Chris Lovejoy's Mailing List

Quite a bit happening this week. Twitter open-sourced their recommender algorithm - you see it here and listen to the Twitter Spaces recording here. This letter (signed by Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Andrew Yang, amongst others) was released, asking for a 6-month pause on training AI models more powerful than GPT-4.

At the end of 2022, I was earning around 10% of my overall income from freelancing projects - now it’s closer to 90%. When I decided to pause on my start-up, I had to decide between looking for a "regular job" (ie. one with a salary) vs doing something else. Working full-time on a start-up for 12 months gave me a lot of insight into what really excites me. And I feel that the majority (but not all) salaried jobs don't provide that deep excitement.

Hey there, Hope you’ve had a great week :) While making exercises to teach machine learning for healthcare, I’ve spent a lot of time actively looking for appropriate datasets. I came across some existing list of medical datasets, but they had a different focus - so I’ve made a new one.

Hey friends, Unfortunately, I managed to get pneumonia this week, and it really wiped me out. It was quite cool seeing the hospital from a patient's perspective. But the novelty did wear off quite quickly. The email will be pretty short this week, as I didn't really do much beyond lay in bed watching Quentin Tarantino movies, reading a few articles and listening to a few podcasts.

Hey friends, This week I started writing an "indiepreneurs log". The idea is: At the end of each week, jot down what I worked on that week, what I learnt and current thinking on my projects. Hoping this can be helpful in the short-term, plus a cool thing to look back on in a year. ChatGPT Pro became available in UK last week, and for me it was an instant-buy. So this has been the first week where I've been able to access it on-demand without any friction.

Hey there! This week I created an academic scraping tool that creates a list of emails for authors who have published on a particular topic. The motivation was that I’m reaching out to researchers in proteomics and transcriptomics, and it was taking time to go to each individual website or paper. However, I’m not sure I should have made it (I explain why below). I’m planning to extend it to also return the contents and abstract of the paper.

Hey there, Some updates my side: I wrote this article about building a mass of written work, and how I’ll be using my website as the place to store it This week I finalised details on my “Python for Biomedical Data Science” module that I’ll be teaching at Imperial College London this summer. I’ll be sharing all lecture notes and coding exercises on this list. These are the topics and I’m still creating the material so let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to cover.

This week I shared five short articles: Key considerations for the use of AI in healthcare and clinical research My writing is incremental and heavily-interlinked Medical AI is well-suited to complex input, personalised output and scaling through automation I Love and Struggle to Write I'm launching 52 startups in 52 weeks On the subject of the last article, I have a confession. I think building 52 'startups' in 52 weeks is actually a terrible idea. Update: I'm going for 12 in 12 months.

Hey everyone, This week I wrote 3 articles: about a GPT app I built to help me learn Spanish, building in public this year, and a 30-day daily Spanish log experiment. An update: I’ve switched strategy from the VC-backed startup route to a solo indiepreneur “micro startup” approach. Over the next 3-6 months, I'm going to be trying out a bunch of ideas, building as fast as I can (target: 2 days from idea to MVP) and sharing everything as I go along.

Reading summaries is easier, but is it better? I have a heuristic that it's better to consume content from the source. Reading classic books rather than commentaries on them (In Search of Lost Time rather than How Proust Can Change Your Life). Not reading the news. Instead, reading long-form deep dives into specific topics of interest. However, one area where I'm not sure this holds true is academic research papers.