Links from October 2024: GLP-1, dementia, components, LLMs don’t reason, CRDTs, drying weather
With the demise of Omnivore I’m left without a home for links and newsletters. I’m experimenting with a few tools, which includes this: a periodic list of links I’ve read this month, and may want to be able to find again.
GLP-1, dementia and infection, web components, LLMs don’t reason, CRDTs, HPV, message streams, drying weather
Alzheimer’s and Infectious Disease: The Story Continues
We get a shingles vaccination at 65, and it may help protect against dementia. From Science: “There are a number of lines of evidence, such as this study in Wales that uses the 1933 birth date that was a cutoff for receiving the Zostavax vaccine to show that there really does seem to be a significant effect.”
Encephalitis lethargica: the mysterious disease that inspired Awakenings is finally starting to give up some clues
Of interest in that the source of this 1917 epidemic still being hunted.
It takes two to think
A letter to Nature Biotechnology highlights the trick for developing new ideas: talk to someone.
With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other’s thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of ‘flow’.
GLP-1s like Ozempic are among the most important drug breakthroughs ever
The Economist on the mania for GLP-1: “The brain has GLP-1 receptors in abundance and, though very little drug seems to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier (the filter that protects the brain from harmful substances), experiments have shown that GLP-1 agonists can nevertheless activate pathways that transmit signals to these receptors deep in the brain. It is unclear exactly how this works…”
GLP-1 For Everything
Post from Science: “It's getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren't good for. […] Has everyone's GLP-1 axis been turned down a bit low compared to the ‘real’ optimum (however you define that)? If so, we're going to kick off some more tough arguments about what it means to be ‘normal’”
HPV vaccine study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated before age 14
Good news: Scotland “has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.”
LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem
On the paper from Apple that shows how irrelevant details leads maths reasoning down the wrong path.
Artificial Intelligence Ready CHEmiCal Knowledge-base
“An open platform developed to share large-scale, publicly accessible chemical activity data.” Based on results from DNA-encoded libraries of compounds.
Tidy URL: A simple bookmarklet to tidy up URLs for easy sharing
Good friends remove trackers from links before sharing them.
Everyone has JavaScript, right?
Wrong, for interesting reasons. Links to a GDS post which found 0.9% of of browsers have JavaScript enabled, but still didn’t get the JavaScript from some reason or other.
Shoelace
“A forward-thinking library of web components.” I’ve written and used web components, and they fit well with how I think. This library of pre-built components might be one to try out.
Peritext: A CRDT for Rich-Text Collaboration
I do like a CRDT, and collaborative text editing is a tricky one. This was recommended to me by Dave G as “the latest” in this space.
Iggy.rs — Technology Radar & current goals
And I do like a messaging system, and Iggy is a new one to me: “persistent message streaming platform written in Rust” (alternative to Kafka). It is probably very, very fast indeed.
Laundry Drying Times For BN1
Using the current weather conditions to estimate t-shirt and towel drying times. It’s under Charts/Forecasts > Other Forecasts > Laundry Drying. There are a few apps that do this too. For the science, see the New Zealand's national weather service post: The science of drying - how to be a clothes line ninja.
The 7th annual state of AI report
Just 213 slides: AlphaFold3, Nobel prizes, protein and genome language models, AlphaProteo, LLMs can’t plan, open endedness might be back, programme search via LLMs + GAs, Monte Carlo search + AI, AI scientists, developer interactive chat side-kicks, EU AI act, and lots of business, politics and safety.