zetazzed

The museum of prehistoric Thera is also worth a visit if you make it there! It is fairly small but contains some incredibly well-preserved artifacts. The frescoes are stunning.

I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.

Super weird that the only relationship documented in this article is two "dinners with AI executives in Asia." Does that count as a close relationship? I get invited to AI dinners in the Bay Area nonstop, and I understand they are always transactional (people wanting to sell me stuff), not actual relations with people who just happen to enjoy my presence...

This includes only diagnosed cases of colon cancer, so if India has much less screening and fewer diagnostic opportunities, that will greatly reduce its score. But it is still a striking number!!

Important context in the article:

"The data showed that the age-adjusted incidence rate fell from 55.2 per 100,000 in 2000 to 36.7 in 2022, then rose to 38.3 in 2023."

If you would like to advance a theory that this is because of a specific environmental change, your theory should cope with the fact that the rate was MUCH higher in 2000 and the rise described here is is 2023. Increased screening is said to be a likely culprit in this case for middle-aged adult prevalence but not for older adult prevalence, because screening has increased somewhat in the middle aged groups.

I am personally dealing with colon cancer, and one of the incredibly annoying things about the awful disease is the number of truly clueless people who use it to advance some culinary agenda they believe in without evidence.

One major element in this is the rise of earnings from pass-through income. Self-employed or nearly self-employed individuals who would have been counted as employees of their small businesses 30+ years ago increasingly take "profits" from their business rather than "wages," even though they are the same thing. The "profits" get tax advantages. This makes labor share decline despite dentists, consultants, etc. still doing the same amount of work and taking home the same pretax income. See: https://www.ericzwick.com/labshare/labshare.pdf

Amazingly, when this (IMHO quite good) data leaked, Moderna stock took a huge drop: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/article/moderna-sto... (Seems like people were expecting absolutely incredible, "cure for cancer" results and had already bid up the price a lot in advance.)

Does anyone know what is happening to the company eMudhra? Are they being sued into oblivion? Taken over by Indian government? Or just doing business still?

I'm not at all anti-AI, but I'm still holding my breath to see real scientific contributions coming from modern (LLM/CoT/agent) AI. Much of the premise behind "AI will make superabundance a reality" hinges on getting AI-driven science that affects everyday lives Anthropic's quasi-CRISPR-like discovery did not seem super compelling, and that is still the best I have seen. If anyone has more heartening stories that could convince me to be an optimist, please do share ;)

It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.

As a fellow cancer-haver, I would give a piece of proactive advice for those (in the US) who do NOT have cancer or even suspect they have it:

Find a decent primary care doc who is not impossible to schedule with. Someday, if you do have a problem, the primary care doc will be able to send you off for scans, etc. much more easily when you are an existing patient. Getting appointments as an existing patient is much easier.

I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024... (But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)

Ok, but how do the economics of this work? Based on its settlement, Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement (https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2...). They and OpenAI pay billions per year for a mix of experts and normal people to label or create data. Why would they continue doing this if the value of this is immediately copied by open models? If your goal is to end the economics of generating and buying data for AI (and I recognize for some people this is really the goal) then sure, but if you want AI for various subfields of interest to continue improving then it's not workable.

Back when people made arguments for software privacy, the argument was usually "big business will still pay and consumers wouldn't have paid anyways so it's ok for us to pirate" - I actually think that was fine for business software but terrible for indie games, whose market was 0% businesses.

But in the AI case, it's not like they get to keep some of the value of their investment - it all gets cloned into models that businesses and consumers alike are happy to use. If someone knows how labs could continue to fund data creation and acquisition in this model, please do share!

I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.

The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!

I'm a good target market for pro-coffee writing, but this is just an observational study of a drinks habit. No one in the general public should have any interest in studies of this kind.

Maybe if you're deep in working in this research space it could help generate hypotheses for more meaningful research? But "we cross sectionally compared two groups with different behaviors and found they were different" is not really a result.

The NYT just did a story on Andon: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/us/ai-boss-san-francisco-...

Their AI "boss" appears to be pathologically chill and worker-friendly. Has never denied a request for a day off.

Who will invest in generating data for the frontier of AI if their output will immediately be used to train a competing model? Forget China vs. US, this applies within-country too. After exhausting all the publicly-accessible data on the internet, the frontier labs started spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate data across a variety of fields. Just look at Mercor doing $1.2bln/year with 90% coming from the top labs (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mercors-fast-growth-...). That pushes ahead what AI can do in medicine, science, coding, and math. But if other companies are going to free ride on this investment, it doesn't make sense to continue. So AI will largely hit a wall, frozen at the current level and work will all shift to cheaper inference.

It's like the Victoria 3 combat system. You just send an army and a general to a given front and let them get to work with no micro. Easy! But of course some percentage of the time they do something crazy like deciding to redeploy from your existential Franco-Prussian war front to a minor colonial uprising...

This is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow. Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.

The total profit of ALL US health insurance companies added together was $9bln in 2024: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea.... This is a profit margin of 0.8% down from 2.2% in the previous year.

Meta alone made $62bln in 2024: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

So it's weird to see folks on a tech site talking about how enormous all the profits are in health insurance, and citations with numbers would be helpful to the discussion.

I worked in insurance-related tech for some time, and the providers (hospitals, large physician groups) and employers who actually pay for insurance have signficant market power in most regions, limiting what insurers can charge.

Is it easy to record a voiceover or add chosen audio? (Sorry I don't have an invite code so I can't try.) I could see some room for human jokes or short human-driven songs that could use a video backdrop.

Does Disney have a positive obligation to show animal cruelty snuff films on Disney Plus? Or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Does Roblox have to allow XXX games showing non-consensual sex acts on their site, or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Can WebMD decide not to present articles claiming that homeopathy is the ultimate cure-all? Does X have to share a "trending" topic about the refusal to release the Epstein files?

The reason we ban government censorship is so that a private actor can always create their own conspiracy theory + snuff film site if they want, and other platforms are not obligated to carry content they find objectionable. Get really into Rumble or Truth Social or X if you would like a very different perspective from Youtube's.

Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.

Ok but telling someone they can have GPUs online in a mere 5 years if they build as fast as SK is still going to be a very painful pill. How do we get a DC in a year?

I see an increasing number of politicians taking the position: "I supported Israel's government's actions when they first attacked, given the goals of destroying Hamas' leadership and freeing hostages, but now that it has turned into a brutal siege with mass civilian casualties on a horrific scale, I'm strongly against their actions." E.g. Macron, Angus King, and many people I know personally. And I think we need to say "Great!" The dumbest reaction is "screw you, you were for Israel's invasion and you're an asshole." Movements that want to grow should accept people who change their minds when the situation changes, they get new data, or they learn a new perspective.

Manufacturing output has more than doubled in the US since 1980: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN#

Companies can choose their gross margins! Just take the cost of manufacturing, double it, and call that your price. You now have 50% gross margins. But you can't choose your total profit. Maybe almost nobody buys at this crazy price you've set. Now your margins don't seem so clever...

In the models I've seen, they still require and bill insurance. The monthly fee is a supplement for the doc practices.

Ok, I appreciate that timelines in this space are long. But the opening phrase:

"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development..."

reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I should do this, perhaps you may ask... I know not, but I feel it done to me, and I am wracked.

I feel like LLMs are the same as the leap from "world before web search" to "world after web search." Yeah, in google, you get crap links for sure, and you have to wade through salesy links and random blogs. But in the pre-web-search world, your options were generally "ask a friend who seems smart" or "go to the library for quite a while," AND BOTH OF THOSE OPTIONS HAD PLENTY OF ISSUES. I found a random part in an old arduino kit I bought years ago, and GPT-4o correctly identified it and explained exactly how to hook it up and code for it to me. That is frickin awesome, and it saves me a ton of time and leads me to reuse the part. I used DeepResearch to research car options that fit my exact needs, and it was 100% spot on - multiple people have suggested models that DeepReearch did not identify that would be a fit, but every time I dig in, I find that DeepResearch was right and the alternative actually had some dealbreaker I had specified. Etc., etc.

In the 90s, Robert Metcalfe infamously wrote "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." I feel like we are just hearing LLM versions of this quote over and over now, but they will prove to be equally accurate.