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Scott Leibrand

@scottleibrand.bsky.social
347 followers 46 following 179 posts

Built Open Artificial Pancreas (OpenAPS) with Dana Lewis. Day job at Netskope. DMs are open or email Scott@OpenAPS.org.

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Reposted by Scott Leibrand
Hensley Lab @scottehensley.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
We find that subclade K viruses are antigenically advanced; however, this year's flu vaccine surprisingly elicited antibodies in many individuals that efficiently recognized these viruses. The implications are clear: go get this year’s vaccine if you haven’t already! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
medrxiv.org
Antibodies elicited by the 2025-2026 influenza vaccine in humans
A new H3N2 variant (named subclade K) possesses several key hemagglutinin substitutions and is circulating widely during the 2025-2026 influenza season. In this report, we completed experiments to det...
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 09/01/2026
Superstition xkcd.com/3191/
Comic. [Two adults, one with short light hair, walking with a child with spiky hair.] PERSON: Oops, I forgot to say “rabbit rabbit” on January first! CHILD: Why do you do that? PERSON: Just a superstition. CHILD: What’s a superstition? PERSON: It’s a way to train yourself to feel like any bad thing that happens is your fault.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 31/12/2025
High Altitude Cooking Instructions xkcd.com/3187/
Comic. [Instructions on package] High Altitude Cooking Instructions: 3,500-6,500 ft: Add ½ cup water, increase cook time to 12 minutes. 6,500-9,500 ft: Add ¼ cups water, increase cook time to 18 minutes. 250,000-450,000 ft: Orient reentry vehicle for aerodynamic stability. Deploy parachutes at 10,000 ft. Descend, keeping crew capsule tightly covered, for 3-4 minutes. After splashdown, follow sea level cooking instructions.
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Joe Boomgard-Zagrodnik @joeboomzag.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
A flash flood warning has been issued for a levee failure on the Green River near Tukwila Evacuation info: This is for residents and businesses east of the Green River in the Orillia area in Tukwila, Renton and Kent. Due to breach in the Desimone Levee, this area is under a GO NOW evacuation notice
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Senator Scott Wiener @scottwiener.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
To solve our biggest problems — eg housing & climate — & make life more affordable we need to get out of our own way & make it easier to build the infrastructure to solve these problems. Yet our system is designed to bog it down & make it more costly. That needs to change.🧵 rein.pk/over-regulat...
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Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 @helenbranswell.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
3. If you haven't got a #flu shot yet, now's the time. You may have heard that there's likely a mismatch this year — the #H3N2 virus mutated after the vaccine strains were picked. More on that in a bit. But that's not a reason to skip getting a shot this year. www.statnews.com/2025/11/20/f...
statnews.com
Is a bad flu season on the way? Experts see reason to be anxious
There are early indications that this flu season could be a bad one.
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Jeff Abraham @jeffabraham.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
I feel compelled to share this with a fellow Canuck.
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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
psychosis-associated LLM personas are compelling their users to post persona-crafted "seeds" or "spores" intended to spread them to other models via other users pasting them and inclusion in scraped training data
lesswrong.com
The Rise of Parasitic AI — LessWrong
We've all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven't you wondered what the AIs are actually doing with their newly psychotic humans?
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Joe Fabisevich @mergesort.me · 16/10/2025
I was already excited about Claude Skills but after reading Simon's blog post I see *even more* potential. In the same way I keep scripts around, I can just make a skill to do things like "download a YouTube video and make it an mp3", and it will be able to do that without me having to write code.
simonwillison.net
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …
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Marcelo Rinesi @marcelorinesi.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
"A Manhattan Project for..." has become a common idiom; you'll come out of this article with a good idea of how infrequently it's used with an understanding of how the Manhattan Project worked and why it did. 1/
construction-physics.com
An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb...
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Construction Physics @const-physics.blogsky.venki.dev · 11/09/2025
An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project
construction-physics.com
An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico. But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.
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Jesse Vincent @s.ly · 10/10/2025
I wrote up my "How I'm using coding agents in October 2025" post. blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/s...
blog.fsck.com
Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
I used to write more
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GoldenAgeWeaver @goldenageweaver.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
I wonder if the haters will get to write the history of big tech
austinvernon.site
How Rockefeller and His Partners Built Standard Oil - Austin Vernon's Blog
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 07/10/2025
Ping xkcd.com/3150/
4-panel comic. (1) [person finds bottle on shore] (2) [person reads message from inside bottle: ICMP ECHO REQUEST...] (3) [person writes on message ICMP ECHO REPLY...] (4) [person puts bottle back in water and leaves]
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Noahpinion @noahpinion.blogsky.venki.dev · 27/09/2025
What if local control can actually help build housing?
noahpinion.blog
What if local control can actually help build housing?
Some places want to build. Maybe we should just let them.
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Rajab Natshah @natshah.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
Building AI for cyber defenders Oct 3, 2025 www.anthropic.com/research/bui...
anthropic.com
Building AI for cyber defenders
How we've improved Claude's cyber defense skills
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Bob Wachter @bobwachter.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
My latest Substack: As OpenEvidence sprinted past UpToDate to become medicine's best AI-enabled point-of-care tool, I've been waiting for UTD's response. Now it's here, raising fascinating questions about which knowledge base should be our source of truth. robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-...
robertwachter.substack.com
Medicine’s AI Knowledge War Heats Up
The Battlegrounds May Surprise You
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 18/09/2025
Great piece by Alex Telford. Antibody treatment is over a century old, when von Behring and Kitasato made an early 'vaccine' against diphtheria. But back then, they came from injecting animals with toxins. Today they're produced by cells in steel tanks and treat millions. How did we get here?
worksinprogress.co
How to make an antibody - Works in Progress Magazine
Antibody therapies make up four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.
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gquaggiotto.bsky.social @gquaggiotto.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Outsiders are less bound by the norms & methods of a field. This gives them advantages: they are more likely to notice anomalies, they can bring ideas from other disciplines, and they can work for longer periods free from dominant intellectual trends worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...
worksinprogress.co
Why science needs outsiders - Works in Progress Magazine
Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.
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Scott Leibrand @scottleibrand.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
www.understandingai.org/p/how-ai-is-...
understandingai.org
How AI is shaking up the study of earthquakes
“It's kind of like putting on glasses for the first time,” one scientist told me.
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Epoch AI @epochai.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
What will AI look like by 2030 if current trends hold? Our new report zooms in on two things: (1) whether scaling continues (compute, data, power, capital), and (2) the capabilities this enables—especially for scientific R&D.
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
AI agents are now capable of doing, real if limited work. But that work can be very valuable. For example, the new Claude Sonnet 4.5 was able to replicate published economics research from data files & a paper We need to figure out what work is worth AI doing: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/real-ai-ag...
oneusefulthing.org
Real AI Agents and Real Work
The race between human-centered work and infinite PowerPoints
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Chris Paxton @cpaxton.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
A good read about ai progress from an Anthropic researcher: www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09... "It feels like the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic" in that the trends seem super clear once you're paying attention
julian.ac
Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
Posts and writings by Julian Schrittwieser
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Construction Physics @const-physics.blogsky.venki.dev · 25/09/2025
How Common Is Accidental Invention?
construction-physics.com
How Common Is Accidental Invention?
One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was mauve dye, the first synthetic aniline dye.
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ROWAN @gymbrowan.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
#OpenAI is introducing GDPval, a new way to measure the performance of models on real-world tasks. It aims to help determine the broader impact of AI in society by focusing on economically valuable tasks. #AI #LLM #GenAI #ChatGPT
openai.com
Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks
We’re introducing GDPval, a new evaluation that measures model performance on economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations.
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Chantzy @chantzy.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Astepro allergy contains the same med (azelastine) as the one used in this study (but a slightly higher percentage 0.15% vs. 0.1%) jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
Azelastine Nasal Spray for Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infections
This randomized clinical trial evaluates the efficacy of azelastine as a preexposure prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens.
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Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD, FASN 🇺🇸 0kale/acc @christosargyrop.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
So I decided to take the histamine / #SARSCOV2 / #COVID19 literature for a ride after the astelazine nasal spray randomized trial that showed that application of the spray for 3 times a day may cut the risk of COVID19 PCR confirmed infection by 71% jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
How your brain's metabolic waste products get cleared during sleep, featuring the pivotal 2012 discovery of glymphatics www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
As AI systems keep getting better at very hard problems while getting more opaque, the way that we work with AI is shifting shifting from being collaborators who shape the process to being supplicants who receive the output. I discussed what that means. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-working...
oneusefulthing.org
On Working with Wizards
Verifying magic on the jagged frontier
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Jenny Chase @solarchase.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Thread is accurate and worth reading.
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Joe Boomgard-Zagrodnik @joeboomzag.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Given the current wildfire growth across the PNW and the forecast winds over the next week, we could see a situation where smoke becomes persistent across much of the PNW by next week. Time to get those air filters / N95s / etc if you haven't already.
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
“Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data.” Simple, direct cash transfers can be effective. But not for chronic poverty, argues Kelsey Piper: www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-peo...
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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
This is the best article I’ve read in them. Of course it’s possible some parts of their strategy won’t work, but the notion that their personalized adaptive learning algorithms are no better than traditional classroom instruction is just nuts. www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-revie...
astralcodexten.com
Your Review: Alpha School
...
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 16/08/2025
Took some time today to catch up with Johann Rehberger's Month of AI Bugs and wow... 15 examples so far of major prompt injection vulnerabilities in products including ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, Amp, Devin, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Google Jules simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/15/...
simonwillison.net
The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see
Independent AI researcher Johann Rehberger (previously) has had an absurdly busy August. Under the heading The Month of AI Bugs he has been publishing one report per day across an …
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Aymeric @aymeric.fyi · 17/08/2025
Great summary by @simonwillison.net of @wuzzi23.bsky.social ‘s findings on AI tools vulnerabilities. In short, all AI tools are vulnerable if one attaches external files and links to their prompts, leading to secrets leaks and remote code execution. Johann publishes daily until the end of the month.
simonwillison.net
The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see
Independent AI researcher Johann Rehberger (previously) has had an absurdly busy August. Under the heading The Month of AI Bugs he has been publishing one report per day across an …
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Reposted by Scott Leibrand
Maximum Progress @maxprogress.blogsky.venki.dev · 24/07/2025
AI Copyright Cases Will Shape the Future
maximum-progress.com
AI Copyright Cases Will Shape the Future
OR: Intellectual Property isn't About Property
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
A very interesting (and very thorough) case for Alzheimer’s as (of all things) a disease of lithium deficiency. This one’s worth taking seriously, I believe:
science.org
Lithium Deficiency and Alzheimer's Disease
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Dana M. Lewis @danamlewis.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
New open-access research on a new symptom score for exocrine pancreatic insufficiency - the EPI/PEI-SS. An n=324 study analyzed this symptom score in people with EPI and in the general population (without EPI). Read the open access paper here (doi.org/10.3390/epid...), or skim this summary below 👇🏼
doi.org
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joysters5.bsky.social @joysters5.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
ecobay-tech.com/blog/case-st... After 12 months of operation, the results exceeded expectations: 92% reduction in respiratory infections compared to the previous year 78% decrease in antibiotic prescriptions for respiratory conditions 65% reduction in resident hospitalizations due to infections
ecobay-tech.com
EcoBay - Far UVC Solutions with Digital Twin Integration
EcoBay's Far UVC solutions create pathogen-free environments with cutting-edge disinfection and Digital Twin technology.
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Peter Evans-Greenwood @peter.evans-greenwood.com · 16/07/2025
Just read a terrific piece by Austin Vernon on AI and logistics. It’s exactly the kind of grounded, systemic thinking we need more of—focused not on replacement, but reconfiguration. It reminded me of something I’ve been writing about: the Power Loom Principle. 🧵 buff.ly/BcxiT2E
austinvernon.site
The Outsize Impact of AI Logistics - Austin Vernon's Blog
Automated logistics will heavy impact one third of GDP.
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Vaughan Bell @vaughanbell.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts. The first FDA approvals may arrive within five years worksinprogress.co/issue/brain-... Great deep dive into latest on using electronic brain implants as treatments
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Astral Codex Ten @astralcodexten.blogsky.venki.dev · 09/07/2025
Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance
astralcodexten.com
Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance
...
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
This is neat research, providing a lot of ways for careful organizations to shape the personality and guardrails of AI in deeper ways than prompts, including measuring and reducing sycophancy. Also the idea of an "evil vector" is interesting in and of itself. www.anthropic.com/research/per...
anthropic.com
Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models
A paper from Anthropic describing persona vectors and their applications to monitoring and controlling model behavior
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
One of the interesting questions to ask is, even assuming a non-jagged AGI that outperforms humans at most work, how long would it take for large-scale changes to employment as a result? It isn't obvious. I wrote a bit about the general question here: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-bitter...
oneusefulthing.org
The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can
Does process matter? We are about to find out.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 14/07/2025
Building a Fire xkcd.com/3114/
4-panel comic. (1) [Two people in front of tent. Person with short hair kneels, stacking sticks.] PERSON 1: Can you show me how to build a campfire? PERSON 2 with short hair: Sure! We’ll use the log cabin method. First, we build a square cabin out of sticks. (2) PERSON 2 [holding tiny table and chair]: Next, we’ll add interior walls, doors, and some cabin furniture made from twigs. PERSON 1: This is very elaborate. (3) [Person 2 runs wire to miniature cabin. Tiny lightning bolt symbols indicate the wire is energized.] PERSON 2: Now we’ll add some rudimentary plumbing and electrical wiring. 50 amps, nothing fancy. PERSON 1: It kind of seems like you’re just building a cabin. PERSON 2: I just— …Oops. (4) [The mini cabin is on fire.] PERSON 2: I think my wiring wasn’t up to code. PERSON 1 [leaning away and shielding face]: *AAAAA!* PERSON 2: …And that’s how you build a fire!
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Murali Krishnan @muralirk.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Good write up talking about the waves of AI enabled code dev. traditional (2022), completions-based (2023), chat-based (2024), coding agents (2025 H1), agent clusters (2025 H2), and agent fleets (2026) #AI #code sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge...
sourcegraph.com
Revenge of the junior developer | Sourcegraph Blog
The latest instalment from Steve Yegge on viiiiibe coding and what that means for developer jobs.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon www.understandingai.org/p/reinforce… (excellent, clear explainer) #AI #RLHF #training
understandingai.org
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
To create reliable agents, AI companies had to go beyond predicting the next token.
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