Shaz

Technical Product Manager. Day dreamer. Foodie (Veg). EDM lover. Like books. Will go anywhere for coffee. Opinions are my own personal views

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Yann LeCun just told the most well-funded industry in human history it is solving the wrong problem.

LeCun: “Babies learn this around the age of eight or nine months, that objects don’t float, they fall.”

No dataset. No labels. No reward signal.

A nine month old drops a spoon and builds a physics engine no machine can match.

LeCun: “Most of us can learn to drive in about 20 or 30 hours of training without ever crashing, causing any accident.”

Twenty hours.

Tesla has built the most capable driving system on the road. It took billions of miles of data to get there. A sixteen year old gets there over a long weekend.

Not because the teenager is the better driver.

Because the teenager is not learning to drive. They are deploying a model of reality they have been building since birth.

LeCun: “If we drive next to a cliff, we know that if we turn the wheel to the right, the car is going to run off the cliff and nothing good is going to come out of this.”

You simulate the crash. You see the wreckage. You feel the fall. You turn the wheel.

None of it was real. All of it was intelligence.

Every AI has to crash a thousand times to learn what you imagined once and never did.

That is not a performance gap. That is an architecture gap.

LeCun: “The main problem we need to solve is how do we learn models of the world.”

Not bigger models. Not more compute. Not another trillion tokens.

World models. A machine that can run reality forward before it acts.

The industry is scaling language.

LeCun says language is a compression of thought. Not thought itself.

You understood gravity before you could say the word.

You grasped cause and effect before your first sentence.

The deepest intelligence you will ever possess was built in total silence.

And every lab on Earth is trying to reconstruct the mind from words alone.

Physics does not care about your context window.

A baby who learns that cups fall in a kitchen already knows that rocks fall off cliffs. No retraining. No fine-tuning. One model. Every environment.

That is what intelligence actually is.

Not prediction. Not pattern matching. Not scale.

A simulation of reality so precise you rehearse the future before it exists.

Every infant on Earth builds one.

No machine ever has.

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

The more I talk, the more I realise capital and network are the only important things you need to change the future. Whatever I ignored so far is what's turning out to be important..

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Coffee softy at Paakashala!

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Such an interesting read! And I'm living proof that we spend all our time in concrete jungles.. Phew!

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@aakashgupta And this is a super hard skill to acquire if independence and self sufficiency were the goals you strived for in the prior years.

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@AlwinDoss Ha ha ha

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Ever since airtel launched priority postpaid, I'm experiencing more call drops.. don't know if I'm biased or if there's more to this than meets the eye.. #airtel

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@ihteshamali Can't do this on Kindle books. Where can I get such books to upload to notebooklm?

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@AlwinDoss Ha ha 🤣

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@Camp4 A different era! Wondering if such bets will ever be placed in the age of AI.. I would.. But world is changing..

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

I'm not sure what we need to do to whoever decided it's ok to light a fire to probably clear some trash.. and that too in the already polluted silkboard junction.. #CentralSilkBoard #Bangalore #SilkBoard

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Funding models don’t just pay for platforms — they decide what platforms become.

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@malnadkoos True 😅🤣

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@aakashgupta Yes! What do you think? In this day and age, are we, as humans, more comfortable online and with bots rather than dealing with other humans? (car dealership salesmen in this case) And hence, will digital experience companies removing human friction win?

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Is it just me or anyone else feels wordpress isn't easy to use when you are just starting out?

While editing a post, just use the cursor to scroll around and the page keeps jumping all over. Good luck finding where you were editing.

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

Whoa!

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@_jacksmith Didn't believe this at first. Now am in a state of shock! This is a silent build up for global health disasters in the future

[Shaz @IntrepidShaz]

@olivercookson Super thread! Loved reading it. The fact that you didn't give up until you got found someone (Andy) who would trust you - inspiring