Technology blogs

Technology interviews

  • Lex Fridman
    (e.g. with Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Andrew Ng, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, David Silver, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Donald Knuth, Guido van Rossum, Bjarne Stoustrup, Leonard Susskind, Frank Wilczek, Lee Smolin, Sean Carroll, Scott Aaronson, Brian Greene, Ray Kurzweil, Max Tegmark, Nick Bostrom, Michio Kaku, Ray Dalio, Daniel Kahneman, David Sinclair, Stephen Wolfram, Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparow, …)
  • The Logan Bartlett Show
  • Machine Learning Street Talk
  • Heros of deep learning, Heros of NLP

Learning

Finance

Longevity

(see Ray Kurzweil, David Sinclair, Brad Stanfield)

  • Slow down aging
    (main strategy: avoid cardiovascular disease and cancer, avoid inflammation)
  • Reverse aging (until now just tested in mice)
    • Epigenetic reprogramming based on Yamanaka factors
      (➩ startups: Altos Labs, NewLimit)
      • Yamanaka factors = 4 genes: Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc
      • Proteins coded by these genes induce adult cells to become pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), i.e. cells that can develop into any specific cell type (Nobel price in medicine 2012 by Shinya Yamanaka).
      • An adult cell is a specialized cell in which certain genes have been turned on or off. This is achieved by adding methyl groups (CH3) to the DNA and/or acetyl groups (COCH3) to the histones around which the DNA is wrapped and depends on the environment of the cell. This same process of DNA methylation that is responsible for cell specialization seems to be also a main contributor to aging.
      • In a way that is not yet completely understood Yamanaka factors restore the methylation pattern of younger cells (which is responsible for which genes are transcribed into proteins).
      • Epigenetic clocks (like the Horvath clock) determine the methylation pattern of a few hundred CpG sites (DNA regions where cytosine is followed by guanine in 5′->3′ direction) and can precisely predict all cause mortality in later life (with a median error of 3.6 years for the Horvath clock). More precise epigenetic clocks than the Horvath clock already exist (with median error of 2.15 years).
      • Avoiding the c-Myc gene avoids generating cancer in the de-methylation process. The OSK (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4) genes seem to be safe.
      • Putting OSK genes into an adeno-associated virus (AAV) under the control of a tetracycline response element (TRE) and injecting the virus into mice allows to activate the OSK genes on demand by giving tetracycline. In this way the reversal of aging can be precisely controlled.