Last year, my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. My family largely agrees with this article: treatment was a mistake and likely worse than the disease (bar palliative care and a stent).

The headline we used in cancer education is about 38% of cancer cases are likely caused and perhaps preventable by modifiable lifestyle factors: Tabbaco, infections, alcohol, UV.

Widespread vaccination (HPV, Hep B/C etc) and precision prevention (genetic counseling and preventative interventions) add another layer of preventative opportunity, and could significantly move the needle inclusive of and beyond/above lifestyle factors.

This leaves a lot of room for change, but requires a changing of economic incentives and cultural factors: which are incredibly slow moving ships.

The next layer is early detection (pre-cancer and early cancer); and technology advancements look promising - multi-cancer blood tests like Galleri and whole-body MRI (Prenuvo, Neko, Midjourney) are scientifically and economically promising, but all commercially ahead of their time.

These two additional pots potentially provide another significant opportunity to reduce the burden where the cost-benefit on personal suffering makes sense.

I’d add as the last personal suffering cost-benefit promising intervention layer targeted immunotherapy (and perhaps to a lesser extent ADCs/smart-bombs), where many patients enjoy results without bearing equal or exceeding suffering. Though with smart bombs, the maths isn’t as convincing, and with both you’re heading into lower odds bets.

Ofcourse, many people are helped by classical chemo, but much of the time (and especially in later stages) you’re hoping to be the exception, and at this point, the population wide experience is in many cancer types net negative.

Many people pin there hopes on this last, narrow category of intervention for breakthroughs; and hopefully they come; but likely this hope, attention and capital is misplaced.

I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.

My guess is that coffee shops fall into one of two categories:

1. Those in high foot traffic areas, where a no-laptop policy helps maintain turnover, or

2. Those in low foot traffic areas, where it makes sense to do everything possible to fill seats and cultivate an appealing, vibrant environment.

Most people, avoid phone calls if possible.

If I get a call and it’s an AI, I, like everybody else, is putting down.

If I’m picking up the phone to call a company, it’s because I can’t achieve what I want to on their website.

These AI phone calls are as or more limited than the website.

There is a use-case for voice AI - most of these demoes really miss the mark with “we’re going to replace your call center”.

If founders had any idea how much performance matters in a call center, and how hard it is to achieve, they’d focus on a use case better served by voice AI.

“I followed up by asking GPT-4o to draw “Explain who the enemy is”, and it generated an image with nothing except the word “SELF” in bold letters on a beige background. Odd.”

While this might have just been 4o guessing what the user wants given the prior thread obsessed with self… “Self” as the enemy is a beautiful idea common in eastern philosophy and the unexpected and odd way it’s delivered is like an allegory of a Zen master’s sudden lesson to a student.

However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.

People of the internet, you were right. Now, this is incredible.