Benjamin Tseng

The final Buffett letter includes this charming anecdote & suggestion to us all on how to live a good life

Text of the full letter: www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025...

Who’s Jobs are AI Taking Right Now? Despite all the speculation over why Amazon is laying off 14,000 workers, as of this writing, and with a few exceptions I’ll note below, I don’t personally worry a great deal about AI t…

I'm generally optimistic about AI technology (yes, even for our careers) ... with one exception, and the data is starting to prove my fears right

benjamintseng.com/2025/11/whos...

#ChemSky

Seven Lessons from My 30s Source: Nano Banana Turning 40 is a milestone that should come with a manual. It doesn’t, of course, but it does come with a decade’s worth of receipts for lessons learned the old fashioned way. As…

Turning 40 is a milestone that should come with a manual. All I got were these lessons instead -- hopefully they help (or at least amuse) you

Read all about the 7 lessons in full here: benjamintseng.com/2025/10/seve...

Lesson 7: Play stupid (status) games, win stupid prizes

Status games are everywhere (ask any parent of young kids the last time an ad or article made them feel guilty).

Recognize them and consciously decide which ones are actually worth your time and energy

Lesson 6: Good taste is overrated

In your career, good taste is an asset

In life? It’s better to have low standards. Being easy to please (ie with wine, movies, food) is a superpower for everyday contentness. It saves you time, money, and mental energy for what truly matters.

Lesson 5: Genius doesn't generalize

In an age of influencer marketing & interview podcasts, its important to remember what it takes to be brilliant at one thing comes at the expense of others

TLDR: don't ask a gymbro for relationship advice or a VC about how to help the poor

2020 was a hard year. I was unemployed w a young son & aging parents I couldn't see

But it was also the year I built a telemedicine operation 0-to-1, built AI models which made it into academic papers, and did policy work which led to new friends & opptys

Embrace the unlikely

Lesson 4: Embrace the unlikely

My 30s included my getting fired, a pandemic, 9% inflation, US political re-alignment, my being put on a legal witness stand — all things I thought were unlikely.

Prepare for what you can, but also learn to embrace the unlikely...

Lesson 3: There’s little upside in talking about politics

Modern political discourse is about tribal outrage. It leads to bad policy and bad behavior.

Disengage from the daily outrage cycle and focus on *policy*. It's boring, but that's a feature, not a bug

Knowing someone is a doctor tells you a great deal about their education, income, and views on risk & credentials.

Knowing someone is a politician tells you they're professional fundraisers and popularity contest winners, and that they're structurally surrounded by flatterers

Lesson 2: A profession gives an oddly effective read on a person

Careers shape our incentives, skills, and definitions of success/failure. While not the whole story, knowing what someone does for a living offers a surprisingly useful set of heuristics for understanding them.

Lesson 1: Don't partner with someone until you've seen them in a crisis

It’s easy to be open & giving when things are good. It's the bad times that reveal value & priorities. Before you enter a partnership (💰 or ❤), see how they handle a storm

My 30s were a wild decade of learning things about being a parent & about how the world works. As I head into the next decade, I've been reflecting on the lessons that have reshaped how I see the world.

Here are 7 of them. 🧵

How you know it's time to start thinking about selling...

Gene therapy for Huntington’s shows promising clinical trial data Huntington’s Disease is one of the classic “uncurable” neurodegenerative diseases. A genetic mutation produces a mutant form of a protein (called Huntingtin) which leads to sudden…

Gene therapy for Huntington's Disease shows 75% slowdown in progression over 36 month clinical trial!

Amazing feat — working gene therapy + targeted surgery + synthetic control arm — and for company uniQure (who's seeing a 3x stock price bump on the news)

benjamintseng.com/2025/09/gene...

Why are ultra-processed foods bad for you? Nutrition is a field that is fraught with studies that are not powered or designed well enough to make strong conclusions about what types of diets are the “best”. So it was interesting…

Why are ultra-processed foods bad for you? benjamintseng.com/2025/09/why-...

Child dies from rare measles-related complication, LA County health officials say Health officials reported the death of a Los Angeles County child from a complication of measles infection acquired during infancy.

Death from sub-acute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) in a child in Los Angeles
SSPE is a rare sequel of #measles infection that appears years after the initial infection, and is uniformly fatal. So sorry for this family. As things are going on the US, we'll be seeing more of these cases.

The Surrealism of Authoritarianism Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are: Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat Contradiction be…

The Surrealism of Authoritarianism -- a look at life under Xi Jinping outlines some of the hallmarks of authoritarian rule benjamintseng.com/2025/09/the-...

You are buying this shirt because you're a Swiftie

I'm buying this shirt to protest the Chinese Communist party

We are not the same 🤣

Listening to a medical informatics professor talk to a Med Student who thought he could vibe code through a data analysis & fail because he doesnt understand how the code or the data works 🤦🏻‍♂️

Vibe coding can be great: but don't use it where it matters if you can't check it

How blockchain network Keeta processes 11 million transactions per second with Spanner | Google Cloud Blog A recent public stress test verified that Keeta Network’s transaction volume significantly outperformed traditional layer-1 blockchains.

Amazing technical feat but does this not defeat the purpose of block chain as distributed ledger if you need to rely on a database hosted at a cloud provider?

How blockchain network Keeta processes 11 million transactions per second with Spanner | Google Cloud Blog share.google/dvfJQGpayOBh...

New Age Bioprospecting for Antimicrobials One of the major contributors to improved healthcare outcomes and reduced mortality in the post-World War II era was the widespread use of antibiotics. Able to treat infection, these miracle drugs …

Are we at the start of a new golden age of antimicrobial discovery?

The lower cost of metagenomics + our better understanding of biosynthetic gene clusters + new computational methods = we may outrun the awful "end of antibiotics" that's fast approaching

benjamintseng.com/2025/08/new-...

YouTube wipes out thousands of propaganda channels linked to China, Russia, others Google removed YouTube channels and other accounts linked to RT, the Russian state-controlled media outlet accused of paying prominent conservative influencers.

This is a good thing in the neverending war on weaponized misinformation

If only we could get X to do the same... www.cnbc.com/2025/07/21/y...

Notion’s hosted MCP server: an inside look Earlier this year, we got requests for a Notion MCP server that would let AI agents work directly with Notion workspaces. Here’s how we built it, from our initial open-source experiment to today’s hos...

Nice look by the team @notion.com on how they approached making their centrally hosted MCP server (and why their first attempt to just map tools to API calls wasn't ideal)

www.notion.com/blog/notions...

Oldie but goodie in these times

Apparently this is the stage of Big tech capitalism we're in now...

This is incredibly tragic. His light was bright.

I heard this morning that my informatics colleague Dr. Atul Butte passed after a battle with cancer. He was a giant in the field & inspired many of us over his distinguished career. He was a passionate champion of the power of big data & his impact on our field is immeasurable. RIP Atul & thanks.

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT.
CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open.
DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open.
CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are.
DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.