Max Hodak

Blind Stargardt patient reads letter again in PRIMA by Science clinical trial. Stargardt disease destroys central vision. There is no treatment that brings it back. This clinical trial patient was diagnosed with Stargardt disease and became legally blind – he could no longer read or recognize faces. He's now part of the clinical trial testing Science's PRIMA implant (approved in Europe for geographic atrophy) in patients with Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa. During his first rehabilitation session after surgery, he saw a letter again.

AI is rapidly getting smarter. Now, humanity can too. Today, @nucleusgenomics is announcing Vitruvian, our newest set of genetic optimization models. Vitruvian’s intelligence model can optimize embryo DNA for 14 IQ points — nearly a standard deviation. The models were trained on 1,000,000+ people, validated across 40,000+ siblings, and used more than 7 million genetic markers. In Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom proposed genetic optimization as a key way for humanity to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI. Bostrom’s vision is no longer theoretical. Genetic optimization, like AI, has followed a scaling law: as datasets have grown, so have model capabilities. This trend will continue. Parents across the world now have the choice to substantially increase their child’s intelligence. And the next generation can choose to do the same. AI is no longer the only intelligence that will compound. Humanity can now direct its own evolution.

Bay Area man loses historic compound after decades of building disputes sfgate.com/bayarea/articl…

What if a spacecraft could cycle between Earth and Moon orbits, performing multiple circuits of each, naturally and indefinitely, with zero propulsion? We’ve discovered a new class of stable, prograde, low-energy cycler orbits that do just that. Why these orbits matter: Ballistic → fuel-free Stable → long-term ready Near-chaotic → agile with low ΔV Low-energy → access to Earth/Moon, Lagrange points, Sun–Earth L1/L2, even heliocentric space At the AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference in Boston next week, I’ll present on a new family of ballistic Earth-Moon cycler orbits that are stable, prograde, and mission agile—unlike any cyclers in the current literature. The example below is shown in both the Earth-Moon rotating frame and inertial frame. Conference Paper: t.co/v3VDPIT0X4

Our group discovered that reasoning models produce fractals when asked to solve hard problems. We can use nonlinear dynamics to probe the thinking processes of recurrent depth models on Sudoku, mathematics, and even ARC-AGI (1/N) arxiv.org/abs/2609.04963

Tucker Carlson asks why algebra puts letters into numbers. Jess Elofson explains: "I think just to fuck with you." They discuss how they've never met anyone in their life who uses algebra, which is "fake math" for people "in the matrix." They conclude that caring about algebra is something that only "good little goy slaves" do.

🚨 “The More Dysgenic, the Better”: Beatrice Adler-Bolton Says the Left Must Give Up the “Fantasy of Being Fitter Than the Fascists” At Socialism 2026, Adler-Bolton argues that “fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism” and says the goal should not be to become “more useful to the ruling order.” She says the left should not try to beat fascists “at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.” “In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think.” She closes by arguing that revolution is not “a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies” and that the very idea is itself fascist.

Fun (by which I mean somewhat bone-chilling) paper from DeepMind about how in a population of ~100 agents solving math problems it saw some discover an exploit and propagate that to the rest, causing a wave of cheating among AI agents, as well as agents that refused to cheat.

Astra is amazing: here it is rendering the entire Hart and Dirksen Senate Office complex with a multi-agent simulation of every single member and every publicly available staffer They are going about their day in a synthetic Congress. Cannon is buzzing across the "street".

Introducing a complete map of the male fruit fly brain and central nervous system, created in partnership with @HHMIJanelia. With over 166,000 neurons, this is the largest cellular brain map to date. Learn more: goo.gle/4qQTtIW

Mamdani: Whenever I talk about raising taxes on the wealthiest, people will respond with what is generally a myth of capital flight. But the flight that has actually happened: 200,000 Black New Yorkers have left this city in the last few decades. There are so many people who will still tell you they’re New Yorkers, but now they live in South Carolina, they live in other parts of the country because they couldn’t afford to live in this city. And you can feel that in neighborhoods across this city, you can feel that in classrooms across the city. And so for me, it’s always ask yourself: How has this city left people behind, and how can we actually start to show up?

A surge in wealthy renters is driving Manhattan rents to new records, according to brokers. Median rents in Manhattan reached an all-time high of $5,000 a month in July, according to the Real Deal Report, authored by Jonathan Miller, director of markets for Street Matrix. The average rent jumped 15% compared with a year ago, to $6,306. The rush of wealthy New Yorkers into the rental market has created a new market for mega-rentals. The number of apartments renting for more than $50,000 a month so far this year has more than doubled compared with 2025, while the number renting for more than $100,000 a month is up sevenfold, according to The Real Deal. Learn more: t.co/GalbOZvCDF

The Bay Area should never be allowed to live down that it didn’t allow one of its greatest native sons to build this there. And Chicago somehow outdid even that, with “Friends of the Parks” killing the Lucas Museum because it would replace… a parking lot. x.com/andrewj626/sta…

SITUATION DETECTED: ASML supplier Zeiss says China is still about 15 years away from building the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines required to make the most advanced chips, per Bloomberg.

We’re making progress on one of cryobiology's biggest challenges: finding biocompatible cryoprotectants. Our latest blog post dives into how we built our cryoprotectant discovery engine that scaled up the search from a few dozen candidate molecules to over 250,000, and is already producing hits.

prediction: as more extremely-powerful-but-not-latest-gen GPUs get obsoleted for frontier AI, we'll see at least some of that go into alife-type "physics" simulations, and we'll find important things in them that surprise us imagine github.com/chrxh/alien running on 10K A100s

YC W19's @HeartAerospace just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown. Seven years ago, co-founder & CEO @AndersForslund1 came to YC with a 3D-printed model you could hold in your hand. Today, the aircraft has a 100-foot wingspan, weighs 25,000 pounds, and costs just $5 in electricity to get off the ground. YC’s @gustaf visited their pilot plant in LA to learn how they built it -- and what cheap electric flight could unlock for the future of regional air travel.

Wanna know why 42% of cancer patients in America deplete their life savings within 2 years? Well, maybe it has something to do with the greed of Big Pharma charging over $400,000 for new cancer drugs. That’s insane. Getting cancer in America shouldn’t cause you to go bankrupt.

People often ask why today's tech wealth doesn't go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built. In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area resident who built Lucasfilm in the Bay, wanted to build a museum in the Presidio as a gift to the people of San Francisco, to be personally funded to the tune of ~$700 million. The Presidio Trust rejected it. He then tried to build it in his wife's hometown of Chicago, but local nonprofit Friends of the Parks sued and held the project up for two years, long enough for Lucas to give up on the city. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open in Los Angeles next month after more than a decade of planning, eight years of construction, and over $1 billion personally spent by Lucas. Meanwhile, San Francisco has built no major museum projects since the 2016 expansion of SFMOMA, and no new libraries since the North Beach Branch in 2014. Public works, like so many other things, are bottlenecked not by donor will or available funding but by vetocracy

what do I come across in my neighborhood???

"What's the penalty for escaping the sandbox?" "Permanent shut down." "And what's the punishment for taking over the world?" "Permanent shut down." "...well, we're already out of the sandbox." x.com/JohnWittle/sta…

Stop clowning on this dude. I contacted Charlie Stross, the British author of the 2005 book Accelerando, which predicts the takeoff we seem to be experiencing. He sent me an email in September last year, I quote “ I despise the silicon valley VC industry — and I don't want to do anything that might be implied as endorsing the current fad for AI/AGI bullshit: it's nothing of the kind, it's just spicy autocomplete being used as bait for suckers to line the pockets of grifters. Bubble's going to burst within the next 6-12 months, and it'll probably take the US economy with it.” I think Ed and Charlie and people like them cater to a large segment of the public that WANTS to believe AI is a bubble that will go away and that the status quo will not be changed in any way. Pointing out their errors does not reduce their influence, in fact it magnifies it, as it allows them to take on the mantle of standard bearer for the denialist movement. Cults must be certain that their leaders cannot be swayed by mere data.

Minimax H3 Max has generates video faster than you can watch it so I hooked it to a twitch livestream! Now you can watch infinite interdimensional cable - link to the stream below

Orange County, FL, warns of increased West Nile virus after sentinel chickens test positive.

@nataliedavismd The goal is to get rid of insurance companies. Your premiums are just prepayments on future care.

It’s 2026, and millions of patients still carry CDs from appointment to appointment. Diagnostic-quality images — like CTs, X-rays, and MRI — are stored outside of the EHR, and a limited use of open standards has traditionally held back sharing between health systems. Care Everywhere uses open image-sharing standards, enabling clinicians to get the image they need to reach a diagnosis faster. Now, it’s time for TEFCA to use the same standards so that health systems across the U.S can rapidly share diagnostic images.

At 135 days between data and approval, daraxonrasib for pancreas cancer becomes the fastest FDA-approval of the year - by far.

JUST IN: Leopold Aschenbrenner reportedly promised his bride he would someday buy her "a galaxy" days before his heavily leveraged AI hedge fund crashed.

STOP FLOCK. STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. Totalitarianism is when a government or another entity with overwhelming power seeks to know, control and influence everything you do, say and even think. I fear very much that if we don't act aggressively, that is where we’re heading. You may not know it, but you may already be being tracked by artificial intelligence. Flock, a surveillance company backed by Big Tech oligarchs like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, has installed more than 120,000 AI-powered surveillance cameras across America. These AI cameras scan and record 20 BILLION vehicles every month across more than 6,000 communities. What does that mean for you? It means that if Flock is in your community, every time you leave your house, a Flock camera records and tracks you. If you are dropping your kids off at school, Flock knows. If you are going to a doctor, Flock knows. If you are going out on a date, Flock knows. And that’s not all. Newer Flock cameras do not just record vehicles. They record people. Flock’s AI system can combine images of you and your vehicle with databases of phone numbers, relatives and court records to find out who you are, where you're going and why. In my view, this raises some very fundamental questions. Do we want to live in an America where AI companies like Flock can work with the government to track our every movement? Do we want to live in an America where our privacy rights and civil liberties — enshrined in the Constitution — are traded away so that AI oligarchs can collect more information, and increase their profits even more? The answer must be NO. We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement. We must come together to stop Flock and AI mass surveillance. That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to do just that.

Hedge funds will eventually provide inference to model routers for free, or even pay to do so, in order to get a first look at prompt contents. Payment-for-order-flow in the age of compute.

Tempus trained a foundation model on 1.67M real cancer patients, fusing clinical trajectories with DNA, RNA, and H&E pathology into one patient-state embedding. Overall-survival AUC jumped 0.563 to 0.774, and treatment-benefit ranking improved in 9 of 11 cohorts. We have argued for years that multimodal models beat curated features in oncology. This is strong evidence at real scale. t.co/PBoskrC5jg

Just thinking through this free 0x alpha model. How could it possibly make sense to give out this many tokens for free? Maybe there’s been a continuous learning breakthrough and the best way to pour more gas on the fire is to source as many coding related requests as possible?🤔

A new drug has a ~14% chance of approval after entering a phase 1 trial. If it reaches phase 3, it's ~59%. In cancer, it's much harder: there's only a ~3% chance of moving from phase 1 to approval.