The Billionaire Who Wants To Live Forever Has Long Covid
www.donotpanic.news
The billionaire who wants to live forever just admitted he has long covid. Specifically, covid wrecked his lungs. If you haven’t come across him, Bryan Johnson is a 46-year-old tech bro who cashed out a few years ago and now spends all his time trying not to die.
  •  TinyTimmyTokyo   ( @TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems ) English
    23•5 months ago

    Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as “uncanny valley”.

    I’ll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.

  •  Deebster   ( @Deebster@programming.dev ) English
    9•5 months ago

    I guess this counts as long Covid, although I associate it more with brain fog and similar symptoms.

    Either way, “lung capacity of an 18-year-old” and “15% loss of lung capacity” can’t both be true, unless he’s suggesting he started with super-lungs.

    •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
      11•5 months ago

      My information is about a decade out of date, for reasons which I will explain later because it is an interesting and semi related story. But I recall from the days that humanity+ magazine still posted blog articles that there were about seven processes in the human body that causes aging (don’t ask me which seven or how to evaluate the research so take this all with a bit of salt). And I’d assume that all seven of them are important and need to be dealt with at the same time. Also there was interesting and effective life extension research done on mice with both low kcal (but that didn’t research life quality) and blood transfusions, but I have no idea if this ever scales up to humans. A long time ago SSC did find a ‘all those nootropics you take, how effective are they really according to the science?’ site and iirc the only thing that really was effective (for being more productive/smart as that is the focus of LW) was caffeine, and some minor others but 90% of them didn’t work (sadly I don’t hve a link, but iirc this was based on actual science and not the normal SSC selfreports (which it did slightly match iirc but the self reports had a lot of ‘I touched grass’, ‘I worked out’, ‘I took the meds my doc said I should take’, and ‘I slept a normal amount’ things which also were effective nothing really groundbreaking seems there isn’t an easy hack (which should loop back into the anti-aging thing which I assume there also isn’t an easy hack, so Quikin is right, eat those veggies).

      CW: one reference to transphobia, and a long rambling post about the blog part of the humanity+ magazine, and some public people related to that.

      So there that is what I can recall and have glanced about the anti-aging stuff, now for the H+ magazine gossip (CW: reference of transphobia, of course). H+mag used to be a blog/magazine which regularly posted articles about all kinds of transhumanist subjects, from robotics to anti-aging to a bit ‘woo’ articles about greater humanity (don’t get me wrong those articles were fine, I thought the ‘woo’ articles (and that is my phrasing, it wasn’t as bad as I make it out to be, but it was a bit woo for a transhumanist magazine) were interesting and it fitted with the idea of H+ to be a humanist transhumanist organization. After all, we should all benefit from technological advances, and people should not be left behind. And then suddenly the constant trickle of H+ articles in my rss reader stopped. That confused me, esp as the last article (in my rss reader) was a imho pretty normal post from the (iirc) main guy behind the magazine/blog who said that we should make sure that everybody benefits from transhumanism and that we should be careful with rightwing people in the movement who don’t want that. This article no longer exists (well the whole blog no longer exists, and the url is dead), it was deleted so quickly that the normal cache things like google or the wayback machine didn’t index it, and the only reason I had seen it was because my rss reader had kept a local copy. After this the blog/mag basically was dead, there were a couple more articles posted but the amount went from several a week to one a month. I have no idea who pulled the plug, but it is pretty worrying, as apparently some of the C-suite of H+ are not that onboard with everybody sharing in the transhumanist future. (That Natasha Vita-More (ex-director) wrote an transphobic ‘you cannot change gender/sex’ thing somewhere 2018 (how can you be into transhumanism and think this? How can you want to live forever in such a way that you refuse to give your age, but be so weird about trans people. I’m not mad, I’m disappointed) is worrying. Ben Goertzel, who used to be big into robotics and AI latest book (in 2018 according to wikipedia) was about PSI (I’m sure he will be back to AI soon now that that is popular). So this is all pretty weird. Vita-More also follows a few d/acc accounts (which is one of those techno optimist offshoots from concurrency people) and various libertarian causes things. So what I think is what happened with h+ mag is that the right libertarians and the left humanist/socialist/etc in the transhumanist movement got into an early clash re the upcoming culture wars (iirc this was before the start of the online culture wars of 2014) and this split large parts of the movement apart and caused a more inward focus vs the broader popularization and optimism of the early 2010s. This idea is also slightly matched by the history timeline of transhumanism kept by the H+ people. (also note im not saying the H+ people are far right (while doing a quick skim I even saw Vita-More had spoken against the far right (on the subject of AI but still, being against the far right good (that she did it by platforming a steve bannon goon is bad however)), I’d think most of them are just californian ideologians/libertarians who don’t want to be really bothered by the culture wars because they just want to live forever). But it is interesting how weird it all got, and how the hypewave of the 2010s seems to have died down re-anti aging. (Of course what is more likely is just that my sources into reading this all disappeared and I see that as the hype wave drying up, anyway talked about the H+mag blog stuff on reddit before but don’t think I have ever talked about it here, so here is my long rambling post (I also did a lookup on what some of the visible people, most of it was silent after 2018, but it seems various things (like the H+mag facebook page (yes very retro)) are starting up again this year guess the hype is back!).

        •  earthquake   ( @earthquake@lemm.ee ) English
          8•5 months ago

          Rachel Haywire

          Now that’s a rabbit-hole. As far as I can tell, she ran (runs?) a facebook group called “Humanity 2.0”. She “leaves neoreaction” every few years and is back within months. In 2019 she violated the by-laws of the Transhumanist Party elections by mentioning “Jeffrey Epstein or the history of Humanity+”. What they mean is that mentioning that Epstein donated $100,000 to Humanity+ in 2011 “hurts the public image of transhumanism”.

          She apparently ran for Humanity+ President in 2013, lost(?), trash-talked Natasha Vita-More, who withdrew H+ support from Haywire since? It’s not clear, a lot of links are dead/scrubbed since then.

          http://transhumanist-party.org/tag/rachel-haywire/
          https://www.facebook.com/groups/transhumanistparty/posts/2389157701305002/
          https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Haywire
          https://snoo.habedieeh.re/r/Transhuman/comments/139x2s/natasha_vitamore_vs_rachel_haywire/ (alternative reddit frontend)

          Bonus: Ye Gods, her interview with an Urbit developer is really, truly, amazingly awful: https://archive.is/5I7Td

          •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
            8•5 months ago

            It’s not clear, a lot of links are dead/scrubbed since then.

            That happens a lot with this H+ related stuff there also just seem to be periods where there is no content to mix it all up. (which, if you are going to be a bit delete happy is a good way to hide your deletions in the void, but in our advertisement seo driven world this is not a good method if you want to become well known and get your ideas out there, but I’m digressing and I don’t know the real goals of anybody here).

            But yeah, looked into Haywire and got a bad vibe from her (and an annoying vibe, I don’t know how to put it into words yet, but I have noticed it in places, a sort of manic tech positivist (which can still be negative about the tech in a criti-hype way) writing of boundless opportunities and everything going faster and quicker and better just across the horizon, Don’t get left behind! But it remains all words and there is the vague stench of far right/libertarian bs, and no actual real tech. Manic Pixie I Fucking Love Science posting (this is not great as it misses the spiritual element of this style of posting, but I have not found the correct words to describe it, in the case of Haywire that she is an industrial goth musician fits).

            Vaguely related but calling the discussion between Haywire and Vita-More a catfight (in the link to some (now dead) Kurzweil forum) is a bit of that unconscious sexism which happens a bit in tech spaces (I’m just assuming it wasn’t intentional).

            Also I might have physically let out a groan due to the ‘trigger warning’ magazine name. (I also have some of her music apparently (A few of the Endzeit Bunkertracks collections) and oof she was singing about ‘being banned from everything you created’ in 2012 already. So very ahead on the curve on that one. (The music itself isn’t bad for that kind of industrial cybergoth stuff, just a bit mid (And I don’t mean that in an insulting way, bad cybergoth stuff is really bad imho)).

          •  gerikson   ( @gerikson@awful.systems ) English
            6•5 months ago

            Ye Gods, her interview with an Urbit developer is really, truly, amazingly awful: https://archive.is/5I7Td

            It always surprises me to discover that there are actual true believers who are worried how to build Urbit on web3, and who fret that Urbit is not compatible with AI. This in the same piece that states that Urbit might be finished/usable in 100 years. Do they really believe that web3 and AI are gonna be around then?

            Also LOL that LLM can’t grok Hoon. It’s a backhanded compliment, but a compliment nonetheless.

            •  earthquake   ( @earthquake@lemm.ee ) English
              6•5 months ago

              Urbit might be finished/usable in 100 years

              In the comments someone asks the dev Jurij “What is the killer application or feature that I must have?” and he replies “No one knows.”

                •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
                  5•5 months ago

                  The Cathedral was such a good memetic thing, super attractive to talk about for anybody with NRx/far right brainworms, incomprehensible why you would use that term to normal people, and made you instantly recognizable as a person to be careful around for anti-fascists, or person of interest for any gov orgs looking into people radicalizing. A bit like the globohomo dogwhistle, it fails because it just looks weird to normal people. At least the alt-right picked a cartoon as their icon.

          •  self   ( @self@awful.systems ) OPEnglish
            5•5 months ago

            Bonus: Ye Gods, her interview with an Urbit developer is really, truly, amazingly awful: https://archive.is/5I7Td

            how does it always come back to urbit?

            The goal of my interview with you is to find out more about the technology behind Urbit, rather than focusing on its social scene like that annoying group of journalists desperate for their 15 minutes. So, let’s take some time to get to the core of Urbit’s technology.

            I can only skim it for now, but it feels like this article deserves its own post. it looks like this was written as a reaction to the articles we’ve already seen that call out how fucking weird the fascists around urbit and the community/cult they’ve formed are; notably, the summary of urbit’s history here specifically elides any talk about the neoreactionary politics that led Yarvin to start urbit in the first place (references to which are themselves scattered across the system’s early specs)

            •  earthquake   ( @earthquake@lemm.ee ) English
              8•5 months ago

              It probably does deserve its own post, I’m not sure I can do it justice. “Urbit is an attempt to make computers great again”, the phrase “from scratch” appears 7 times, “Urbit is doing God’s work to make the perfect computer”, [in a linked tweet] “Urbit fulfills prophecy”, “It’s [Urbit] a massive virtue signal”.

              I missed the comments section at first. “This is one of the things Urbit got right. Especially useful to pique people’s interest and keep them invested by giving them a unique, cool identity.” Jurij claiming that Urbit is amazing because…usernames?

              And then there’s the link to Plunder, which the NixOS-heads will have to investigate to figure out if it does what it says:

              “Plunder is a new programming model where programs run forever. Hardware restarts are invisible to the software, as is moving a running program from one physical machine to another.”

              Finally, Haywire has such lovely readers as *squints* “Eva Brawn”.

        •  papertowels   ( @papertowels@lemmy.one ) English
          1•5 months ago

          Yes, how would you define “does something good”? Live another year?

          What it boils down to this: can you provide a concrete example of a metric that you’d accept as proof that it actually does something good? If not, then you’re just setting up a moving goal, and saying “bring me a rock”

          •  V0ldek   ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) English
            10•5 months ago

            That’s exactly what scientists are supposed to do. You can’t ask a random person on a forum to come up with a solid experiment setting…

            Let me rephrase the original question: are there any solid, peer-reviewed studies, that have looked into life-extension and concluded a positive effect?

            •  papertowels   ( @papertowels@lemmy.one ) English
              2•5 months ago

              I can ask a random person on a forum asking about arbitrary levels of “realness” to solidify what they mean.

              Maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m not asking for metrics that prove, without a doubt that something works. That is clearly what scientists should be doing, not, as we agree, a random person on the internet.

              I’m asking for what metrics OP would accept as evidence that would convince them something works. That is something that scientists would not have a say in.

              Would peer reviewed papers qualify? Would a random blogpost? Where is their bar set for things that would actually change their mind?

              I’m actually not sure where the line is drawn for “life extension”, and would appreciate your two cents. Does a healthy diet, regular exercise, and ample sleep fall under that in your experience? Why or why not?

              I know this guy does a lot of super off the wall techy stuff, but the foundation of what he focuses on seems to be pursuing these things (diet, sleep, exercise) with militaristic discipline.