man. I love his prose but he is very consistently anti-human in outlook, presumably related to WWII trauma.
I found the last chapter of The Inheritors gave me more affection for Homo sapiens rather than less. After several hours of living with these gentle but confused Neanderthals, it’s incredibly refreshing to stand up, look around, and know what’s going on.
Of course, real Neanderthals had material culture—ochre at least—and burials, and violence. And real Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Europe were dark-skinned. But he couldn’t possibly have known that in the 1950s and at any rate, by his own account, he did no research for the book. It’s allegory not (pre)historical fiction.
why should we care about informal science? because the actual important information is not in the cleaned up journal articles, it’s “hey i couldn’t get this to replicate” → “it only works if you do this” (or “nobody can get it to work outside that lab and we’re Suspicious”) and right now those discussions are behind closed doors and nobody outside of academia has access to em, and even within academia you might not get access to the good backchannels unless you had the right advisor
https://interconnect.substack.com/p/the-real-deepseek-moment-just-arrived DeepSeek is switching to UE8MO FP8 encoding, the first model to do so. Chinese chips are not yet built for it, though Nvidia’s Blackwell chips support it. “DeepSeek is setting the direction, roadmap, and expectations for the entire Chinese AI hardware ecosystem, from SMIC the chip foundry, to the GPU designers, to peer AI models”
for context, if you can get a model to perform well on lower-precision weights, obviously it’s a huge efficiency improvement. FP8 is as low as anyone has gone.
links 8/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-27-2025
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/16/the-inheritors-william-golding-neanderthal-novel-60-years William Golding’s daughter on the real-life inspirations for his novel The Inheritors
man. I love his prose but he is very consistently anti-human in outlook, presumably related to WWII trauma.
I found the last chapter of The Inheritors gave me more affection for Homo sapiens rather than less. After several hours of living with these gentle but confused Neanderthals, it’s incredibly refreshing to stand up, look around, and know what’s going on.
Of course, real Neanderthals had material culture—ochre at least—and burials, and violence. And real Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Europe were dark-skinned. But he couldn’t possibly have known that in the 1950s and at any rate, by his own account, he did no research for the book. It’s allegory not (pre)historical fiction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26424568/ is ALS caused by retroviruses??
https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/a-major-literary-writer-has-switched Naomi Kanakia on Ocean Vuong’s new book; apparently it’s less mannered and more sincere/sentimental this time around, and critics hate it, but Kanakia kinda doesn’t.
does zoledronate prevent or reduce bone metastases in cancer?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095980491100829X in breast cancer, no (2011)
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1756-8722-6-80.pdf different breast cancer systematic review (2012) gives some borderline p = 0.04 results
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191455&type=printable in prostate cancer, also no
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/69191495/j.eururo.2014.02.01420210908-28313-2b6ht2-libre.pdf?1631147867=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DPrevention_of_Bone_Metastases_in_Patient.pdf&Expires=1756224108&Signature=CCqSxjeRGx9Q3YCrmABua30jscXOYtnSL~hfPQDQdhj0k5d2CYKyKfZcf7jhfBPSUo~WAxRS~HJUH-c-nO~CmCK111rOS7o~mtDUMeGrUVjXAU5G3Gbaw9w45MFDOY8iDlq005QtXtnmK690k3Pucq7lxv5gNrr6vVb0eN0kgVVtspENQp8uLnOAA2omODrKG0TifNMxTEcDTxyQqH-2-nHp5P0HvlS8Mdo-WVb0qwTKPJQhK24qFM-OUHDJgGhQz2qK3f9hGUSKI8zXfLdqVrEuT0Qb3ayNuSyd7JY4dUY4XwOVP0tVQCXb~g-VyModmLdcKdcs9I9c5P1ju6gavg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA another null result for prostate cancer, the ZEUS trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilocarpine drug approved for presbyopia. it contracts the pupils, pinhole camera style. is this preferable to reading glasses? idk
https://www.reinvent.science/p/revive-the-republic-of-letters Ben Reinhardt: established scientists won’t actually interact with an informal “I tried this” blog post. Maybe the solution is to literally write (open) letters to specific scientists!
why should we care about informal science? because the actual important information is not in the cleaned up journal articles, it’s “hey i couldn’t get this to replicate” → “it only works if you do this” (or “nobody can get it to work outside that lab and we’re Suspicious”) and right now those discussions are behind closed doors and nobody outside of academia has access to em, and even within academia you might not get access to the good backchannels unless you had the right advisor
https://archive.is/20250519034010/https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541 kibitzing about Sam Altman’s kitchen supplies. apparently he buys flashy-but-subpar stuff; he, or whoever shops for him, is not up to speed on the current kitchen optimization meta. obviously the article feels obligated to say this proves he’s running his company into the ground, which it doesn’t.
https://interconnect.substack.com/p/the-real-deepseek-moment-just-arrived DeepSeek is switching to UE8MO FP8 encoding, the first model to do so. Chinese chips are not yet built for it, though Nvidia’s Blackwell chips support it. “DeepSeek is setting the direction, roadmap, and expectations for the entire Chinese AI hardware ecosystem, from SMIC the chip foundry, to the GPU designers, to peer AI models”
for context, if you can get a model to perform well on lower-precision weights, obviously it’s a huge efficiency improvement. FP8 is as low as anyone has gone.