We’re literally seeing digital evolution in real-time. These are basically primitive life forms such as bacteria evolving just with tiniest differences.
Right now we’re engineering every bit of it to make it better but in the long run this is unsustainable. It’s going to be so complex that even these digital life forms won’t be able to understand their own digital DNAs, like us.
We know we have DNA, we can measure every letter but it doesn’t mean we understand what’s going on our 14 trillion cells and how each and every one of them is regulated.
I think this analogy not only explains us, or digital beings we see today. It explains everything, quite literally. Still it would be amazing to think about these systems from the perspective of biology, and try to understand the parts analogous to existing frame that we already have. Then we might figure out what to optimize better. For instance if we figure out a certain part of a layer corresponds to “genes” then we might find out there is alternative splicing within it. Wild but worth a shot.
It’s like netflix for language, where users can select/create their personal bilangual stories.
I had quite a lot of feedback from HN, friends, random people on the internet and trying to solve the common pain points and find my way around to make it geniunely useful.
- Most people said it’s hard to come up with a story, so I added url grounding. Also added buttons (including HN :)) so people can just click click and get their stories at their level with their interests.
- Made sure people can generate stories without ever signing up
- Each word is highlighted while being read, and the meanings can be checked with a tap. I also added an option for users to read the sentence for being checked how good their pronounciation is.
- Benchmarked 7 different models to get the fastest & highest quality story generation (it’s gemini now) and it’s insanely fast. I might share more about it on the webpage because I am an engineer and I enjoy this stuff lol.
- Added CSV import in Use my words so Anki users can just import their words to study.
- Also people can download their stories as pdf so they can send it to their kindles.
- I am working on a ChatGPT app, so people can just say “@DuoBook give me a Dutch/English story on latest Iranian events” within ChatGPT, but I am a bit afraid that it might be costly lol.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if US used open source Chinese models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight… democracy at its best.
Yep, I think it is. The point is there's almost no history of oral peptides, other than stomachs destroying them.
FTA: "So to summarize the state of the art in oral peptide delivery: there are exactly two FDA-approved products that use permeation enhancers to get peptides into your bloodstream through your GI tract. Both achieve sub-1% bioavailability. Both required over a decade of development, thousands of clinical trial participants, and hundreds of millions of dollars."
Would a sublingual dose be possible/more effective? Research in other (um, yeah, medicinal!) compounds shows that it can be an effective pathway to the bloodstream rather than trying to survive the digestive system.
Sublingual is even harder. The sublingual mucosa is thin but selective. It strongly favors molecules that are small, lipophilic and uncharged. Semaglutide is about 8-10x too big, highly polar and charged.
Injection is really the only method with any substantial bioavailability. BUT, low (<1%) bioavailability does not necessarily mean useless.
If the drug has a relatively low marginal cost of production, and the stomach just breaks down 99% of it without side effects, you can just manufacture 100x more, give it orally, and eat the cost of the 99% that gets lost along the way.
Injectable Semaglutide/Tirzepatide (>99.8% pure) are currently sold at a profit from China for around $2-3/weekly dose. Rybelsus (oral semaglutide) is sold at roughly the same cost per milligram, even though it's made in FDA-approved facilities (you just need to take >= 40x more milligrams per month, bringing it to $1000/month in the USA)
So manufacturing oral doses 100x higher than injectable seems to be economically viable.
Ancedotal but it's really hard for me to do insufflation because of the discomfort. Of course if my life depended on it I could probably do it but otherwise I'd rather not.
Local buffering — pH microenvironment control (semaglutide)
One I take, PEP19, apparently is unique in being naturally bioactive. Evidence is early stage, but I get noticably better sleep with it (by some non-drowsiness mechanism), taking 6mg, 3x the recommended dosage for sleep, but the higher dose may promote fat burning and fat browning at night (only 1 study). It only has 10 residues which apparently avoid having typical cleavage points, fragments may retain bioactivity, and it has extreme potency in very small doses so any absorption means a lot.
Despite a plethora of peptides, successes are not common.
And I got a 504 error (served by CloudFront) on that status page earlier. The error message suggested there may have been a great increase in traffic that caused it.
Maybe that's precisely what Cloudflare did and now their status page is down because it's receiving an unusual amount of traffic that the VPS can't handle.
