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Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rice, grains, seeds and potatoes used to be peasant foods, while kings ate fresh meat plus imported fruits and spices and had higher-protein diets than peasants.

  Their words

  rice, grains, seeds and potatoes all used to be peasant foods And the kings actually just ate a lot of fresh meat like beef, venison, wild boar, swan, and peacock, and imported fruits and spices like saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper A king's diet was high in protein A peasant's diet was low in protein

  @levelsio on Xx.com

Cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute; writes Ground Truths on biomedical research, and wrote Super Agers and Deep Medicine.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Brain ageing is not gradual wear: around midlife the brain's original immune cells are replaced by inflammatory cells that came from the blood.

  Their words

  The original brain microglia (Micro1) are replaced by transformed monocytes (Micro 2) that are highly inflammatory.

  Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50erictopol.substack.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is roughly a 35 to 40 percent chance of something we would recognise as an AI takeover by 2040.

  Their words

  By 2040 um let's see uh maybe around 35 or 40%.

  youtube.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A narrow, highly accurate model can beat a general one inside its own domain, as AlphaFold did, and materials science and chip design are next.

  Their words

  I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Programmers fail to recognise how much mathematics their job uses because the mathematics it needs is discrete and school teaches the continuous kind.

  Their words

  And I wonder sometimes if that is the reason people don't recognize the use of math in software engineering is because the math they do need is not the math they've been exposed to.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute; writes Ground Truths on biomedical research, and wrote Super Agers and Deep Medicine.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The brain and the immune system act as the master regulators of ageing: when they age at a normal pace, survival over the following 15 years is near total.

  Their words

  Accordingly, the brain and immune system have the appearance of master regulators of the aging process.

  Medicine is Moving From Calendars to Clockserictopol.substack.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Factory-made bacterial protein cannot feed the world, because meeting humanity's protein needs that way would take more electricity than the planet generates from renewables.

  energy

  Their words

  To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy

  chrissmaje.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The weak selection signal on behavioural traits is a shortage of statistical power, not evidence that behaviour was unselected.

  Their words

  It may still be the case, and I guess it is, that immune traits are the most selected category, but is not at all the case, and in fact, we can prove it's not the case that behavioral traits are not selected.

  youtube.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Biology has already handed us an alien library: hundreds of millions of protein machines we do not understand and can only study one at a time.

  Their words

  we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most surprising thing about the last three years is not the technology but how few people recognise we are near the end of the exponential.

  Their words

  I will tell you though what the most surprising thing has been. The most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential.

  youtube.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.

  Their words

  Across much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Code Breaker

  Their words

  I mistakenly expected this to be a somewhat shallow, generic popular science book, but it was a very thorough account of how CRISPR gene editing emerged from decades of obscure basic research into bacterial immune systems.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We have not scratched the surface of what classical, non-quantum computers can do; they can already go far further than anyone expected.

  Their words

  I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.

  youtube.com

Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Means-testing the winter fuel payment is a tough decision that has to be taken, and it should stand.

  Their words, before

  No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.

  Their words now

  However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI will not produce a big breakthrough in biological understanding any time soon, because biology has nothing like the clean, complete, high-quality data that made protein-structure prediction work.

  Their words

  So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.

  AI and Biologyweb.archive.org

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Life obeys universal principles, and the right framework will let us recognise life that is currently too different for us to see as alive at all.

  Their words

  I think life obeys universal principles. I think there is some deep underlying explanatory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe and will allow us to identify life that we can’t yet recognize because it’s too different.

  youtube.com