
Scientist, entrepreneur, computer geek, and stellar bio-writer. CEO & Founder @AetherWorksLLC | Partner @BlueBearCap | @ActiveAether | @AetherStore
NYC
Joined April 2013
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this is amazing
Replying to @doristsao
2/ TL/DR: We found neural activity across both inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex alternates between a conscious mode and an unconscious mode ~ 15 times every second.
Rob MacInnis retweeted
a new paper published yesterday in Science Advances showed that just 10 minutes of ultrashort-wave stimulation significantly boosted the brain's waste-clearance system in mice
it amplified the brainwaves associated with deep sleep, even while the mice were awake
in mice with Alzheimer's pathology, just 7 days of treatment reduced amyloid buildup and improved memory
startup idea: a neuromodulation sleeping cap that supercharges your brain's nightly cleanup, improves sleep quality and potentially helps prevent Alzheimer's
i genuinely think we'll eventually figure out how to get a full night's restorative sleep in just 4 hours
imagine getting an extra 4 hours of life every single day without sacrificing your health
the implications are absolutely insane
Rob MacInnis retweeted
liz warren: we’re gonna stop the mayonnaise company from buying a hot sauce company
elon musk:
The most important piece of writing in years. Clear points for personal conviction and clear points to challenge dissenters. This is the statement of the options, laid out bare. Choose.
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
genius.
introducing FindMyWifePhone™️ my latest shortcut squarely placed on the pareto frontier. there is no easier & cheaper way to find your wife's phone.
"honey, do you know where my phone is?"
the fuck I dont!
"can you call me?!"
she keeps her phone on silent.
so i made this shortcut to help.
trigger = i send her a text with !ping in it
action = hey phone sets a timer for 1s
timer always works, we like to keep our phones on silent + dnd and we dont use apple watches. so finding each other's phones used to be a challenge. we both have this set up in reverse, and its worked well.
bonus shortcut = button in home screen widget to send !ping to my wife
(we also have one called !awaken which disables silent, sets volume to max & disables do not disturb in case of emergency)
100% - in other news, tylenol would be laughed off the stage these days before the clinical trial period even started…
Rob MacInnis retweeted
This morning it finally came home to me. I will probably never write another program in C again.
Which is a big deal. I've been writing C since 1983. 43 years is a long time and a lot of skill investment.
It's not like I didn't see this coming. I've been writing about the decline of C for years, predicting that it would be displaced by newer systems languages with better safety guarantees and more coherent designs.
It wasn't better language design alone that did it, though. It's how good LLMs now are at generating code from specs and prompts.
This means I can speak a program into existence in Rust or Go without any more effort than would be required to conjure it up in C. What makes this particularly dramatic is that I never learned to hand-code in Rust. And now - I don't need to.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
“I can try to persuade you, but I can’t force you”. damn skippy
Rob MacInnis retweeted
"AI is conscious" is the first major example of AI psychosis and the most potent cogsec vulnerability that exists in the human brain. Many AI companies are exploiting this to gain power over you.
We're empathy machines. Attacks that exploit this, like 'model welfare" should be treated as malware.
this is the most disgusting, horrific shit I have heard in a long time. “kid feeling inconvenient to you? slip em cyanide, no probs. in fact, we’ll help! we’re the government, that’s what we’re here for!”… just … the entire concept is outrageous and foul deep down to its core. monstrous. state-run. unreal.
The Netherlands has 'aborted' a 2-year-old baby, just one year after the country legalized euthanasia for children under 12.
In 2025, 10,341 people in the Netherlands were euthanized, up nearly 4% from the year before.
According to the Assessment Committee for Late Termination of Pregnancy and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Aged 1 to 12 Years, the baby had "both mental and physical" disabilities, so they decided it was best to kill the child.
"The child had multiple, very severe disabilities, both mental and physical, and the prognosis was that the child would be dependent on support with all activities of daily living for the rest of their life."
After getting consent from the child's parents, the baby was killed.
Horrific.
useful
We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay.
Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this.
Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide.
Here are the four guiding principles:
1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence
It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it.
2. Writing is thinking
Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter.
3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it
If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.
4. Longer is not better
AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt.
You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)

























