Kevin Quirk

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

Nothing stops the spread of the virus. Policies pursued so far have been all pain and no gain.

[Dr Zoe Harcombe, PhD @zoeharcombe]

790 phases, 131 countries analysed. There were NO sig reductions in the R ratio "following the introduction of school closure, workplace closure, public events ban, requirements to stay at home, & internal movement limits. (CI incl. 1.0)
Nothing 'worked'!
https://t.co/fjcv6lsItL

[Next Science @NextScience]

🚨 Scientists just reprogrammed leukemia to self-destruct – and it worked.

In a major breakthrough, scientists at Institut Pasteur have developed a therapy that forces leukemia cells to self-destruct—and alerts the immune system to wipe out the rest.

The team targeted malignant B-cell leukemia with a triple-drug combination that reprograms cancer cells to undergo necroptosis, a form of inflammatory cell death.

Unlike the silent shutdown of apoptosis, necroptosis creates an immune alarm, drawing in the body's defenses. Using real-time imaging, researchers watched immune cells swarm the cancer, leading to total tumor elimination in lab models.

The challenge was that B-cell cancers typically lack a key protein, MLKL, needed for necroptosis. But the team cleverly sidestepped this using three existing clinical drugs. Together, they bypassed the missing protein and reactivated necroptotic pathways. The result: not just tumor shrinkage, but complete disappearance in multiple preclinical models. While human trials are still to come, the findings hint at a new kind of cancer therapy—one that doesn’t just kill tumors, but trains the immune system to join the fight. And because the drugs are already approved, the road to real-world use could be much shorter.

Source: Le Cann, F., et al. Reprogramming RIPK3-induced cell death in malignant B cells promotes immune-mediated tumor control. Science Advances.

[John Lee Pettimore @JohnLeePettim13]

Kyoto was supposed to start the world’s exit from fossil fuels. It did not. In 1997 almost 200 nations promised to limit greenhouse gases. We are now halfway to 2050. "Fossil fuels" still supply about 82% of the world’s energy — down only a little from 86%. That small drop hides a huge rise. By 2022 the world was burning about 55% more fossil energy than in 1997. Absolute dependence on coal, oil, and gas went up, not down. In one year the world dug and pumped 8.2 billion tons of coal, 4.5 billion tons of oil, and 2.8 billion tons of gas. There has been no global decarbonization. The world is more hooked on fossil carbon than it was when Kyoto was signed — and we have spent trillions to get here. What an absolute waste of money.

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

The AI containment debate may already be over.

@friedberg argument is that powerful AI is no longer controlled by a handful of American companies running enormous data centers.

Open weight models are becoming capable and efficient enough to download, modify, and run on consumer hardware, making the technology nearly impossible to contain once released.

The recent launch cycle shows how quickly this is happening.

DeepSeek released a faster and cheaper model, Alibaba published downloadable weights for Qwen Image 2.1, and PrismML compressed a 27 billion parameter Qwen model into just 5.9 gigabytes.

PrismML says its compressed model retained 98.2% of the original model’s benchmark performance while becoming small enough to run on a laptop or consumer GPU.

At the same time, closed model companies continued releasing more capable and affordable systems.

Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 reportedly matched its more expensive flagship while costing approximately 40% less to run than its predecessor.

Stanford found that the cost of running a model with GPT 3.5 level performance fell more than 280 fold in roughly 18 months.

It also found that the performance gap between leading open-weight and closed models narrowed from 8% to 1.7% on some benchmarks in one year.

That is the real meaning of Friedberg’s argument.

Governments can regulate large data centers, chip exports, and commercial AI providers but they cannot easily remove models that have already spread across the internet and onto personal computers.

The debate must therefore shift from whether powerful AI should exist to how it should be used and who becomes responsible when it causes harm.

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@BillAckman Amodei & Altman see that open source AI models are cheaper & a threat to their businesses. They are running a propaganda campaign against AI & begging for regulation. They want the gov to anoint them & effectively ban their competitors thru regulations. Goal: Regulatory Capture.

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@JohnLeePettim13 Roughly 70–90% (or higher by number of trips), depending on exact definitions of “trips” vs. tonnage/vehicle activity; a large majority of U.S. semi tractor-trailer activity is short- or medium-haul well under a 350-mile round trip. https://t.co/SOssR4jb9W

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Next week, @SpaceX will be bringing online 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPU (worth $15+ billion), with another ~$15+ billion in November, and then potentially another $15 billion in December, for a possible total of 660,000 GB300s coming online in Q4 alone.

Upwards of $50 billion of GPUs.

(below is an old pic of SpaceX's new Minihard GPU facility, which is where those 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs will be coming online, the same number as the other two buildings, but in a much denser configuration, allowing for a significantly smaller overall building footprint)

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@TheLeadCNN Does Jake Tapper work for the Babylon Bee now?

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

"Don't think for a second that because you are an 'alarmist' that you are doing a social good." Amen.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Roland Fryer:

“Ms. Hannah-Jones sees segregation and school choice as causing educational inequality. The data suggest the fundamental problem is the scarcity of effective schools. Other parents’ choices didn’t cause Najya’s teachers to leave assignments uncorrected, lower expectations, or award A’s for below-grade work.”

[Manhattan Institute @ManhattanInst]

When Roland Fryer sought to improve 20 struggling Houston schools, he implemented five practices: more instructional time, high-dosage tutoring, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and a culture of high expectations.

The results were extraordinary.

In math, elementary students gained four additional months of learning each year; secondary students gained nearly eight months in a nine-month school year. Every graduating senior in the high schools was admitted to a two- or four-year college.

Roland Fryer writes about Nikole Hannah-Jones, school choice, and the real way to turn struggling schools around in @WSJ: https://t.co/bJCqjShln1

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@BernieSanders So misleading as to be a lie.

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@AAGDhillon @CivilRights Are there civil & criminal penalties for engaging in such blatant racial discrimination? Can admissions officers be held accountable?

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@ewarren It makes complete sense since the benefits are capped. A worker earning $184,500 gets the same benefit as the person earning $10 million. Same amount paid in SS taxes & same benefit. Totally fair. Duh.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Consequences will both harden the product and reduce the press releases where companies brag about their product flaws.

[MindArch @mindarchx]

Harvard needs 8% return every year just to keep the lights on. 5% spending plus 3% inflation. Miss that number and buildings stop, professors leave, research dies.

40% of the operating budget comes from one portfolio. Not tuition. Not grants. One fund.

Jake Xia manages that fund's public markets. He also teaches the math behind it at MIT for free. One of the top five most-watched courses on OpenCourseWare. Millions of views. Almost nobody changed how they invest.

Every year he hands students a blank page. Build a portfolio. No rules. Someone writes 100% Apple. Someone writes rare coins. Confident picks. Same blind spot, every time.

Not one student asks the only question that matters: how much goes in each position. They all pick what to buy. Nobody sizes it.

Sizing is the entire job. The answer won the Nobel Prize. It's called the efficient frontier. Xia draws it on the board in under a minute.

Five equations sit underneath it. Compound growth. Present value. The geometric mean. The Rule of 72. Real return. All older than any bank on earth. All fit on a napkin. None behind a paywall.

A "guaranteed 5% bond" during 4% inflation is a 1% return. The industry doesn't hide this. It just hopes you never run the equation yourself.

The lecture is free. The napkin is free. The only thing that costs anything is not knowing

The answer is in this video.

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@avidseries Didn’t they make a movie about this? Meant to funny but maybe sadly prophetic.

[Kevin Quirk @KevinQuirk9]

@Leonajardinho Why would sell a six year old car in pristine condition? Silly.

[Next Science @NextScience]

🚨 SCIENTISTS JUST CREATED A MATERIAL THAT BREAKS THE RULES OF HEAT

Researchers at North Carolina State University engineered a layered material that does something unusual: it blocks heat almost like an advanced aerogel, while remaining mechanically rigid.

At room temperature, it conducts heat at only about 0.04 watts per meter-kelvin—among the lowest reported for a dense, nonporous solid. Yet its stiffness reaches about 7.7 gigapascals, far stronger than many plastics, foams and aerogels.

The secret lies between its layers. Organic molecules were engineered into a hybrid perovskite structure, making it difficult for the tiny vibrations that carry heat to travel through the material.

Even more interesting, the material can be deposited as a thin film over large areas, potentially opening doors for advanced thermal insulation and electronics.
A material that is both strong and almost impossible for heat to pass through could change how we control heat in future technologies.

Source: North Carolina State University & Science Advances.

[Q Shadow Walker @QShadowWalker]

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. Jaw-dropping fraud report just found that 9.2 million people — including ILLEGAL ALIENS — do NOT meet the federal requirements to qualify for the Obamacare Medicaid expansion program...that's nearly HALF of those enrolled

50% FRAUD 🤯

The problems are the worst in CA and NY. IMAGINE THAT.

"The study says New York and California have some of the biggest problems, finding up to 62% of people enrolled in California are not eligible. And the states might not even be incentivized to fix the issue."

"This study says some of those people actually make too much money to qualify for this Medicaid expansion program and others are getting these benefits, even though they're here in the country illegally!"

The entire system has to be gutted! Purge the rolls!

[Kurt Mahlburg @k_mahlburg]

A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures.

The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019.

A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years.

Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture.

The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment.

Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls.

"Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded.

Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls.

The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges.

The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway.

How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?