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Jason Benn
@jasoncbenn
ML engineer, community builder, previously founded the Neighborhood SF, learning to meditate. Anon feedback 🙏 bit.ly/jbennfeedback
San Francisco
jasonbenn.com
Joined November 2012
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  • user avatar
    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Apr 4, 2024
    What gene therapy would be on the top of your wishlist? One biotech friend's answer: short sleep. It's ONE base pair flip and changes you into the type to only need 4 hours of sleep per night (!!!) Isn't that basically a 17% "life" extension? @bryan_johnson
    373K
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Nov 28, 2022
    App designs by Midjourney v4 are frighteningly good.
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Nov 20, 2022
    LLMs are much more capable than anyone initially appreciated. GPT-3, by default, is playing some kind of weird improv game I'd call "Plausible Bullshitting". But engaging with it in clever ways reveals a more sophisticated model of the world.
  • user avatar
    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Aug 14, 2023
    Some notes on being a great thinking partner (inspired by experiences with some of my friends):
    76K
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Jan 25, 2024
    I've now read several posts now about people taking a serious medical problem into their own hands and solving it. They're pure competence porn, they increase my agency and hope just by reading them. First one, from @acesounderglass:
    user avatar
    Elizabeth Van Nostrand
    @acesounderglass
    Oct 13, 2022
    My resentful story of becoming a medical miracle acesounderglass.com/2022/10/13/my-…
    46K
  • user avatar
    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Nov 25, 2022
    Time for a status update on the Neighborhood! The bottom line is that 100+ people have moved into 30+ new homes since February, twice our original 2022 goal of 50. Honestly, we've lost count.
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Apr 4, 2024
    Replying to @jasoncbenn and @bryan_johnson
    She said it would take an expert 2 weeks to manufacture a bootleg gene therapy in a BSL 2 trailer (that admittedly costs $10Ms) at a safe purity level
    26K
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Jun 23, 2021
    Replying to @tommycollison
    My friend has a habit of taking selfies with people she connects with at parties and then sending it to them. Now they'll remember her face, where they met, and that they were having a good time. Perfect 1st message
  • user avatar
    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Apr 4, 2024
    Replying to @jasoncbenn and @bryan_johnson
    The gene is DEC2 btw
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    The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals
    From pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Dec 2, 2021
    What is culture? Culture is the ambient force that induces different ways of being into people. Similar to Alan Kay's "Perspective is worth 80 IQ points", I believe a powerfully good culture is worth, conservatively, 30 IQ points.
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Sep 6, 2024
    I think Season 1 of the Neighborhood is complete. We figured out how to create a great community out of thin air, and then iterated on the recipe 4x. Now, the bottleneck is real estate. Once it makes financial sense to acquire and develop great houses, we can start Season 2.
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Apr 4, 2024
    Replying to @arram and @bryan_johnson
    The FDA only approves work on diseases, not general life improvements. So you'd do trials on people with sleep disorders, then expand/use off-label. The tech already works. It'd require a trailer-sized BSL 2 lab (that costs $10Ms) and 2 weeks from an expert to manufacture some.
    15K
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Oct 29, 2024
    The Jhourney retreat was so much better than I expected - I got to jhana 1/2 on day 1 and 3/4 by the end of the week 😮 I loved the experimental and self-guided format and they really cared about every one of us. 10/10. (nobody asked me to write this)
    5.7K
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    Jason Benn
    @jasoncbenn
    Nov 6, 2023
    I met a researcher whose open-source AI argument completely fell over within 1 sentence. She was like "open-source is safer, because more eyes means we'll find out when it's unsafe." My response was "What happens when you identify that it's unsafe?" She was stumped
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