 12 week, at-home pilot in individuals with high PFAS levels, especially people with exposure to firefighting foams. For those who qualify, the pilot is completely free, and comes with before-and-after PFAS tests and vitamin/blood panels.
The Scientific Literature is Poisonous to LLMs:
In 2024 a research team spanning MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Google, and OpenAI examined the effects of removing different text corpora from the training data on the performance of an LLM after training (holding the LLM’s structure constant). They found that removing ArXiv, PhilPapers, and NIH ExPorter from the training corpus improved the LLM’s performance at answering academic questions and its average performance across all benchmarks while also making the model less likely to generate toxic output.
Diagnosis drives treatment. Treatment is what matters. That’s the whole relationship.
Patients almost universally have this backwards, because the system delivers diagnosis backwards. You sit in a room, and a professional pronounces a noun over you, and the noun arrives with the gravity of a verdict. Patients receive a diagnosis the way defendants receive a sentence: as a statement about who they are and what their life will now be. They go home and google the noun and read the prognosis statistics and the disability rates and the mortality numbers, and they begin, quietly, to become the label.
But that is not what a diagnosis is. A diagnosis is a routing function. It exists to answer exactly one question: given this cluster of symptoms, which treatments are most likely to help? That’s it. That is its entire job. It is a lookup key into treatment space. It is the means; the treatment is the end.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 