Scott White

Always learning.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Can't tell if measles vaccine works

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Very sobering article suggesting that climate change and associated wild fires are causing the collapse of many Western forests; one study suggests that by 2100, 40% of Western conifer forests will be replaced by shrubland (and poison oak). https://t.co/9q06pPDusz

[Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross @alexwg]

https://t.co/N2AwpI9f8m

[Rahm Emanuel @RahmEmanuel]

Last year at this time, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy terminated 22 mRNA research contracts worth $500 million. Same cost as Trump’s gifted Qatari plane.

Today, Merck and Moderna announced that an experimental breakthrough vaccine treatment — developed through mRNA research previously funded by NIH — has shown signs of preventing cancer from returning or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients.

Thank god the NIH funded this before Kennedy and the Trump administration showed up to degrade America’s health and leadership.

Which Republican senator has the courage to tell Secretary Kennedy that his decisions are making Americans sicker and letting China take the lead on research, science, and technology?

I’ll save you the time and give you the answer: none of them.

https://t.co/jTgRr89d4J

[Manz🌪 @ManzTrades]

Moderna $80 Calls are up +400,000% today

That's a 4000x Return

So, $1,000 -> $4,000,000

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies have borrowed so much money this year that they're pushing up interest rates for the entire economy. Nomura estimates tech borrowing alone now equals 25% of what the US Treasury issues in bonds, five times more than last year. Bank of America says the surge has added about 0.3 percentage points to the 10-year yield. Bond managers are selling Treasuries to buy AI corporate debt instead because it pays more.

My Take
AI companies are now competing with the US government for the same pool of lenders, and the lenders are picking the corporate bonds. Alphabet's 30-year pays 6.4%. A Meta data center bond pays over 7.5%. At those rates, a 5.2% Treasury loses the fight for capital every time. That's one of the reasons long-term rates have stayed so stubborn even as the Fed tries to bring them down.

JPMorgan expects $5.5 trillion in AI infrastructure spending through 2030, and most of it will be borrowed. That borrowing raises the cost of money for everyone, the government, your mortgage, small businesses trying to get a loan. The AI buildout has reached the scale where it moves rates for the whole economy, and most people paying higher borrowing costs have no idea that a data center arms race is one of the reasons why.

Hedgie🤗

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Designers are the unhappiest people in tech.

I sat down with @OpenAI's Head of Design @iansilber to talk about why—and why he still thinks this is the best time in history to be one.

We discuss:
🔸 His theory for why designers are so unhappy right now
🔸 Why he thinks this is the best time in history to be a product designer
🔸 His hot take that AI is already an incredible product designer
🔸 How OpenAI designs at two speeds
🔸 How Ian thinks about craft, taste, and what will be left for humans

Listen now 👇
https://t.co/dHSL5lXXv4

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

You could move to New York City.

Rent an 852-square-foot apartment for $5,503 a month.

Blow $500 on three “first dates” a week and somehow remain single for six years.

Finally meet someone you like, then discover they’re “not really looking for anything serious right now.”

Get a master’s degree so you can qualify for an internship.

Apply to 147 jobs, get 93 automated rejections, and finally find an “entry-level” position requiring five years of experience.

Eventually land a six-figure job and still need a roommate to make rent.

Pay federal income tax, New York State income tax, AND New York City income tax because apparently living there is a three-level subscription.

Learn that a “quiet neighborhood” means the sirens only come by every 20 minutes.

Pay $27 every day for a sandwich (no sides) because the place has exposed brick and a handwritten menu.

Take the subway to work every morning and develop the useful skill of pretending not to notice absolutely anything happening around you.

Spend 45 minutes traveling three miles.

Carry your groceries home six blocks because parking near your apartment is more of a philosophical concept than an actual possibility.

Have “owning a washer and dryer” become one of your primary measures of generational wealth.

Walk past a mountain of trash bags on your way to a restaurant with a Michelin star.

Tell your friends back home you don’t need a car while spending $46 on an Uber because the subway is delayed again.

Go to Central Park when you want to remember what trees look like.

Spend your twenties telling everyone you could NEVER live anywhere else.

Then one day you visit your cousin in Iowa.

He has a house with four bedrooms, a garage, a yard, two cars, four kids, and somehow pays less than you do for the apartment where your refrigerator touches your couch.

But hey.

The NYC bagels are incredible.

[Sholto David @addictedtoigno1]

A tool used to rephrase plagiarised text changed "final solution" to "mass killing of an ethnic group" in a chemistry paper. Now retracted thanks to a PubPeer user who spotted this.

[BILLIONAIRE UNIVERSITY® @TheBillionaireU]

He’s 26. In a San Diego apartment, on a $180 Prusa, he 3D-prints a tongue-controlled retainer. Apple offered him $8.4 million for it. He said no.

The device sits in your mouth like an Invisalign tray. Embedded inside: a tiny accelerometer array linked to a Bluetooth LE chip, sealed in medical-grade epoxy he buys for $28 a bottle from a Kearny Mesa dental supplier. It samples tongue and bite pressure 240 times a second, converts the patterns into cursor movement and clicks, and streams everything wirelessly.

Hardware cost per unit: $47. He wears his own version eleven hours a day and hasn’t used a mouse in six months.

In October he dropped a demo on Reddit’s r/AssistiveTech—a full 47-minute Cursor coding session run entirely by tongue and bite. It hit the front page in nine hours. Three days later an Apple Accessibility engineer spotted the Hacker News crosspost. The following Wednesday Tim Cook quote-tweeted the video and called it “the accessibility hardware Vision Pro should have shipped with.” In November Apple’s business-development team sent his lawyer an $8.4 million acquisition offer covering the design, the firmware, and a three-year global exclusivity deal. He turned it down in December. His public statement was seven words: “This should be open. Everyone needs it.” That same day he released the firmware and STL files on GitHub.

Apple poured $3.5 billion of R&D into the idea that spatial computing needs its own proprietary hand-tracking silicon and multi-year hardware roadmap. Neuralink raised at a $2 billion valuation on the same premise for brain implants. Tobii sells eye-tracking systems to clinics for $12,000 a unit and sits at a $340 million market cap.

Meanwhile a guy in a San Diego apartment runs a $180 printer that produces a $47 retainer, one that a nine-year-old with cerebral palsy in Argentina downloaded and printed at her local library last week.

[China Science @ChinaScience]

A 40-year-old Chinese woman who had been almost completely blind for nearly 20 years regained her visual function after becoming the first person in China to receive a homegrown high-resolution retina-based visual brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a clinical trial.
After more than two months of training, she is making steady progress in rehabilitation, learning to recognize letters, practice writing, and move around indoors with increasing confidence.

[Scott White @scottblanc]

@JeffDean The VCs should have been pitching you

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

The bond market situation is crazy.

While everyone focuses on AI, US borrowing rates just hit the highest level since June 2007.

Credit card "serious delinquencies" are at the highest since 2010 and mortgage rates could near 8%.

What's happening? Let us explain.

(a thread)

[Tamay Besiroglu @tamaybes]

At this rate of revenue growth, Nvidia's datacenter revenue will match what the world economy spends on work that can be done remotely in ~6 years. If you assume growth slows by 30% every time it doubles, that will happen in ~20 years.

[amit @amitisinvesting]

OH. MY. GOODNESS.

CITADEL HAS BOUGHT A MAJORITY OF THE PUBLIC ASSETS FROM LEOPOLD'S SITUATIONAL AWARENESS FUND.

So...Citadel scares everyone on Tuesday about a surprise rate hike during FOMC that WE ALL KNEW was not going to happen...

On Wednesday, the entire market freaks out about the rate hike which causes the selling to compound on itself creating 50-70% drawdowns across the board in high beta semicondcutor names...

Which means Leopold who we now know had $45B of assets and was 400% LEVERED ends up being the sacrifice as he gets liquidated at what theoretically could be the bottom due to not having the margin requirements to keep solvent...

AND THE PERSON WHO CAUSED THE SELLOFF WITH THE RATE HIKE FEARS ENDS UP COMING IN TO BUY HIS ASSETS FOR 40 TO 50 CENTS ON THE DOLLAR.

By the way, Leopold is getting married this weekend. I think he wanted to make sure he wasn't getting margin called during his wedding.

A vet on wall street in Ken Griffin takes out the young new kid.

ABSOLUTE. CINEMA.

[Carolyn Rockey @CarolynWRockey]

Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't.
He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies.
She said yes.
Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway.
Then he bred them.
The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear.
Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10.
A second grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations.

-Wilderness Whisper

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Ultra amazing —>

[Alex Toussaint @alextoussss]

Extremely excited to announce our first air-to-air kill of a flying moth by an autonomous micro-drone. This is a big step towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.

[Sebastien Bubeck @SebastienBubeck]

Btw this was done with gpt-5.6. One million lines of LEAN to formalize the unit distance solution.

Pretty cool that this can be done by a single person in a short time (as opposed to a team over year(s))!

[Jen Zhu @jenzhuscott]

I'm rooting for all OSS OW AI labs all over the world to win this race on behalf of humanity. 🚀

Digital rights mean:

- we own our data
- we decide what's private to us
- we own our weight
- we adopt foundational model based on our needs/preferences/values, instead of being decided by somebody else - not any government, not any centralised handful individuals

AI should reflect the beautiful, diverse humanity that include all of us. 🌏🫶