And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride.

Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.

If I was Dario, and I was after a cynical sales grab to go with the "actually curing cancer!" spiel, I'd probably aim for a drug repurposing strategy. I'd use the above approach to find existing drugs that might target known pathways that drive incurable cancers. I'd only screen compounds with extensive safety data and easy delivery mechanisms, and from the in silico hits, I'd throw a tonne of money at rapidly experimentally screening all those candidates in parallel, and then rapidly push those that worked into clinical trials. I'd assume that, with a small but non-negligible prior, and the money to push through hundreds and hundreds of candidate compounds through at once, I'd have a reasonable chance of getting one drug through to a "Claude Cured Cancer!" show-stopper headline.

But I think even then, with all of Anthropic's wealth, you'd need 2 years minimum to move from initial screening targets to a Phase 3 trial. And it would be an almost criminal waste of research funding to get there -- the dollars for discoveries ratio would be appallingly bad.

(If I was Dario, and I actually wanted to cure some forms of cancer? I'd just use my obscene profits to fund actual cancer research, step back, and let the researchers get on with it.)

It's still possible to use Claude to proofread - highlight grammatical, flow, structure, logic errors and make simple suggestions for you to pick and choose or adapt as you wish. No watermarking will flag your text. No flaw accusations of LLM authorship will haunt you. All will be fine.

But if you want an LLM to rewrite your text, that's (a) not proofreading, and (b) should be flagged as LLM generated ... because it is.

(The broader question, of whether any change or addition to the system prompt makes benchmark performance better or worse, would be also interesting. Given that they've only just realised that filling the context with highly specific edge case rules might not be useful, I half-suspect Anthropic does not test this? But that would be surprising.)

More broadly, diet is a frustrating modifiable risk factor - there are lots of studies suggesting the (somewhat nebulous) "Mediterranean" diet is protective, and beyond that, omega 3s.

But human diet is uncontrolled, highly varied, and reporting is difficult to obtain and unreliable (people don't want to admit what they ate), so a lot of these data are seen as interesting, promising but unconfirmed.

Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.

What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.

Alternatively, buy a mirrorless or DSLR with some decent lenses.

Farage has always been pretty good at destroying his own gravitas at unexpected moments, but he's outdone himself this time.

May the best garbage receptacle win.

After a hiatus of a few years, when the internet had me, I've gone back to prioritising reading books once more. It's not only great for my writing, it's also just good for the soul. And it's the absolute antithesis of the infinite scroll.

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases

No need to compile unless you really need to.

(Well, it's way worse that that, but I didn't want to invoke Godwin's law.)

He is not "challenging science" with measured arguments and carefully controlled peer-reviewed research to back his claims. He's deliberately trying to silence science because of a completely unsupported brain fart.

And no, it's not about "timing". It's about spreading baseless FUD to discourage any form of vaccination, because he believes (with no actual evidence, and despite vast amounts of research to the contrary) that vaccination causes autism.

However, I also know that many people find my lifestyle agoraphobic, and positively need high-density living. Many PhDs at my institute seem to feel the need to constantly surround themselves with noise and distractions that would do my head in (they literally have TV series playing on their phones as they do repetitive analysis tasks ... it is freaking weird!)

I'll never forget my first time living in the UK, describing my happiness of hiking in the wilderness to my English colleagues, and them looking at me in absolute horror, telling me that the idea of not being able to see a human house in any direction would scare them half to death.

And now, even when I go hiking, I encounter people who feel the need to hike with a bluetooth speaker blaring out their music / podcast / audiobook at themselves and everyone else.

I love silence, but most of the world seems genuinely scared by it.

I'm also a little concerned that the BMJ plot of risk adjusted mortality still shows a clear positive correlation with age at death, which I strongly suspect would turn out to be statistically significant. The adjustment does not appear to be correct, therefore, and while that might still preserve these odd findings, it's definitely not ideal.

The much better occupation, from the graph, is the third outlier -- mining and geological engineers. Life expectancy: 80.3, risk-adjusted mortality: 1.1%. Or, alternatively, economists are close too (80.6; 1.19%).

Aircraft pilots, btw, really were the opposite end of the scale (78.1; 2.3%), surprising enough to be noteworthy beyond a control (the BMJ article does discuss this a little, but seriously -- that's very surprising for a highly-educated profession).

If you genuinely love something, set it free. Or better yet, don't keep it captive in the first place. Live in harmony with the wildlife around you, don't force them to live with you.

It is wonderful stuff. And not only can you finally think in the mornings, but provided you don't get heart issues from it, it appears to reduce your risk of Alzheimer's substantially.

Many share houses, when I was a student, put the film calendar for the local art house cinema on the back of the toilet door. It was the accepted place for it.

Reading on the pot is a time-honoured tradition.