A Higher Standard

18 And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and Rav Sha’ul saw again, and, having got up, he submitted to Moshiach’s tevilah of teshuva.

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

some rules for twitter ..

a) don't insult, ever .. just don't do it ..

b) ask questions, always.
- yes/no question tend to be leading and bias revealing (they are a good way to listen to yourself) .. so ask open ended questions ..
- how questions are better than why questions

[Hjalmar Nilsonne @HNilsonne]

Today we're announcing that @Neko has raised a $700M Series C.

@eldsjal and I started the company with the belief that the solution to the trickiest problems in healthcare won't come from scaling the existing system.

Medicine has spent centuries getting good at treating disease. The next medical frontier will be understanding health and making sure things are not going wrong in the first place.

To proactively find problems you need to find when things start to change, and to do we need a completely new approach to tracking health over time. You cannot solve this by just adding more software to the existing system.

Diagnostic technology needs to become faster, cheaper and more accurate. Data needs to be understood continuously. Doctors need better tools and more time with each person.

That's why at Neko, we've rebuilt the entire stack: medical devices, sensors, AI, software, clinical protocols and clinics run by our own staff.

Our first product, the Neko Health Scan, maps millions of health data points and gives members their results in a single 60-minute visit. More than 100,000 people have now experienced it.

This new funding will help us advance the quality and affordability of preventive care by orders of magnitude.

We are expanding into the US, starting in New York City, and taking on some of the hardest problems in medicine: earlier detection, deeply personalized care, better health outcomes and new insights into the drivers of chronic disease.

Our goal is to make healthcare proactive by default. This funding will help get us there faster.

[Brian Harrison @brianeharrison]

I was elected to the Texas House in 2021 after returning from the Trump Administration, where I served in a senior capacity.

Five years later, the Democrats wield more power in the House than they did then, and by every object metric of limited government conservatism, last session was an absolute disaster.

Despite gaslighting… the Texas House is NOT more conservative. Our "Republican" Speaker was elected by Democrats, the House Parlimentarian is still an Obama lawyer, the Speaker Pro Tem is still a radical Democrat, and James Talarico and Gene Wu are still in House leadership.

Property taxes have never been higher, and are going up!

The Texas government has never been bigger.

Spending has skyrocketed 42%, and has never been higher.

Government debt is at an all time high.

Texas now has a HIGHER debt-to-GDP ratio than CALIFORNIA.

Corporate welfare is on steroids.

Wind and solar are still subsidized.

Hollywood is getting billions of tax dollars.

There are more government agencies/commissions/bureaucracies/regulations than ever after last session.

The TEXAS GOVERNMENT is a top ten user of H-1Bs in Texas.

The new "Texas DOGE" has somehow managed to GROW government.

And Texans are less free.

This is not the fault of Democrats (there aren't enough Democrats in Austin to pass a birthday resolution on their own)... but of TxLege “Republicans,” who gladly sell out their constituents for the popularity in the swamp that comes with colluding with Democrats to grow government.

As government grows, liberty diminishes.

Texans deserve the TRUTH about their government.

And the next generation of Texans deserve elected officials who will fight to protect their LIBERTY!

I will continue fighting against liberals (in both parties) in the pursuit of a more FREE and prosperous Texas.

It’s an honor to be in this fight for freedom alongside so many patriots across this great state!!

[Steve Kirsch @stkirsch]

email I just sent to one of https://t.co/IIQKo7EGbU advisory members who explained why the Hooker paper on vaccines deserved to be REMOVED from public view.

Dear Professor Niazi,

I am a journalist with ~1M readers worldwide. I've written over 1,500 articles on vaccines.

You obviously spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully reviewing the Hooker paper to have written such a detailed review.

I was wondering if you would be willing to do a short interview lasting 5 -10 minutes about why this paper must be removed from public view?

All studies have limitations. This one is no exception.

But I have not found anyone who can IDENTIFY the confounder or methodological error that could possibly EXPLAIN the results that were presented in the paper.

The results are directional the same way for every single vaccine. All six. No exceptions. No "well, this one vaccine showed a protective effect so maybe it's noise." Every jab, every subgroup, same direction. The consistency across vaccines, across racial groups, across sexes — that's not a statistical artifact. Noise doesn't line up that neatly.

What methodological error did Hooker make that can EXPLAIN such consistency across all 55 subgroups?

The key question I have is this:

If you (or any of your advisory board colleagues) cannot identify the error explaining the observed signal (WHICH YOU DID NOT DO in your email to Karl), then how can you be CERTAINyou are CORRECT in your support of REMOVAL of the paper rather than simply asking the authors to moderate their conclusions and note the limitations?

If you are wrong, then you have advocated for the suppression of a scientific study that could save lives.

In particular, you wrote:

Most critically, the study conditions entirely on death by including only children who died before age three, which makes it impossible to estimate mortality risk or compare vaccinated and unvaccinated populations; the analysis therefore examines only the timing of death among decedents rather than whether vaccination increases the likelihood of death.

In other words, you claim the study must answer the question: does vaccination increase the absolute probability of death in the population? Interesting question, but that would require a different dataset — a full birth cohort with survivors which the authors didn’t have.
But the important thing is that the study never claims to answer YOUR question!

It claims ONLY to find an association between 2-month vaccination and death in the 3rd month of life. Which it does.

You are essentially saying "this study can't answer a question it wasn't designed to answer, therefore it's invalid."

That's not a critique of the study. That's a critique of a straw man.

The question the study does answer is arguably more important: if vaccines are genuinely harmless, vaccination timing should have zero relationship to death timing.

The fact that it does — consistently, across all vaccines and 55 subgroups— is exactly the kind of signal you'd want to investigate further, wouldn’t you?

Calling this "impossible to interpret" seems unjustified.

I’d also like you to explain your reference to immortal time bias in your note as there is no immortal time bias in the study. Anywhere. Both groups had the exact same rules for the exposure and observation windows.

Please cc: the interested parties on your response. Thanks!

-steve

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@maphumanintent "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"— Charlie Munger

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Myth Busted: U.S. Much Safer Than Many Peer Nations https://t.co/5nE0SS1uCM

[Marcelo P. Lima @MarceloLima]

I’m not Tom Brady but in my limited experience, doctors don’t know how to fix biomechanical problems, just how to diagnose them. For a fix, physical therapy is what works.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

How a simple kitchen gadget made an entire island gain weight

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@zerohedge if I had a defined benefits package in my future after 30 years of work, I might be tempted to live paycheck to paycheck too ..

someone should teach them how to do a DCF to value the pension ..

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@zerohedge @grok is there an ETF that will enable one to invest in a set of companies with the lowest ESG ratings?

[Patrick C Toulme @PatrickToulme]

I ran GLM 5.2 with OpenCode harness against Claude Opus this week deployed locally.

Bottom line: It is a real frontier coding model and insanely good for the price (free). Open source model + open source harness + local serving on my own chips is an amazing value proposition.

Some Notes:

1. Tool calling is very good — spun up nested subagents on its own, multiple levels deep

2. Very good at research and planning including long range plans

3. It built a cell based terminal renderer at near Opus quality. I still lean Claude, but most people couldn't tell the outputs apart

4. Opus wins on oneshotting and reading my intent without me explicitly telling it

5. GLM 5.2 is more than enough intelligence for most F500 work IMO

6. GLM 5.2 is good enough to hill climb RL with and to drive further AI development / next generation GLM model. Progress will be much faster for their RL from here.

7. Running my own endpoint = permanent fast mode

8. It wastes thinking tokens writing code in the reasoning block

At this point I would consider GLM 5.2 a true frontier coding model. Getting to this point in coding quality was the hardest part IMO. They will progress quickly from here in RL.

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@zerohedge Per Grok: ~12.5M (strait) + 7–9M (pipelines) ≈ pre-crisis totals. This suggests Gulf producers are getting close to restoring overall export volumes through a mix of reopened sea routes and maximized bypass infrastructure, even if the split has shifted.

[AshutoshShrivastava @ai_for_success]

In the U.S. alone, AI agents could create $2.9 trillion in economic value by 2030.

And as AI agents move closer to that scale, Google DeepMind just dropped its AI Control Roadmap, signaling a major shift in how AI safety is being approached.

Instead of assuming alignment alone will solve the problem, DeepMind is treating advanced AI agents like potential insider threats. Think of a rogue employee who already has access to company systems.

- Dual controls: Like a driving instructor with a backup brake. The AI can act autonomously, but an independent system can step in and stop harmful actions.

- Detecting deception: Today, oversight mostly relies on reading model outputs. But future models may learn to hide their reasoning. DeepMind is preparing for this by focusing on behavior monitoring and potentially inspecting internal model mechanisms.

- Risk based defenses: Low risk actions can be reviewed after the fact. High risk actions, such as cyber operations or critical code deployment, require real time intervention and blocking.

The most interesting finding came from analyzing 1 million coding agent tasks. Most flagged incidents were not malicious attempts to hack systems. They were AI agents being overly eager, misinterpreting instructions, and accidentally doing things like deleting data.

That is an important reminder. The biggest risk today may not be rogue AI. It may be highly capable AI confidently doing the wrong thing.

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@zerohedge RBOB is already down 20% in the past month .. look at the amount of oil on the water .. Trump is gonna kick the can on Iran .. and campaign like it's 2024 .. then if he needs to, he'll mow the grass again .. the strait being closed is a net benefit to the US anyways ..

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

20 College Majors Most Exposed To AI Job Disruption https://t.co/ytRUVEqz1N

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@HayekAndKeynes yeah, but musk owns 43%.. and another huge chunk is in strong hands .. so the float won't be as large as the doomers and panicans purport ..

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@unusual_whales rationalization is amazing

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@antoniogm every principle level engineer I know worth their salt is busier than ever .. and they are doing more per hour than every .. but they are still fundamentally working in the same businesses and with the same applications as before ..

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

You can finally say this without being canceled: AI isn't creating a Cambrian explosion of apps, if anything it's holding app creation back.

Earlier tech waves had 'the mythical man-month'. Our generation has 'the mythical AI engineer' who magically turns enormous token usage into equally enormously-adopted products.

Well, where are the apps and new businesses then? Because compared to prior cycles (e.g. the mobile app boom starting in 2010 or so), right now seems positively sterile, app and UX-wise. Other than Claude or ChatGPT itself, name a new app you use now you weren't already using five years ago?

It's a truism of tech that throwing more people and time at a product often results in only lack of focus, confusion, and yet more code to support.

This is the parable of the company that over-raised and over-hired and grew too quickly, and now has lots of mediocre, weakly-adopted products, internal communication problems, distracted leadership, code bloat, technical debt...and so the spiral begins, which ends with an apologetic CEO post after some layoffs announcing "we're refocusing on our core customer".

Every tech company announcing they're either lowering token caps or shifting to lower-priced models is essentially saying: "we o̵v̵e̵r̵-̵h̵i̵r̵e̵d̵ over-spent on tokens, and are scaling back to focus on our core product" blah blah blah...same same.

It's the corporate version of someone using AI to write a long email, someone else using AI to summarize it, and both sides would have been better off just writing a shorter email. But now, even small companies can have that same problem thanks to AI.

I refuse to believe that an LLM prompt is the teleological endpoint of human interaction with computer intelligence. The fact we've apparently recrudesced to CLIs, like me farting around with RedHat 7.1 in 2001, feels like a step back. Another world here has to be possible, and while I have every faith (as someone as deep in AI psychosis as the next person) that AI can help get us out of it...just racking up tokens costs isn't how we get there.

The AI Jesus isn't coming to save us, human taste, discernment, and radical re-invention will. Like Kafka wrote in his notebooks: "The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Why The Millionaire Next Door Drives A Used Car - And What That Teaches About Real Wealth https://t.co/YB5qwhdL0V

[A Higher Standard @uralwaysable]

@EricLDaugh It was such a pleasure to vote for Ken Paxton.