Steps to become a senior programmer:
1. Install my /teach skill
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill teach
2. Create a new working directory on your laptop
mkdir junior-to-senior
cd junior-to-senior
3. Kick off your coding agent in the directory
claude
4. Copy this prompt
/teach me how to be a great strategic programmer. My opinion is that AI is eating 'tactical, on-the-ground' programming. The day-to-day work of a developer involves not only coding, but also planning, QA, codebase design, and much more. I'm interested in learning the strategic skills - that, in a previous era, would take me from junior to senior - but in this era are table stakes.
5. Paste it into the coding agent
Below is an example of what the first output will look like. I used Opus 4.8, medium effort.
6. Continue working with the agent until you're a senior
PSA: If you used Claude Fable-5 today with memory turned on you just violated all your NDAs. Anthropic requires a 30 day retention policy including human review, and the memory feature (on by default) searches past chats for context, so sensitive historical chats get pulled in.
Yesterday the 🇪🇺Commission announced it is forcing Meta to open #WhatsApp to rival AI companies. It's just the latest attempt to regulate Europe's most-used texting platform.
But the US government is protecting WhatsApp's American owner (Facebook). https://t.co/Po7e9OccxA
An interesting proposal for restoring human versus machine chess competition was to limit the machine to the same energy expenditure as the human brain. A worthy challenge, considering the amount of power required for AI data centers!
Beyond brain fog: viral proteins as convergent drivers of neuroinflammation and proteinopathy
🚨“COVID-19 never really leaves your brain.”
New science review proposes SARSCoV2 viral proteins stay behind as long-lived toxins, triggering chronic neuroinflammation and planting the seeds of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, even after mild infection.
This very interesting and eye-catching GERMAN review reframes post-viral neurological syndromes( L0ngC0vid) as driven by persistent viral proteins acting as long-term toxins ("protein-as-pathogen" model), not just the active infection!
➡️Core mechanisms:
- SARSCoV2 Spike and OTHER viral proteins activate glial TLR4/TLR2 receptors, triggering chronic neuroinflammatory cascades via NLRP3 inflammasome,
- They also disrupt autophagy, allowing toxic protein aggregates (tau, amyloid-beta, α-synuclein) to accumulate and seed neurodegeneration,
➡️SARSCoV2 specific evidence:
- Animal studies show Spike protein alone (without live virus) induces TLR4-mediated cognitive deficits, memory impairment, synaptic loss, and sustained neuroinflammation, recapitulating post-COVID syndrome,
- Spike binds α-synuclein, accelerating Parkinson-like clumps,
➡️Human data evidence:
- Millions experience "brain fog,"
- Post-COVID patients exhibit measurable brain damage: cortical thinning, hippocampal iron accumulation, and biomarkers of ongoing neuronal injury,
➡️Broader risks:
- Even mild infections leave lingering proteins that promote Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s-like pathology via shared pathways,
- Same pathways seen in influenza, dengue, West Nile etc,
- Mild infection = no protection,
‼️So, according to this review, the “protein-as-pathogen” model makes it crystal clear: every new SARSCoV2 infection (even mild or asymptomatic) deposits more of these long-lived toxic viral proteins into the brain. They don’t fully clear. They accumulate.
Each reinfection reloads the TLR4/TLR2 → NLRP3 inflammasome trigger and further collapses autophagy, speeding up the tau/amyloid/α-synuclein proteinopathy and neurodegeneration.
SARS-CoV-2 does not just infect.
It weaponizes its own proteins as long-lived intracellular saboteurs.
Millions are probably already carrying this hidden payload.
This is not brain fog.
This is a silent, population-scale reprogramming of human brains toward dementia-like decline.
The long-term neurological cost will probably dwarf the acute pandemic itself!
#AvoidSars2 #AvoidReinfections
https://t.co/x0oxacaNwl
As with fat tails Llms are frequency machines that fail to extrapolate outside the sample set. What they know is the VISIBLE.
Almost as bad as economists, almost worse than psychologists.
My waiter had dementia and forgot my order.
I visited a cafe in Japan that ONLY hires people with Dementia. It's called the Cafe Of Mistaken Orders.
Sometimes the servers bring you the wrong food, never bring your order, or sit down and join you instead.
But the point of this cafe is to be a place for dementia patients to feel needed and have purpose.
And this cafe is working. Japan has discovered that being socially connected actually slows down the progression of dementia.
So now there are 8,000 dementia cafes all over Japan!
The U.S. should be more like Japan. We should keep elders out of nursing homes, find ways to give them purpose, and part of society until their last days.
@infohazard_lol I think there is a design flaw in AI products for development >> they should not cause AI psychosis.
They should maximise collaborative and satisfying development of robust code not automation.
Melatonin has radioprotective effects☢️
In this 2020 clinical study, 5 healthy males aged 25–35 were given 100 mg of melatonin before exposure to 100 mGy of X-ray radiation (equivalent to multiple CT scans)
- 1 hour after radiation: 33% reduction in DNA damage markers
- 2 hours after radiation: 28% reduction in DNA damage markers
No observed side effects
Video on melatonin megadosing research (100-3,000 mg): https://t.co/XWAuFdHGhu
Study: PMID: 33380653
Our obsession with the news distorts our reality and "industrializes" our inner lives. Author and philosopher Alain de Botton explains:
"People will routinely say things like, 'Of course, we're living in this very sad age.' And sometimes I think: says who? When did this age get anointed? Compared to what, the fourth century in Abyssinia, the twelfth century in Syria?
Our inner lives have been industrialized. And commercialized. And that's no good for the free thinker, the honest thinker, the authentic thinker.
"You're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain things that people around you think are very important. If there's a singer you don't know about, a movie you just haven't crossed that threshold on--congratulate yourself. You're doing well. You're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself.
We don't need to know everything that everybody else knows. We need to know the interesting bits of our own experience."
AI hasn't replaced anyone.
We have been lied to for three years.
Will anyone be held accountable for the fear and panic people have been feeling for so long?
🧪 Enfin une étude qui montre noir sur blanc ce que beaucoup d’entre nous observons depuis longtemps.
Des chercheurs de Mount Sinai et Yale ont pris les anticorps de personnes atteintes de covid-long et les ont injectés à des souris saines. Résultat ? Les souris ont développé de la douleur chronique, de la fatigue et une inflammation des nerfs - exactement comme les patients.
Ce transfert ne s’est pas produit avec les anticorps de personnes guéries ou jamais infectées. Cela prouve que, chez une partie des malades, les symptômes (surtout les douleurs) sont causés par des auto-anticorps qui attaquent le propre corps : cerveau, nerfs, vaisseaux. Ce n’est pas psychosomatique. C’est biologique, réel, et transmissible par le sang.
C’est une avancée importante : elle valide l’auto-immunité comme mécanisme chez certains patients et ouvre la porte à des traitements ciblés (IVIG, plasmaphérèse, etc.).
Mais ce n’est que la partie visible.
Derrière ces auto-anticorps, il y a des mécanismes moléculaires à l’œuvre. La rupture de la tolérance au soi peut avoir diverses origines... inflammation chronique, problème dans l’ontogenèse des cellules immunitaires, programmation épigénétique (tiens… on risque de reparler de CXCL10), persistance antigénique ou du pathogène, terrains de prédisposition…
Ce qu’il faut bien comprendre, c'est qu'une fois la réaction auto-immune générée, on n’en guérit pas vraiment. On peut juste la contrôler. Et la moindre réexposition à l’antigène responsable, notamment la protéine Spike persistante, qu’elle vienne du virus ou des injections, risque de relancer la réponse pathologique.
Cela soulève aussi une question sérieuse pour les transfusions sanguines. Si les auto-anticorps et/ou la Spike circulante peuvent être transmis via le plasma ou d’autres composants, alors des donneurs asymptomatiques (post-Covid ou post-injection) pourraient potentiellement transférer ces facteurs à des receveurs vulnérables. Ce risque théorique mérite une vraie évaluation et des mesures de précaution (tests de Spike circulante, dépistage des auto-anticorps chez les donneurs, etc.), plutôt que le silence actuel.
Merci de votre attention
Please stop. I don’t want an AI summary of my Google search. I don’t want an AI summary of the text message from my friend at work. I don’t want an AI summary of the email I’m about to read. Please just stop.
Its interesting to have AI solving problems - with many high visibility problems it doesn’t seem to solve - and maybe even contributing to…
Alignment should start there.
Not a single entity talked about the possibility that we are on the 8.5 watts per square meter! When did your job become so important? Yesterday I was invited to an old house 🏠 in Gersthof and we all engaged in lively conversations about carbon capturing with oysters 🦪 or similar, instead of the boring culture war. People care!