https://roblh.substack.com/p/surviving-involution one theory of what’s going on with the economy in China, by Rob L’Heureux: it’s “involuted”, aka super focused on undercutting the competition by being as cheap as possible.
This is not good in the long run either for the Chinese people or the CCP, and they’re trying to escape it. Meanwhile, it implies that if you’re trying to compete with Chinese companies, you need to compete on being able to do things that customers will pay high prices for, and as a corollary we should be skeptical of attempts to compete with China on commodities.
plus, a theory of what the CCP is up to: they want to preserve power, no matter what. When that meant liberalizing economically, they did that; when that means state control, they’ll do that.
At the moment, they care a great deal about output (for national security reasons) and about affordability (so ordinary Chinese people won’t revolt at a high cost of living), and if anything they’d rather Chinese businessmen not make too much profit, and that all adds up to incentivizing ever-lower prices.
The “cysts” in PCOS are immature egg follicles that have failed to develop. This is why people with PCOS miss periods; but it’s actually not bad for IVF. In fact, people with PCOS have an equal or even better chance of successful fertility with IVF with age—they’ve kept their follicles around longer, and artificial stimulation will mature those eggs anyhow.
links 8/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-25-2025
what would it take to make “foundry”-like CDMOs for [[biotech]] the way they have for the semiconductor industry?
differentiated manufacturing capacity (better and cheaper than what biotechs can build in-house)
flexibility for handling new classes of bioproduct
https://darkcoding.net/software/personal-ai-evals-aug-2025/ a custom-built eval, drawn from one person’s actual history of LLM queries
https://roblh.substack.com/p/surviving-involution one theory of what’s going on with the economy in China, by Rob L’Heureux: it’s “involuted”, aka super focused on undercutting the competition by being as cheap as possible.
This is not good in the long run either for the Chinese people or the CCP, and they’re trying to escape it. Meanwhile, it implies that if you’re trying to compete with Chinese companies, you need to compete on being able to do things that customers will pay high prices for, and as a corollary we should be skeptical of attempts to compete with China on commodities.
plus, a theory of what the CCP is up to: they want to preserve power, no matter what. When that meant liberalizing economically, they did that; when that means state control, they’ll do that.
At the moment, they care a great deal about output (for national security reasons) and about affordability (so ordinary Chinese people won’t revolt at a high cost of living), and if anything they’d rather Chinese businessmen not make too much profit, and that all adds up to incentivizing ever-lower prices.
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/freezing-my-eggs-in-public-my-ovaries Ruxandra Tesloianu on her experience with egg freezing and PCOS.
The “cysts” in PCOS are immature egg follicles that have failed to develop. This is why people with PCOS miss periods; but it’s actually not bad for IVF. In fact, people with PCOS have an equal or even better chance of successful fertility with IVF with age—they’ve kept their follicles around longer, and artificial stimulation will mature those eggs anyhow.