James Lin
@jlinbio
Slaying dragons @mit @eboyden3 lab "Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it." — Camus.
I wrote some observations from my first two months at MIT's best neuroscience lab 1. How to make the most of a research position 2. Notes on academic culture jameslin.bio/research
Bring back single-purpose hardware. Bring back retro, bring back dumb. Bring back friction. Phones that can't browse. Handheld consoles just for games. Vintage cameras. Apps exist because hardware was too expensive. Now hardware is cheaper. What products do people love?…
"We don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built." - @PalmerLuckey We spoke with Casey Neistat (@Casey) about the vision for @ModRetro: "Let's identify consumer electronics that people just love... and…
a16z and sutter hill ventures in completely different ways. a16z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid (10x what others were offering) for early rounds, got them twitter, instagram, coinbase, github, anduril, abnb, slack. round sizes went up…
recently got asked: Which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA? curious what people think
introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators. record in stealth. livestream all day. pre-order now.
Ozempic will make hundreds billions in China this decade and next and for decades after 5-min drone delivery, robotaxis, and XiaoHongShu brainrot promote inactivity and button-clicking What used to be a starving nation is now one of excess comforts and luxury People underrate…
I made it onto a niche internet list of essays you should read I wonder if this is how Paul Graham feels
The starving artist has been replaced by the college influencer wannabe. The death of attention spans kills depth and nuance at the same time it creates a deep craving for it and you get cinematic imitations, weightless, effervescent. Nothing is original is heavy anymore.
I keep finding media that predicted how science would strangle itself, from 2008, 1979, 1824... The Paper Trail (part of my writing at the Distressed Scientists Department) digs into these: what they got right, what holds true now, and what we can learn. Enjoy
When I tell you I inhaled this book, I mean I read it in one sitting, then 7 times over again. I've recommended it 57 times, gifted 12 copies, and lovingly annotated it on 6 flights. Donald Braben's Scientific Freedom is an eulogy to scientific discovery, autopsied while it was…
For centuries, scientists kept logbooks - messy, brilliant, unfinished. You can still find Einstein's. Feynman's. Curie's. This is a digital logbook for the 21st century. Entry 000: Welcome to the Logbook. ↓
Announcing The Distressed Scientists Department - a living notebook to make research a playground again. And because knowledge is more than the PDF. I turned down a “safe” PhD this year when I internalized that grants truly do take longer than experiments and that 5 years in…
Excited to have contributed to this paper! Automating systematic reviews with AI has been bottlenecked by rigorous testing, so we decided to just manually grind 10,000+ result checks
We automated systematic reviews using gpt-4.1 and o3-mini ! Our platform (otto-SR) beat humans at all tasks and conducted 12 years of systematic review research in just two days. We also show how otto-SR can be used in the real world to rapidly update clinical guidelines 🧵
Today we’re announcing otto-SR, an AI workflow to perform systematic reviews 3000x faster By using gpt-4.1 and o3-mini, ottoSR beats humans at all tasks In two days, we conducted 12 work-years of Cochrane research–finding 2x more relevant papers and altering key conclusions 🧵