Muscles only grow when you rest, after having stressed them during exercise.
Wisdom is the same. You can only grow wise once you cringe, having stressed your mind by being retarded.
Let me explain why an AI art company just built a full-body medical scanner, because almost everyone is reading this as a random pivot.
Ultrasonic CT works by firing sound through your body and recording the ripples that scatter back. Half a million emitters the size of a grain of sand, surrounding you in water, each one listening. What comes back is noise. Reconstructing a clean 3D image of muscle and tissue from that scattered acoustic mess is an inverse problem, and it is brutally hard. The hardware is the easy part. Butterfly Network already makes the chips. The reconstruction is where every previous attempt stalled.
That reconstruction is the exact problem Midjourney spent years getting good at. Turning ambiguous input into a coherent image is what they do. They aimed it at sound waves instead of text prompts.
This is why the scan takes 60 seconds while a full-body MRI takes 60 to 90 minutes. Close to 100x faster, no radiation, no magnets, resolution down to a fraction of a millimeter.
Then read the part most people skipped. The scans happen at a spa. Hot tubs, cold plunges, and a machine that quietly images your whole body while you relax. The scan is a side effect. You barely notice it.
Run it forward. The plan is 50,000 machines doing a billion scans every month. Midjourney has no investors and no quarterly hardware margin to chase. The payoff was never the scan fee.
A billion monthly full-body scans is the largest longitudinal map of human anatomy ever assembled. Every model trained on it gets sharper, and every sharper model makes the next scan worth more. This was always an image company. They just found a kind of image nobody else could generate.
Everyone always talking about “talent density” in Silicon Valley when we really should be talking about how 80% of pretzels in America come from a small region of Pennsylvania
For those of you who have a terminal illness, a chronic condition, or debilitating health issue, there is new reason to have hope.
New treatments are arriving that buy more time for the next to arrive. Even for the most vicious of diseases, for example, metastatic pancreatic cancer.
The recent breakthrough, daraxonrasib, nearly doubled overall survival, 6.7 to 13.2 months, with fewer side effects than chemo. It's hard to overstate the significance of this.
In a slow world, a few months doesn't matter much. In a fast world, that could mean the difference to make it to the next life-extending therapy.
We are on a long arc of getting increasingly better at solving disease.
In 1919, Elizabeth Hughes was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The only treatment was a starvation diet, which she did for three years. Her weight dropped to 45 pounds at age 14.
Then insulin arrived in 1922. It allowed her to live to 73.
And recently, Sid Sijbrandij used AI and existing biotech infrastructure to fight a recurring osteosarcoma that standard medicine had given up on. Today he has no evidence of disease.
A new era for life is here. It won't appear overnight. Nor will it be all sunshine and rainbows. But we are at the inflection point where hope can dare rise as the sun for those who have been stuck in the darkness.
OK, so I became one of those people: Claude diagnosed my sleep disorder.
Here's the story.
I'd been sleeping worse and worse since hitting my mid-30s. I've been averaging 5:30-5:45 a night for a couple years now, while in my 20s I was getting 7+ hours a night. I figured it must be stress, sleep hygiene, perhaps just aging--or maybe I'm one of those freaks of nature who doesn't actually need much sleep.
Eventually I bought an Oura ring and started tracking sleep, figuring "what gets measured gets optimized." But it didn't optimize anything, it mostly just showed me high-resolution charts that, yeah, my sleep sucks. It never pointed out anything obviously wrong other than how little I was sleeping.
Nothing seemed to help. Phone in another room, eye mask, blackout curtains, white noise machine, nothing seemed to help. My body just didn't want to sleep more than 6 hours a night.
Eventually I decided: fuck it. I'm pretty productive, maybe this is all I need. People say humans need 7-9 hours a night, but that's averages right? I'm probably just an outlier.
I stopped worrying about it.
Later I mentioned to an acquaintance that I was tired since I had woken up multiples times in the night.
They said: multiple times? That's really weird. You shouldn't be waking up multiple times in the night at your age.
Weird? That's not weird.
Is that weird?
That evening I asked Claude: is it weird for an in-shape mid-30s male to be waking up multiple times a night?
Answer: yes, that is weird. If you aren't sleeping enough and waking up multiple times a night, that usually means something is wrong. You should look into getting a sleep study.
I asked it what a sleep study measures, and if any of that data already lived in my Oura ring. Sure enough, some of it did--not sleep study grade, but enough for a first cut.
So I busted out Claude Code, since I would want Claude to have maximum access to tools for this. I had it figure out how to pull from the Oura API (using personal access tokens, ask your Claude for instructions) and pull down all of my sleep data. I then had it use Python to statistically analyze everything (heart rate, SpO2, wake events, sleep stages), test multiple hypotheses, and generate a dashboard full of charts, while explaining everything it was doing so I could follow along.
After 30 minutes of slicing and dicing, a hypothesis emerged: UARS, upper-airway resistance syndrome, a mild cousin of sleep apnea.
No way. Sleep apnea?
I don't snore, I'm not overweight. No way I have sleep apnea. This is the first time I've ever heard this.
Claude walked me through it. UARS is milder than full-blown sleep apnea. In UARS, your airway doesn't collapse, it just narrows, particularly in REM sleep when the muscles in your throat relax. This causes your oxygen to gradually drift down over the course of REM sleep, until your brain yanks you awake before it becomes a full apnea. In your 20s the muscle tone in your throat keeps your airway open, but as you age that tone slackens, which can trigger this effect, fragmenting your sleep.
It looks exactly like this: waking up disproportionately during REM sleep multiple times a night. That actually tracked; I realized that almost every time I woke up in the middle of the night, it was out of a dream.
Claude was clear that the Oura ring data was not dispositive, because it wasn't able to measure breathing disruptions per hour (RDI), which you'd get in a sleep study. Do a sleep study, get the RDI number, and then we'll have our smoking gun.
It pointed me to an FDA-approved at-home sleep study device (with finger probe and chest sensor) called WatchPAT for $200. After one night of recording, I got the results back to the next day:
Mild sleep apnea, likely UARS. Dammit Claude. Nicely done.
Here's the takeaway, and why I'm posting this: I'm a textbook "no way it's me" case. UARS often shows up in healthy, normal weight people who don't fit the apnea stereotype, and often gets missed for that reason.
It's easy to attribute poor sleep to insomnia or anxiety or stress, and there's an infinite supply of influencers who will pitch you reasons to feel like your sleep ritual is the problem. If you just got that red light glasses, or the blackout curtains, or took that sleeping peptide, maybe you'd be able to fix your sleep.
Roughly 10-15% of adults have some form of sleep apnea, and vast majority of them (80%+) are undiagnosed. If this might be you, run your fitness tracker data through your neighborhood frontier LLM. You'll thank yourself later.
I’ve been loosely backtesting some ideas over the last few days, and $TRUMP and $WLFI are consistently at the absolute bottom of the barrel. Across almost every model, they show the heaviest, most relentless downtrends.
Nothing new I guess, but it's still staggering looking at the numbers when you just scroll down a universe of the top ~200 coins and you can almost always bet your ass these two shitcoins are gonna have the most negative scores.
Absolute scams.
I don’t see a new paradigm where majors are rotated out of, and select up-and-comers can sustain their swim against an outgoing tide for long. Instead, I think majors are telling us something, and people are finding reasons not to listen.
Far left: we need to tear down the system
Center left: we need a system
Center right: we need positive-sum games
Far right: we need to win zero-sum games
Sharing my mental and physical health journey and learnings on neurodivergence. My guess is this applies to many of you.
15 months ago I exited BlockTower and was beyond burnt out. I was anxious, depressed, and felt like I had the body and mind of a 70 year old. I spent the next year on the “basics.” Sleep, exercise, nutrition, minimizing screen time, connecting with close friends and family. That helped a lot, but I still struggled with a couple bad habits and felt far from being capable of tackling anything ambitious.
The neurodivergence angle - a few years ago, I got assessed for autism and ADHD but definitively and clearly had neither (at least according to current tests, literature, and psychiatrists.)
In the last month I connected with a couple new doctors including a brilliant neuroscientist that opened my eyes to various patterns.
Almost all the literature and studies on these topics come from “average people.” High functioning people are largely absent from the literature because we don’t volunteer for medical studies and often “cope” so well that we go undiagnosed.
I’m fairly certain now that I have some form of ADHD (and am somewhere lightly on the autism spectrum), very different from anything I’ve ever read about.
My own pattern - hopping from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, a constantly working mind that’s only silenced by intense flow state like rock climbing, procrastination as my biggest (and almost sole) source of anxiety, and gravitating towards nicotine and THC with no desire for any other substances. Apparently this is an archetype for high functioning ADHD, and reflects a weak dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex that controls “executive function” in the brain.
Buddhist style meditation and any type of arduous deep focus strengthens this part of the brain. Doom scrolling and staring at financial charts all day weakens it.
I’m exploring a range of remediations - technological, nutritional, psychological, and already seeing benefits. Closer to the start of this journey than the end. Will share more soon with things that worked for me.