I'd argue the reason we’ve spun our wheels on Alzheimer's for decades isn't just about a flawed amyloid model. It’s a symptom of a much larger, dying paradigm in biotech.
For decades, the industry standard was to hunt for targeted small molecules to solve singular biological issues. And to be fair, I don't think this was because of a lack of vision as it was simply the strict limit of our technological capabilities at the time. But attempting to treat a cascading, systemic disease like Alzheimer's with a single targeted molecule is like hoping replacing one pipe will solve the problem when the issue is that the entire plumbing system is corroding.
This fundamental mismatch is exactly why clinical progress has stalled, and I believe the future of treating Alzheimer's will instead closely mirror how our approach to oncology has evolved.
We spent years searching for a universal molecule to cure cancer before we accepted reality. We now know that effective treatment often requires sequencing a tumor's mutanome to develop a highly personalized intervention for the individual. As neurodegenerative systems fail with age, we face that exact same biological complexity. A traditional small molecule is not going to rescue a globally failing network.
My personal take is that we won't see a true breakthrough in Alzheimer's until capital fully rotates out of these legacy, single-target pipelines and into programmable biological systems.
What Andreessen is hinting at, albeit still largely surface level, is 无心 or no mind.
Popular in martial arts and Buddhist philosophy, I think practically what you should take away is that body and mind are fundamentally intertwined.
Introspection is a practice of the mind, specifically cognition centered around portions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex. There’s a lot more to who you are and areas you can hone / cultivate.
This piece totally misreads the temperament of actual builders imo. The author confuses a malicious will to power with a genuine, if sometimes naive, optimism that code/crypto can solve human coordination problems.
I appreciate your response! It’s nice to see the impact of technology from people actually there on the ground.
Too easy to forget that there are ~10 billion people in the world. I live in the US, and it always gives me awe when I realize we represent <5% of humanity.
In the realm of autonomous vehicles, early sensor fusion systems relied heavily on the usage of Kalman Filters for perception.
The state of the art has now been supplanted by large deep learning models in the present day, primarily relying on end-to-end trained Transformer networks.
This may be familiar to you in the context of LLMs which have recently become popular, but they were actually first successfully utilized in autonomous vehicles (invented by researchers at Google and implemented in production at Waymo almost immediately).
Yes, Fukushima definitely put a huge damper on nuclear. And I do generally agree with you. Every time an accident happens, which is an inevitability, it's guaranteed that some investors will pull out.
The risks you end up taking on don't make sense for the amount of energy received. Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.
In terms of baseload requirements, batteries are the far safer alternative for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Nuclear power may have been tenable as a solution, even with the heightened risks, if improvements in battery technology were stagnant and/or stagnating. But this hasn't been the case, and so nuclear fission as an energy source will likely become a relic of our past. Now nuclear fusion on the other hand...