The biohackers subreddit banned all posts about peptides and HRT because peptide companies were spamming + manipulating the sub in order to manipulate Google AI and ChatGPT answers. Very insidious industry that is drastically changing the internet www.404media.co/companies-ar...

Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search

Peptide companies have been doing AI-engine optimization by spamming the biohackers subreddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google.

404media.co

New post: Can longevity save us from a population crisis? We tried out @ourworldindata.org’s new population projection tool to see if increasing life expectancy could save us from demographic decline:

Can longevity save us from a population crisis? – The Longevity Initiative

Everyone’s worried about falling birth rates. Almost no one is talking about the other lever that could reshape our demographic future: longevity.

thelongevityinitiative.org

There's a lot of interesting discussion about fertility rates lately. At @ourworldindata.org, my colleague @sophiamersmann.bsky.social and I just built a new population simulation tool to help inform the conversation.

Great overview of current best practices for agentic coding tools. Recommended reading if you write code. steipete.me/posts/just-t...

Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering | Peter Steinberger

A practical guide to working with AI coding agents without the hype.

steipete.me

Things I find surprising about AI in Sept 2025: - lots of progress on coding agents, little on game-playing - really great writing is still beyond LLMs, no real progress since 4o - AI generated videos are really convincing now, but fake AI content is not flooding my timeline yet

Excellent thread on AI by my colleague Esteban - recommended!

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina@eortizospina.bsky.social · last yr.

1/ I recently listened to David Autor on @reidhoffman.bsky.social's podcast and really enjoyed it. It got me thinking about how we've adapted to past technological shifts and why we need to think differently about adaptation with AI. A few thoughts in this thread🧵

Forecasts suggest current steep funding cuts to USAID funding could lead to over 14 million extra deaths (range: 8.5–20 million) by 2030 - including 4.5 million children under 5 (3.1–5.9 million). From a new paper by Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti et al: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

thelancet.com

Childhood leukemia used to be a death sentence for the vast majority of patients. Now, most children in rich countries are cured. Cool article from @scientificdiscovery.dev for @ourworldindata.org on crucial progress I was completely unaware of: ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...

So far we’ve been lucky that LLM economics results in almost perfectly egalitarian access to capabilities. It could’ve gone differently - where the richest enjoy far better systems or one lab holds a monopoly. Here’s hoping this stays true.

Really nice to see these features in prod! Kudos to my colleague @sophiamersmann.bsky.social for building all of this! 🔥

Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · last yr.

💡 Very excited to announce new features: better interactive maps! 🗺️ – Enhanced country/region selection with several sorting options and a bar chart preview – Selecting a country highlights it and shows its value on the map – Zooming to your selection brings up a 3D globe view 🌍

According to SimilarWeb, chatgpt.com had 5.1 billion visits last April (13% increase relative to March), and about 55% of the visitors were younger than 35. For comparison: Wikipedia.org had 3.7 billion visits (down 6%), with ~45% under 35

“…today’s antivirals are so effective that if taken during pregnancy, the risk of passing HIV to the infant is minimal. Without these drugs, around a quarter of babies born to HIV-positive mothers would also contract the virus – and half of them would die before the age of two.”

Saloni@scientificdiscovery.dev · last yr.

I signed the 10% Giving Pledge this year, and this week, I decided to donate 19% of my annual income to global health charities. It's not going to be anywhere near "enough", but I'm happy to do it --

Leopold Aschenbrenner and Daniel Kokotajlo have both argued that China must not reach AGI first. Have either of them given any update on how they think about US labs reaching AGI while Trump is in the White House?

Something pretty strange about where we are with LLMs is how bad the spam in my email inbox still is. I would have guessed we would routinely see super convincing, personalized spam by now.

The way the other nations exports are calculated in Trumps "tariff" chart is so incredibly dumb

Tell me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings without telling me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings

Katie Drummond@katie-drummond.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW: DOGE is planning to migrate the Social Security Administration codebase to a new programming language. This would normally take years. DOGE wants it done in months. That could put benefits for millions of Americans at risk. Scoop from @makenakelly.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/doge-r...

I find many non-fiction books are more verbose than I would like. I'd often prefer a distilled version with a page count of roughly a quarter. I'd be willing to pay more for the distilled version than the verbose one. Could this be a new revenue stream for writers in the age of AI?

"Any grants, contracts, or collaborations involving mRNA vaccines be reported up the chain to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s office and the White House" - Lysenkoism at work in the new NIH.

Derek Lowe@dereklowe.bsky.social · last yr.

Our latest issue of Works in Progress dropped today! - The steam networks of NYC - Prehistoric violence - Urbanism with Chinese characteristics - Extending the fertility window - The Hanseatic League's rise and fall - The pineapple: the king of fruits - The land value tax worksinprogress.co

Most OECD countries fail to allocate even 0.15% of their national income to aid the world’s poorest countries, despite a commitment to do so. That's just $1 out of every $700. Only Luxembourg, Sweden, and Norway meet this minimal UN target. New cuts will deepen this shortfall.

My latest article on Our World in Data, looking at foreign aid and the difference we can make with personal donations: ourworldindata.org/foreign-aid-...

For many of us, it doesn’t cost much to improve someone’s life, and we can do much more of it

Most countries spend less than 1% of their national income on foreign aid; even small increases could make a big difference.

ourworldindata.org

South Korea’s under-15 population has halved in two generations. I knew the population was aging quickly, and it’s no surprise that means fewer children—but the absolute numbers are striking. It's easy to look at fertility rates and forget about absolute numbers. That's a lot fewer kids around.

The number of children in South Korea has fallen by 60% since its peak

South Korea is undergoing one of the world’s most rapid demographic transitions. Fertility rates — the number of children a woman has over her lifetime — have fallen rapidly over the last 50 years, an...

ourworldindata.org

I think this is right. There is another interesting dynamic that for AI labs it would be very useful if academic research were freely available and so you have a powerful new force against established, paywalled scientific publishing.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina@eortizospina.bsky.social · last yr.

I think AI tools like DeepResearch will break the market of peer-reviewed, paywalled journals sooner than most people realize. Evaluation is harder than production of papers, and that gap is growing quickly

THIS IS HUGE! A cancer vaccine developed by Yale University and DFCI shows MAJOR promise. Results of an early-phase trial reveal ALL patients with ADVANCED stage kidney cancer had successful anti-cancer immune responses AND have remained CANCER-FREE approximately THREE years after treatment. 🧪🧵⬇️

OpenAI plus users now have access to the "Deep Research" feature. I just tried it for the first time and asked it for a report on a niche programming topic (comparing computation expressions in F# vs Algebraic Effects in OCaml) and the result was better than any blog post I know of on the topic.

This is quite surprising!

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last yr.

This is a crazy paper. Fine-tuning a big GPT-4o on a small amount of insecure code or even "bad numbers" (like 666) makes them misaligned in almost everything else. They are more likely to start offering misinformation, spouting anti-human values, and talk about admiring dictators. Why is unclear.

How could @ourworldindata.org maps be better? Do you experience any annoyances or pain points when you interact with our maps? Is there something you wish you could do that you currently can’t? What’s the next cool thing we could build on top of our maps? Any notes welcome! Thank you 🙏

GDP per capita

This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries.

ourworldindata.org

StopTB has a new report estimating the impact of the foreign aid freeze. It's useful to understand the huge impact that global health efforts have everyday, and worrying. Some highlights... 🧵

AMAZING! A GROUNDBREAKING sickle cell disease treatment has been APPROVED for NHS use. Exagamglogene (exa-cel) SUCCESSFULLY edits the faulty gene in a patient’s OWN stem cells. Researchers concluded there was a functional cure in 97% of trial participants that received it! Let’s talk about that! 🧪🧵⬇️

AMFAR has published a report on how the foreign aid freeze affects PEPFAR, which actually still hasn't resumed. They estimate that hundreds of thousands of people lose access to HIV antivirals and 1500 babies are expected to contract HIV — *each day* 🧵