Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.

I think it’s a neat improvement.

> ...terrible UX, terrible everything...

I think I accidentally enrolled for emacs and can't unenroll on the site. I guess I'll have to finally start using emacs now

No, that's unnecessary. Nobody will be taking you that seriously.

> some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page

Did they actually put money in?

BTW your password-based signup flow isn't working (on iOS Safari at least).

It almost universally describes complex systems.

I started my father [0] on ≈200ug and he was more animated and looked at photos around the house much more. Bumped him up to ≈500ug [1] the last two days, and he’s shown a nearly unbelievable improvement in lucidity and recognition.

He’s still nonverbal but babbling a lot more, and in a non-agitated way. He’ll make eye contact with us more and wiggle his eyebrows. He has not been running away from me during morning yogurt and other meals we sometimes have standing up. More responsive to music, photos, eye contact.

He actually kissed my mom today and then got teary-eyed. He hasn’t done anything like that in at least a year.

Tonight when he was tired, he wasn't unstoppably wandering. He was tired but still “there” and lucid. I was able to calmly walk him to his bedroom.

Lithium orotate might be the magic bullet. Lithium deficiency could very well be the cause of age-related neurodegeneration. It’s too early in my personal case study to draw firm conclusions, but this is looking absolutely incredible from my perspective as a caregiver. Subjectively, he seems no longer “lost” in the darkness.

If he is still stable and/or improving in a month, I will be making as much noise about this treatment as I can online and in meatspace. [2]

[0] Early onset posterior cortical atrophy and corticobasal degeneration. It presents initially as visual disturbances, hallucinations, and coordination problems rather than memory loss. Sometimes memory and speech can persist until the end.

[1] I opened up some 5mg Nutricost capsules, weighed the contents, and calculated how much of the mixture is needed for a given amount of active ingredient. Then I measure out each dose on a calibrated milligram scale. This is definitely out of reach for many people, so ideally companies can just add a small dose to multivitamins and call it a day. I’ve been taking the same dose I give my dad, and have not noticed much of anything.

[2] There are some ethical considerations in halting the disease process for those with late stage dementia. It would be inhumane to “cure” advanced AD if one has no hope of a life worth living, given one’s current capabilities and options. (For example, bed-bound in nursing homes with severe memory loss.) I’m very optimistic about lithium orotate, but I doubt it can do more than halt the neurodegeneration—which would mean rapidly hitting a low ceiling for cognitive improvements after beginning the therapy. That also means a practically life-long caregiving requirement. I didn’t want to be a caregiver for my father for the next 30+ years, but frankly I did not expect such a dramatic and immediate improvement in his condition. I expected nothing at all to happen.

If cells in the brain are being deprived of lithium due to sequestration by amyloid beta plaques, then a bioavailable form of lithium that is resistant to sequestration may treat the pathology.

  > Replacement therapy with lithium orotate, which is a Li salt with reduced amyloid binding, prevents pathological changes and memory loss in AD mouse models and ageing wild-type mice.

Another source on lithium orotate:

  > LiOr is proposed to cross the blood–brain barrier and enter cells more readily than Li2CO3, which will theoretically allow for reduced dosage requirements and ameliorated toxicity concerns.

Sometimes I search for things I know I am looking for. Other times I don’t know quite what I’m looking for or I know in advance that I’m not likely to find it—so I chuck it at Llama 4 Maverick and it usually gives me something useful.

I had no plans to use the LLMs until they opened it up on my tier. At this point however, it’s half the value I get out of Kagi.

If there was no freedom to amass fortunes, these people would still exist, and they would do even more damage in whatever theoretical social structure we would have.

* And to a lesser degree, the self-interest everybody naturally possesses.

** Minimizing negative externalities is the responsibility of government accountable to the people.

If I stop making progress on my personal projects, sinking my free time into games or online interaction is very unsatisfying.

(Humans will still have to set the goals and objectives, unless we unleash an ASI and render even that moot.)

Millions, perhaps billions of times more lines of code will be written, and automated programming will be taken for granted as just how computers work.

Painstakingly writing static source code will be seen the same way as we see doing hundreds of pages of tedious calculations using paper, pencil, and a slide rule. Why would you do that, when the computer can design and develop such a program hundreds of times in the blink of an eye to arrive at the optimal human interface for your particular needs at the moment?

It'll be a tremendous boon in every other technical field, such as science and engineering. It'll also make computers so much more useful and accessible for regular people. However, programming as we know it will fade into irrelevance.

This change might take 50 years, but that's where I believe we're headed.