“Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| 1 | | Low-calorie diet plus exercise put half of young adults’ type 2 diabetes into remission In a randomized trial of 96 adults aged 18–45 in England and Canada, 27 of 50 who followed an 800–900 kcal-a-day diet with supervised exercise were in remission at 24 weeks, against 2 of 46 on usual care, researchers from McGill, Leicester and Alberta report in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas. WHY Glucose-lowering drugs were stopped under supervision while the intervention group lost 8.4 kg on average; the authors say the trial was small and short, and longer real-world studies must show whether remission lasts. |
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| 2 | | A blood test flagged elevated Alzheimer’s-related decline risk years before symptoms Among 2,684 cognitively unimpaired older adults pooled from six studies, those with very high levels of the blood marker p-tau217 had an estimated 38% chance of cognitive impairment within five years, a Mass General Brigham-led team reports in JAMA. WHY The marker stayed predictive after accounting for amyloid PET scans and the APOE4 gene; the authors say blood tests are not yet recommended for people without symptoms, because no disease-modifying treatment exists for that group. |
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S&P 7,580.07 −1.82% | NDX 28,384.9 −3.46% | 10Y 4.94% −4bp | BRENT $113.43 +2.37% | BTC $77.9k +0.82% |
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| October ended with a tech rout: Intel fell 28.58% after weak fourth-quarter guidance and dragged chipmakers down 7.2%, while Amazon’s negative free cash flow revived doubts about AI spending. Brent rose after a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz was hit by limpet mines and Washington signaled it could resume strikes on Iran; Treasuries drew safe-haven buying. |
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| Two essays this morning share a suspicion: the smoothing we do to fit in costs more than it saves. George Mack argues that the normal version of you leaves no trace, and that the stares you get for doing something odd are other people updating their expectations. Sasha Chapin finds his utopia in a Brooklyn restaurant that refuses to file off its rough edges, then wonders whether he has filed off his own. Together they make conformity look less like safety and more like a slow way of disappearing. |
Today’s question If nobody remembers the normal version of you, what are you protecting when you smooth your edges? |
ESSAY High Agency · George Mack Mack’s claim is that conventional behavior evaporates from memory, while unusual acts become the stories people tell about you. He runs from Montaigne’s lists of once-normal customs, like blackened teeth, to Zack Pinsent, a teenager who switched to 18th-century dress and built a following, and borrows the idea of prediction error: BBC test audiences disliked The Office because it broke their expectations. The open question, raised by a commenter, is whether being memorable is a good measure of a life at all. Feeds your note on the stares you drew walking backwards uphill. |
ESSAY Substack · Sasha Chapin Chapin argues that if machines absorb the world of bits, the good life may look like small, physical work that refuses to scale, done with devotion. His evidence is one evening at Cafe Kestrel in Red Hook: a room too loud to talk in, drinks 25 minutes late, unexplained popcorn, then a halloumi and a burger he ranks near the best he has eaten, while staff quietly set the patio with candles. The tension is whether a utopia built on whim can be repeated or only stumbled into once. Feeds your note on whether optimization is killing connection. |
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WORKFLOW karpathy.bearblog.dev · Andrej Karpathy Karpathy turned a Friday-night frustration with YouTube’s recommendations into a deployed site in about two hours: a YouTube-style front end for 6,454 videos that Hacker News commenters recommended, sorted into 150 topics. The agent downloaded every HN comment, ran a cheaper model over them to cut spam down to about 40,000 recommending comments, built the UI, then bought a domain and hardened a server. The move worth stealing is using a source that already encodes human judgment as your curation layer; the catch is that the quality filter now reflects the model’s taste as much as yours. |
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PREDICTION MARKETS Crunchbase News Kalshi raised $1 billion in a Series G led by Wellington Management and Sequoia at a $40 billion post-money valuation, the week’s second-largest U.S. round after manufacturer Re:Build’s $2.1 billion. It closed the week before Tuesday’s midterms, with Serval also on the list at $3 billion for enterprise coding agents. The question for your corner of the industry: what a $40 billion price implies about how much of collective belief investors think can be traded. |
AI simonwillison.net GitHub’s annual report puts merged pull requests at 220 million a month and commits at 7.38 billion a month, each more than tripling in under a year, with new repositories doubling to 30.3 million a month. Willison reads the curve, flat for years and then nearly vertical, as a stark picture of agentic engineering. Open question: how much of that is new software, and how much is agents generating churn. |
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Newsletter Celine Nguyen writes long, image-rich essays on art and attention; start with this one on how beauty pulls attention outward, which pairs with your note on art as something revealing. | | Tool Draw a symbol, get its LaTeX command. Runs in the browser and works offline, handy for real analysis write-ups. |
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Until tomorrow. Sun 01 Nov · 09:36 ET |
