"It's still extremely early. We’re still in the Apple II computer era of solar. Conventional wisdom is that solar demand is going to saturate this week. We've got a graph here somewhere that's like, 'This year is it, it's never going to grow anymore.' Instead, it's just blasting

China produces 20x+ as much solar as the U.S. (over 1 TW vs. just 50 GW). If solar is the only scalable way to meet the 100s of GWs of extra demand we'll have because of AI, what exactly is the story of how America wins AI? Is China privileged in the long timelines world? SMIC

Casey Handmer argues that investment in natural gas is doomed, even if there were no near-term geopolitical or financial risks from an AI bubble or China invading Taiwan. The fundamental problem: gas turbines need 20 years to pay back, but solar and batteries have already won on

From the transcripts of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast with geneticist David Reich... Is it possible that events like the Black Death or the Plague of Justinian happened frequently in the last several thousand years in western Eurasia? Reich says population geneticists themselves are

Casey Handmer argues AI pricing is so elastic that Anthropic could raise subscription prices 10x to fund new gas turbines. If that’s true, why is solar still the future? “The learning rate for natural gas is nowhere near as steep as solar… there are very few manufactured

.Jacob Kimmel thinks that the functionality to reverse aging already exists in our epigenome. But then why didn't evolution already optimize for longevity? Jacob explains that if you consider evolution as an optimizer, the gradients flow in a really surprising way. Naively,

We’ve raised $2,027,084 for FarmKind (with matching). This will improve the lives of over 20 million animals. We’ve increased the global funding for farmed animal welfare by 1%. That’s crazy - the world is really big place! Thank you all so much for the incredible

We did it! Dwarkesh's fundraiser raised $2M+ for high impact work to end the worst abuses of factory farming. I'm so grateful for everyone who contributed. It's a great reminder of how many people want to help end the horrors of factory farming.

You will definitely want to tune into this pod with my cofounder Jacob Kimmel and my favorite podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. Jacob has this rare combination of being super deep in bio and ML (he’s often technically more adept than candidates we interview for nearly every role NewLimit)

improving biology that evolution has optimized is absurdly difficult. one reason for optimism in longevity is that evolution hardly selected for it. even simple interventions can restore function or extend life. it seems likely that medicines turning on just a few key genes can

I had no idea that humans lost our natural defense against HIV to fight an even worse retrovirus that no longer exists Old world monkeys still have this immunity - we share the same gene (Trim5-α) - but ours was repurposed millions of years ago Ep w Jacob Kimmel out tomorrow

"Transcription factors allow a very small number of base pair edits at the substrate of the genome to lead to very large phenotypic differences. If you think about how attention works - queries, keys, values - transcription factors are the queries, the genome sequences they bind

.Jacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors necessary to reverse aging. 0:00:00 – Three reasons evolution didn't optimize for longevity 0:12:48 – Why didn't humans evolve their own antibiotics? 0:26:08 – De-aging cells via epigenetic reprogramming 0:45:24 – Viral

Why didn't humans evolve our own antibiotics? I asked Jacob Kimmel (full episode is out):

.Dwarkesh Patel has a rare talent for traversing the tree of ideas by stepping upon only the most entropic branches it was a joy to discuss ideas around AI in bio, human evolution, the biology of aging, NewLimit, & the future of therapeutics a few weeks back

What should I ask Sergey Levine?

RTed by the guy doing it at the biggest scale. Casey must be onto something.

"A good way to understand a lot of evolution—and how you're able adapt to new environments or pathogens—is that gene duplication is possible. The real problem is this: if one or two mutations break the gene, and only three mutations together fixes it again, it’s very hard for