Monday, August 3 — Rex Daily

I Daily Wisdom

Robert Greene The Daily Laws August 3 · Make Them the Star of the Show

Most men . . . seek less to be instructed, and even to be amused, than to be praised and applauded.

—Jean de La Bruyère

Influence over people and the power that it brings are gained in the opposite way from what you might imagine. Normally we try to charm people with our own ideas, showing ourselves off in the best light. We hype our past accomplishments. We promise great things about ourselves. We ask for favors, believing that being honest is the best policy. What we do not realize is that we are putting all of the attention on ourselves. In a world where people are increasingly self-absorbed, this only has the effect of making others turn more inward in return and think more of their own interests rather than ours. The royal road to influence and power is to go the opposite direction: Put the focus on others. Let them do the talking. Let them be the stars of the show. Their opinions and values are worth emulating. The causes they support are the noblest. Such attention is so rare in this world, and people are so hungry for it, that giving them such validation will lower their defenses and open their minds to whatever ideas you want to insinuate.

Daily Law: In conversation, try getting others to do 70 percent of the talking without them noticing, and see the effect.

The Laws of Human Nature

, 7: Soften People’s Resistance by Confirming Their Self-Opinion—The Law of Defensiveness

Steven Pressfield The Daily Pressfield Day 215

THE HERO TAKES SIDES AT THE MIDPOINT Michael Corleone, when he says in the midpoint scene, “… then I’ll kill them both,” has made a choice that will define his life from this moment to the grave. He has taken sides in the most fatal sense. He has declared, “I am with the family. The family supersedes every thing.” “Writing Wednesdays,” stevenpressfield.com, 1/29/20 When you and I analyze the Act Two Midpoint in our own novel or screenplay, we must ask ourselves: “Does this moment represent an irretrievable choice for our protagonist? Has our hero taken sides via a decision she cannot take back?”

Leo Tolstoy A Calendar of Wisdom August 3

We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do.

Often, they are not immediately forthcoming.

Both evil and good exist in the life of the spirit, though, which is outside time, and though we may not see clear indications of reward or punishment, nevertheless, we feel reward or punishment with our conscience.

You should be in a hurry to do good works, even small ones, and to avoid sin.

One good thing leads to another, and one sin causes another.

The reward for virtue is virtue, and the punishment for vice is more vice.

—The TALMUD

The worst punishment is the understanding that you failed to properly use those good things which were given to you.

Do not expect a big punishment.

There can be no harder punishment than this remorse.

You seek the cause of evil, and it is only in yourself.

—JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Doing good is the only sure path to bliss.

Do not expect some tangible reward for your goodness; your actions are their own reward.

In the same way, do not think that you can hope to avoid punishment of your evil acts, for your punishment already lies in your soul.

You are mistaken if you think that the pain in your soul was caused by anything else.

II The Day Ahead

Tomorrow · 13:00 全社会議（期初） ewijaya@gmail.com
Tomorrow · 16:20 懇親会（全社会議） ewijaya@gmail.com

III Signals & Dispatches

AI / ML

@rauchg source ↗ Vercel says its internal agent now supports finance, communications, documents, marketing, engineering, and analytics across daily operations.
@kunchenguid source ↗ A long analysis argues that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is making frontier models more machine acceptable but less pleasant for humans to work with.

Drug Discovery

@afederation source ↗ Ptarmigan 1 is presented as structure free drug discovery that finds known and cryptic pockets with roughly 5,000 times less compute than co folding.
@keita_masui source ↗ A Nature Reviews Drug Discovery update highlights simulation driven clinical trials, digital twins, and AI as possible ways to shorten development cycles.

Biotech

@adamfeuerstein source ↗ Adam Feuerstein argues that a possible AstraZeneca Bristol Myers Squibb mega merger would favor cost synergies over buying promising biotech and weaken the M&A thesis.
@JackPrescottX source ↗ AbCellera’s Carl Hansen describes a durable biotech as a company with a winning lead drug, a deep pipeline, and internal capability to reproduce successful discoveries.

Tech

@BullTheoryio source ↗ A market recap says semiconductors led the Nasdaq’s sharp July decline while investors continued adding money to AI related funds.
@firesidealpha source ↗ Lumentum’s CEO describes indium phosphide laser fabrication as a specialized optical analogue to the CMOS foundries behind mainstream chips.

Japanese Politics

@tairu_election source ↗ A proportional vote model updated with the latest JNN poll puts the Democratic Party for the People narrowly ahead of Nippon Ishin in fourth place.
@yamatogokorous source ↗ A bill seeking as close as possible to gender parity among election candidates reportedly passed the Diet unanimously, prompting debate over parity and equal opportunity.

IV Sky over Ibaraki

🌤️ +28°C

humidity 79% · wind ↙9km/h

warm, partly cloudy, light wind

V What Rex Can Do Today

Prepare a one page brief for tomorrow’s company wide meeting, with three questions to ask and one follow up action per agenda item.
Turn the Ptarmigan 1 and simulation driven trial signals into a short reading memo for StemRim relevance.
Draft a concise post meeting follow up template for stakeholders and keep it ready for tomorrow afternoon.

VI Toward the Long Game

Read the Ptarmigan 1 preprint and compare structure free pocket finding with an AlphaFold guided virtual screening workflow in five bullets.
Study the Nature Reviews Drug Discovery material on simulation driven clinical trials, then map two possible applications to regenerative medicine trials.
Build a small notebook that benchmarks a baseline molecular property model against a modern graph model on a public dataset, and record failure cases.