justsocrateasin

I have a calendar reminder to read this speech every 3 months. It's one of the few reminders that I actually listen to and don't just ignore.

Sample size of 1 here, but hopefully worth the read.

I got food poisoning while abroad shortly after college, and took some shitty OTC antibiotics. I was low-grade sick for ~1 month, and when I came home I started developing IBS which got progressively worse over the next few years. FODMAP saved me, but at the detriment of needing to eliminate a lot of foods that I loved eating.

Recently I started eating 2tbps of chia seeds with some lemon juice and water daily. Chia seeds are incredibly fibrous. Over the next month, my stomach seemed to get permanently better - I can now eat larger quantities of some of those "problem" foods without debilitating side effects.

The bacteria in your gut affect a whole lot of things. And there are competing cultures, all of which like to eat different things. My hunch is that I coaxed the fiber-loving ones back to health, and they in turn did me the favor of repressing the cultures that liked fermenting beans and cruciferous vegetables. There's a lot we don't know about our gut microbiome, but my guess is that eating high-fiber, high-diversity diets is a much better solution than taking a pill.

This anecdote is misleading. TJ is a magnet school with a formal application process. Students study for years to get into TJ. Although many of their sports teams are excellent, students don't go to TJ for sports - they just happen to be over-achieving outside of the classroom as well.

I would strongly recommend seeing a therapist. This is the exact kind of "thought pattern" that therapists are incredibly good at helping you sort through.

I think this line of thinking fails to recognize what a general math background does for your critical thinking skills.

I'm sure you and I both took plenty of math classes, and therefore we won't ever really know what our computer science skills would be like without a rigorous math background. Even if I never touch anything more complex than algebra II again, taking ~30 credits of applied math allows me to think in a way that I wouldn't otherwise without that background.

I would highly, highly recommend this long-form interview of Brandon Stanton - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/321-brandon-stanton-th...

He has a really interesting story yet he rarely tells it - he's too focused on telling the story of others.

Entirely anecdotal, but a lot of professional endurance sports athletes / ultra distance athletes are also high performing PhD candidates/professors/academics. It's kind of weird - if you watch the documentary about the Barkley Marathons, the winners are usually some kind of math/engineering PhD candidate.

Another anecdote - As a kid I was "hyperactive" and struggled a lot in school until my freshman year. Coincidentally, my problems of hyperactivity and poor grades both stopped at almost the exact time I started doing "competitive" endurance sports. I was just now diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in my mid twenties. My diagnosis probably took so long because I've been "self medicating" with exercise for the last ~10-15 years.

I definitely believe the results of this study and I've found them true in my own life. I've consistently used exercise as a reset from studying / working, and often attributed consistent exercise as a key to my productivity.

This may be an oversimplification, and I could be wrong, but the way I understand it is this:

Relapse events are often triggered by an alternative mutation in the cancer. So let's say your skin cell becomes cancerous because gene 1111 mutates. You have, let's say, a million other genes that dictate your skin cell, and maybe like a few dozen mutations that could be cancerous (some mutations are harmless). So the T cell targets that gene 1111 mutation, but as a response, either that same mutated cell mutates again, or a healthy cell mutates. Now it's gene 1232 that mutates, but your T cells are modified to only recognize that gene 1111 mutation, so the new gene 1232 mutation sneaks by without being killed by the T cell.

There are a lot of intuitions I have about why you can't just do it again, and ultimately I think it depends. Maybe gene 1232 doesn't change a protein that T cells can target without killing your other cells. Maybe your skin cell has dozens of mutations but 99% of them aren't cancerous, and we don't yet have the right signal/noise reduction in sequencing / the right AI to determine the mutation that is causing the cancer. Here we need to keep in mind that these proteins are very small and very hard to determine the structure of. Cancer cells can be very hard to differentiate from normal cells in a way that you can target them, so a new mutation is a whole new puzzle to solve.

If I am wrong please correct me - my degree is in chemistry / applied math and not genetics/biology and this info comes from domain knowledge I pick up at my job (SDE for a cancer company) + books I've read.

I disagree here. I strongly believe there's a market for a better social media app, that messaging apps are not hitting. Why? messaging apps (chat, discord, WhatsApp, Signal) are not really social media - they're organized differently with communication at the center and content sharing on the edge (as opposed to Facebook, with content sharing at the center and communication on the edge).

That edge v. center distinction dictates the use patterns, and social media is therefore used differently than a chat app. With a chat app, the social media aspect is drowned out by the sheer volume of communication, largely text based and not media based.

But why is there a market? There is a growing movement to get away from Meta-based social media apps, because they're incredibly addictive and rob users of their attention / time. That being said, I still want to see what my friends are doing... but I'm sick of needing to choose between getting life updates from friends or having my brain back.

Build me a platform that isn't Meta-based and isn't addictive and lets me share fun things with my friends and I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for it.

This is exactly what I'm doing - working at a bioinformatics startup as a SDE, and slowly picking up comp bio projects.

I have a fondness of writing summary articles on to cap off a big work project (for instance, completing a database migration). A few of them get 'traction', but mainly I like the challenge of eloquently describing my problem/solution and giving myself a zitgeist of work I've done. It's satisfying.

Recently, I had an old colleague of mine reach out and ask if I had the time to be a part-time contractor/advisor for his tech consulting start-up, since their client needed to do a database migration. He had remembered me because of the articles I wrote. It's a nice bit of money on the side ($500-$2.5k a month depending on how much I work) and I'm always learning something new.

Reminds me of all the research/talk about the brains of London Taxi Drivers: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/the-bigge...

I imagine something similar has happened to many/most people. For me, I got rather obsessed with cycling ~5 years ago, and as time has passed on I've found that I can traverse entire 80 mile routes in my head with a lot of detail and accuracy. Further still, I listen to podcasts when I bike most of the time, and it's interesting to do a route twice and remember snippets of conversation from the podcast of the last time I road the route.

Brains are truly spectacular machines. Makes me wonder what cell phones / social media / all those free dopamine hits are doing to my brain and consciousness over all these years.

To-do lists didn't work for me for a while, but I eventually figured out the secret for me. I kept dropping off on my usage, forgetting to write down my to-do's. They usually only worked when I was feeling motivated/inspired, not on a daily basis.

I found that the secret for me was To-do's in a spiral bound notebook, so that my list was always staring me in the face and begging to be added to / crossed off. The physical act of writing and crossing off helps tremendously.

I left my job last April entirely due to compensation. It was also due to life balance, but I was willing to sacrifice some life balance in exchange for higher salary.

I was working 60+ hours a week and on call three nights a week at a consulting firm doing engineering. My manager told me I was doing a phenomenal job and the entire year-end review cycle agreed - I scored higher than 95% of my peers and told I was "invaluable" to my team. Most of that was less because of my engineering skills and more because I was just pouring my life into this job.

Then, I got a 2% raise (yes, 2.0%, about $100/month). meaning I was still paid less than everyone who had just been hired. Many of those new hires weren't even engineers! I quit pretty fast for an 80% raise.