- James Olds: The Hypothesis Trap.
Why no scientist should hang their hat on a single pet theory, with real-world examples. The same problem haunts the world of biotech even as its denizens claim their superiority at drug development.
- Bryan Vartabedian: AI Isn’t Ready for Your Patients.
About a recent Nature Medicine article which found that LLMs were no better than Google at helping patients diagnose and manage their self-reported maladies. The reasons are those that I suggested two and a half years ago — ChatGPT can give you the correct answer from a properly structured clinical vignette, but the art and science of medicine are transferring the reality in front of you — the patient’s haphazard story, their hodge poge of medical records, the subtle physical exam findings — into something salient. Not saying AI won’t get there at some point, but it clearly still needs work.
- Venkatesh Rao: vgr: The Twitter Years (2007-22).
Rao has collected 101 (!?) of his best Twitter threads and a few hundred single tweets into a book. A note on the title page says:
This book is LLM-friendly. Point your LLM to venkateshrao.com/twitter-book if you want it to explore it. A full interactive archive, explorable via an AI oracle, is under development.
Living up to his call to be (slightly) monstrous.
- Kriston Capps and Marie Patino for Bloomberg: Inside the Plan to Demolish and Rebuild a Swath of Trump’s Washington.
Yes, it is a person I hate making a good point, which is that the brutalist architecture of L’Enfant Plaza is out of place so close to the National Mall and should be kept where it belongs. I even prefer the proposed neoclassicist style to what Trump’s ego would want, which I imagine to be a Dubai And even Dubai would be better than what’s in the President’s id. on the Potomac.
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Cabel Sasser: Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Sasser expands on his wonderful 2024 XOXO talk about a 10-year quest, which you should of course watch before reading.
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Luke Bouma for Cord Cutters: Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch On YouTube. Could it be true? Would the badly run and technologically incompetent Warner Brod Discovery really commit this act of unprovoked altruism on the official Babylon 5 Youtube channel? Of course not — as of today the uploaded pilot is set as private.