AI

• Devin launched by Cognition AI: “Gold-Medalist Coders Build an AI That Can Do Their Job for Them”⁠

• ⁠“I trained a reinforcement learning agent to play Pokemon Red!”⁠, Peter Whidden (PPO CNN⁠ with novelty bonus; demonstrates: noisy TV problem, reward-shaping, reward-hacking, & RNG exploits)

Matters Of⁠ ⁠Scale⁠:

• “Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-center project, media report says”⁠

• “Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search”⁠, Ruosset al2024; ⁠“Evidence of Learned Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network”⁠, Erik Jenner2024 (Leela Chess Zero looks ahead at least two turns during the forward pass)

• ⁠“Why the Law of Effect will not Go Away”⁠, Dennett1974 (the evolution of model-based RL)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Low resting metabolic rate and increased hunger due to β-MSH and β-endorphin deletion in a canine model”⁠, Dittmanet al2024 (why Labrador dogs are so fat)

Recent Evolution:

• “Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why? How did cells evolve a process to end their own lives? Recent research suggests that apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, first arose billions of years ago in bacteria with a primitive sociality”⁠ (inclusive fitness⁠ in microbial communities)

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

Politics/Religion

Psychology/Biology

• “Estimated Sustainable Cost-Based Prices for Diabetes Medicines”⁠, Barberet al2024 (once development is paid off, semaglutide⁠ etc could be very cheap)

• “E. coli chemotaxis: the baffling intelligence of a single cell” (how bacteria mechanistically decide how to explore)

• “Human brains preserve in diverse environments for at least 12,000 years”⁠, Morton-Haywardet al2024

• “Object permanence in newborn chicks is robust against opposing evidence”⁠, Woodet al2024

• “Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer, snow, and ice”⁠, Magga2006

Technology

• ⁠“Building the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel: When Men Split The Sea—Half a century ago, 2,000 workers crossed 17 miles of water with concrete, steel and rock. Seven would die. The others lived to tell of ferocious storms and hard-charging men. This is their tale”⁠

• ⁠“The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible”⁠

• “Polyamorous Scheduling”⁠, Gąsieniecet al2024

• Wirephoto⁠: ⁠“How Photographs Were Transmitted by Wire”⁠, Spot News1937

• Storm oil⁠

• How could we combine forums & wikis?⁠

Economics

• “Clown Eggs”⁠, Fagundes & Perzanowski2019

Philosophy

Fiction

• RIP ⁠“Vernor Vinge (1944^–₈₀2024)”; “First Word”⁠, Vinge1983; ⁠“The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”, Vinge1993

• ⁠“Chance and Order”, Stanisław Lem⁠ 1984 (Lem remains the SF author, after Vinge, of the 2020s)

Miscellaneous

• Historia Augusta⁠ (Gibbon’s biggest mistake—one of our most important sources on the late Roman Empire turns out to be a blatant pack of lies, possibly some sort of very erudite literary exercise, like a Roman Onion)

• ⁠The Æsop for Children, ? 2012_13ya (gorgeous)