Around the Web #10
Around the Web #10
Call of Duty, AI Ghostwriters, and the Lab-grown blood
1. [Social Media] 📲🤳🏿📱
2. [Web3/Crypto] 🌐
The Risky Business of Sam Bankman-Fried
There are many contents out there on FTX and the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) debacle.
I found this essay and the accompanying video from WSJ very succinct and useful. You can take it as SBF-FTX 101 before going through the rabbit hole if you choose to.
Also, people claimed SBF took drugs (stimulants) and suggested it might have fueled his high-risk ventures. A psychiatrist writes about this – the psychopharmacology of the FTX crash. Quite an excellent essay, even if you choose to read it for just the science.
3. [Christianity]✝️
The History of Christianity
I went on a road trip recently, this podcast came in very handy, I highly recommend it to folks interested in historical theology and the history of Christianity.
4. [Economics/Finance] 💸
I:
II:
5. [Movies] 🎥🍿🎬
Some of my Favorite Movies/Shows I Have Seen Recently.
I: The Stranger via Netflix
“Mark, an undercover cop, forms an intense, intimate relationship with Henry, a murder suspect, in an attempt to earn his trust and get a confession, risking both of their lives in the process.”
II: True Detective: Season 3 via HBO Max
“In the heart of the Ozarks, the mystery surrounding a chilling crime deepens over three decades. Season 3 of the hit HBO series stars Mahershala Ali (Best Supporting Actor Oscar(R) for “Moonlight”) as a retired detective who has been tormented for 35 years by a case involving the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy and his 10-year-old sister in the town of West Finger, Arkansas.”
6. [Video Games] 🎮
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
Like many people, I played a lot of video games growing up. But I made myself stop about a decade ago, however I still play once in a while. I was pumped when the new modern warfare came out. I couldn’t ‘afford’ to play it. So, I watched the gameplay on YouTube. It was really good.
Via DraKulis Cinematic Gaming
7. [AI] 🤖🖥👨🏿💻
[I]: Replit’s Ghostwriter AI can explain programs to you—or help write them
Another AI-powered programming assistant that makes coding suggestions. Reported to be similar to GitHub Copilot and works best with JavaScript and Python. It’s called Ghostwriter.
[II]: AI Content Generation, Part 1: Machine Learning Basics
A comprehensive intro to generative #AI for folks into content creation. It’s fairly beginner friendly + a nice appendix on the ‘metaphysics’ of numbers.
[III]: Some ‘recent’ AI developments
Google’s Minerva is a language model that can answer math and science problems and provide an explanation for the answer.
Meta’s No Language Left Behind (NLLB) is a system that is able to translate between 200 languages, which is a key advantage over most currently existing solutions. Code.
OpenAI’s Whisper is a robust speech-recognition model that performs well even on noisy datasets. Code.
Stability AI’s stable diffusion an open-source text-to-image synthesis model that does not require any sophisticated system to run. Demo
Meta AI's Make-a-Video can turn text prompts into realistic video footage without the need for fine-tuning.
Read full essay.
8. [Biomedicine] 🩺🥼🧑🏻⚕️
[I]: Gut microbiome dysbiosis in antibiotic-treated COVID-19 patients
COVID-19 may cause dysbiosis in the gut microbiome, which may, in turn lead to secondary infections by bacteria. See paper.
[II]: World-first clinical trial to test the efficacy of lab-grown blood.
The goal is to eventually manufacture blood groups that are hard to come by to help people who rely on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.
[III]:
[IV]: Aging: Great release of unpublished data from David Sinclair's Lab
A recent short talk on the biology of aging by Sinclair.
Thesis: Epigenetic noise is a major driver of aging.
Content: Epigenetic age prediction, data on Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) for slowing down aging, accelerating aging with inducible changes to the epigenome, reversing aging, restoring vision, etc.
[V]: Variational autoencoders learn transferrable representations of metabolomics data
Really clever data science work here, the authors applied VAE on metabolomics data from the TwinsUK population cohort and applied the learned latent representations on unseen data.
9. [Nigeria] 🇳🇬
[I]: Tinubu's Akure visit was a repentance mission, not an endorsement
Following the confusion over the Yoruba socio-cultural group endorsement, I found this video to be most helpful: It’s an interview of the current secretary General on Arise TV. I was drawn towards Afenifere primarily through Baba Ayo Adebanjo a few years ago. And I have often half-joked that once I get the chance, I would love to join the group myself. Especially when it appears most of them are old men.
[II]: On Tinubu’s Drug Money (never-ending) issue:
“Tinubu's $460,000 Forfeiture is Drug Money, Documents Clear on This”. Link