1. Some good news in #4 but my! How things have changed since "Hum Do, Hamare Do."

   JF

   Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026 · May 22

   Ten notable facts from India’s new SRS Statistical Report 2024 published two days ago:
   
   1) India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.88 (rounded up to 1.9 in the figures) in 2024 from 1.92 in 2023.
   
   2) This drop is roughly the historical speed of the last few decades. India’s TFR was 4.3 in 1985 and it has been falling around 0.06 per year since then.
   
   3) For those who think “smartphones are the reason for the fall of TFR,” there is not much change in India’s TFR after their introduction. Of course, this might only apply to India.
   
   4) India’s sex ratio at birth continues moving toward natural levels. It has grown from 907 girls per 1000 boys in 2018-2020 to 918 in 2022-2024. Without sex selection (e.g., selective abortions), it should be around 952.
   
   5) Nonetheless, this bias still means that India’s replacement rate is around 2.15, not 2.1 as in other advanced economies.
   
   6) Hence, India is already 0.27 children below the replacement rate and the gap continues growing.
   
   7) However, this figure hides large regional differences. Kerala is at 1.3, well below the U.S. and approaching Italian and Spanish levels (Delhi is even lower, at 1.2, but it is a peculiar case), while Bihar remains at 2.9.
   
   8) In terms of the rural/urban divide, rural India is at 2.1 and urban India at 1.5.
   
   9) From everything I can see, India’s TFR will continue to fall, and it should reach 1.57 (the current level of the U.S.) around 2031 unless something significant changes.
   
   10) Having said that, India’s data has a non-trivial margin of error, and a new Census might change our reading of the situation.
   
   In summary, India is following the same path as everyone else. No Indian fertility Sonderweg!

   

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2. Why Japanese companies do so many different things

   But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.

3. Soft Serve & Soft Power

   Stuffed with rava masala dosa at Saravanna Bhavan, I studied a map of the South Indian chain’s global footprint. How hard would it be to eat at every foreign chain restaurant in New York City? Like the best projects, what began as a simple question has now morphed into a three-part series.

4. One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible.

   A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said.

5. Doc in a Box

   The first review of the pilot for AI prescriptions refills in Utah is out and it looks very reasonable. In the 72% of cases where the AI recommend a refill at least one of two physicians agreed in 97% of cases.

6. To Set a World Record at 81, All She Had to Do Was Hold On

   Wearing floral print spandex shorts and a green sports bra, her task that day was simple but far from easy: hang on a pull-up bar for two minutes and two seconds. If she could do that, she’d earn a Guinness World Record for the longest dead hang by a woman over 80.

7. The third wave of American philanthropy

   Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.

   Here's one take on where the money should go:

   Take a lesson from your Gilded Age predecessors, and treat beauty as a central charitable pursuit. Build monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens — and yes, even mansions for yourselves. Leave a physical legacy to future generations, not just a record of programs and disbursements. Recognize that meaning inheres in architecture, art and landscape as much as in more measurable goods.

8. The obligatory AI tutorials of the week: Tufte Skill and Marc Andreessen

I was able to create this post using the complimentary wi-fi on the Air India flight to Mumbai, including checking all the links and re-reading some of the pieces. I was even able to use Claude Code to make minor UI edits to the code. However, I wasn't able to push the updated site to Github / Cloudflare. The wi-fi was probably too slow for that. So that had to wait till I landed and got access to a better wi-fi.

1. Slop Watch: GLP-1 Edition:

   We did find some Reddit comments, though, warning other netizens to steer clear of MEDVi, claiming serious allegations of possible HIPPA violations, shady billing practices, and even damaged vials of seemingly bogus drugs causing physical harm.

   AI is making the web weirder and muddier than ever. And though MEDVi promises that “sometimes you have to see it to believe it,” in our burgeoning AI-powered web, that’s no longer the case.

   MEDVi, sadly, is the same company from last week's NYT's article about a one-person, $1.8bn company. It is disappointing to see NYT fall for their hype despite this article being published almost a year ago.

   This, yet again, also raises the question of just how credulous and naive am I being when it comes to the AI Hype cycle. Keep that in mind with rest of this week's coverage.

2. Project Glasswing:

   Today we’re announcing Project Glasswing1, a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.

   We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

   Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.

   Since Anthropic (along with OpenAI) is trying to IPO this year, it is tempting to dismiss this as hype, especially in context of the previous link. However, there are many signals that end credibility to their claims.

   First, there is the large list of credible partners above including their competitor in the LLM space, Google. Second, was the news that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chairman of the Federal Reserve summoned CEOs of major Financial Services firms to warn them about the risks posed by this model. Third is the long list of credible tech people endorsing the abilities of this model.

   With this level of publicity, if this was hype, we will find out soon enough but the evidence so far suggests it is likely real.

   In which case, this is a huge step change in the abilities of LLMs. I expect this will also bring AI centerstage in national and global political discourse. This is a model with major national security implications because the NSA / Mossad types can use one vulnerability in operating systems to compromise personal devices of their targets. Imagine what they could do with "thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities".

   This also raises important questions like what if China had developed a model with such abilities first or what if Anthropic hadn't realized the power of this model and released it to public or who gets to decide who gets access to a model like this, a private company or government?

   The other question I am thinking about is how do leaders of China, Russia react to this news knowing that NSA / CIA have access to such a system?

   There is a lot of excellent coverage of Mythos and related stuff, if you want to read more.

3. Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse

   First Banksy and then Satoshi. Something about their unmasking is not sitting right with me. I am bothered by it. I am annoyed by it. And even more annoyed with myself because as a former journalist I should understand, but I don’t. I am referring to Reuters’s meticulous investigation and unmasking of Banksy, and John Carreyrou’s in-depth report labeling Adam Back as Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin.

   Both investigations are technically impressive. Both raised the same question I keep turning over: what exactly was accomplished here, and for whom?

4. We Are on the Cusp of a Revolution in Rare Disease Treatment

   When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe deficiency of an enzyme known as CPS1, left his tiny body unable to properly break down protein, flooding his blood with toxins that could cause brain damage or death. A liver transplant could correct the problem, but KJ was too young and too fragile to undergo one. With each passing day, the risk of irreversible neurological damage grew.

   What happened next may become the most important medical story of the decade. In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines. He received his first dose at 6 months old. One year later, KJ is walking, talking and thriving at home with his family.

   Worth a read, the key question being how does the FDA regulate individualized treatments when the current paradigm is to rely on RCTs with thousands of subjects.

5. The Jump Rope Queen of Beverly Hills

   Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened.

   82!

6. I Trained for the Paris Marathon Using ChatGPT:

   Twelve months ago, I signed up for the Paris Marathon. Within six months, I knew I’d be in trouble without a trainer. So, living in the San Francisco Bay Area — the home of artificial intelligence — I decided to build one myself.

7. Singing a Vote of Thanks:

   We should all do this sort of thing more often. 🙂

8. AI, Unemployment and Work:

   Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

The first two stories this week are mindblowing. Huge if true, as they say.

1. Australian Tech Founder Uses ChatGPT and AlphaFold to Design Dog Cancer Vaccine — Tumours Shrink by 75%. Originally seen here and video here:

   A Sydney data engineer with no background in biology has used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design what researchers are calling the world's first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for a dog, and the results have stunned the scientists who helped make it.

2. A Fly Has Been Uploaded:

   In 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment.

   The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding.

3. Some more AI tutorials. So many tutorials, so little time.

4. BO

   Brooks Otterlake@i_zzzzzz · Mar 13

   Japanese society is so civilized that the fires simply drive themselves to the fire station

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