P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #333
🛻 Driving South
my story 🚀
🏡 We’re finally back home this week. If you’re in Austin lets hang out! Especially if you have a pool :).
📺 I spent some time watching conference footage from The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) this week. It’s available on YouTube. You can hear the leading people in the field tell stories about putting the latest AI technology to work.
fun facts 🙌
A short sampler of hip-hop history and culture. Google celebrates the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop. ~ learn more
The future of e-bikes. “What can we do to get a people's e-bike that has 30 miles of range, requires no maintenance, travels 15-20 mph, and retails around $500?” ~ learn more
Connecticut has cut incarceration in half. “In 1999 Connecticut had so many people in prison that it paid to send 500 of them to be incarcerated in Virginia. Nearly 25 years later, the state has not only sliced its number of imprisoned people in half, but been able to close more than 10 prisons while keeping its crime rate at its lowest level in more than 40 years.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
How does LLM safety training fail? “We hypothesize two failure modes of safety training: competing objectives and mismatched generalization. Competing objectives arise when a model’s capabilities and safety goals conflict, while mismatched generalization occurs when safety training fails to generalize to a domain for which capabilities exist.” ~ learn more
Google’s new multimodal medical AI. “Med-PaLM M is a large multimodal generative model that flexibly encodes and interprets biomedical data including clinical language, imaging, and genomics with the same set of model weights. Med-PaLM M reaches performance competitive with or exceeding the state of the art on all MultiMedBench tasks, often surpassing specialist models by a wide margin.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
The last 1%. This is about software development, but I think it’s more broadly applicable. “I've seen (and been on) so many projects that claim success and move on to the next thing when they are 99% done and fail to complete the last 1%.” ~ learn more
On-boarding your AI intern. “Just like any new worker, you are going to have to learn its strengths and weaknesses; you are going to have to learn to train and work with it; and you are going to have to get a sense of where it is useful and where it is just annoying.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Placebo in surgical research. This is a paper about ethics, but I suggest you read it for the summaries of the three featured studies. “The purpose of this paper is to present three famous cases of placebo use in surgical trials and to perform an ethical analysis of their acceptability using the Declaration of Helsinki as a main regulatory source.” ~ learn more
In the E.R., is it better to be treated by a hot-shot heart surgeon or a rookie? “The heart surgeons most likely to attend the national meetings also tend to be the go-getters, eager to cut and demonstrate their prowess in the operating theater. When these surgeons are away, mortality rates decrease by about 12.5%, a decrease “similar in magnitude to some of the best treatments we have available for heart attacks.”" ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Overstock.com is now Bed Bath & Beyond. They bought the rights to the brand and website out of bankruptcy and decided that it’s a better name so they’re switching to it. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Scientists control human DNA with electricity. “In a novel experiment, researchers were able to trigger insulin production in human cells by sending electrical currents through an “electrogenetic” interface that activates targeted genes.” ~ learn more
A targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research. “The researchers tested AOH1996, a small molecule PCNA inhibitor, in more than 70 cancer cell lines and several normal control cells. They found that AOH1996 selectively kills cancer cells by disrupting the normal cell reproductive cycle. It targets something called transcription replication conflicts, which occur when mechanisms responsible for gene expression and genome duplication collide.” ~ learn more
3-second workout just 3 times a week provides real benefits. Everyone can find 3 seconds per day, right? “In 2022, researchers from Australia’s Edith Cowan University, in collaboration with Niigata University of Health and Welfare, Japan, found that doing eccentric bicep contractions for just three seconds a day for five days a week significantly improved muscle strength.” ~ learn more