AI

• RIP FHI (2005^–₁₉2024); “Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute: The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk”

• The (minimal) implications of chaos theory for reinforcement learning agents

Matters Of Scale:

• “Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models”, Anwar et al 2024 (research challenges in scaled LLMs)

• “Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity”, Cantlon & Piantadosi2024

• A history of Vaswani et al 2017 inside Google: low-level optimization, trial-and-error, defying orthodoxy, and lots of compute & data

• “How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for AI”

• “Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data”, Gerstgrasser et al 2024 (model-collapse doesn’t happen if you continue training on real data)

• “Introducing Open Asteroid Impact”

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven”, Begg et al 2023

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Genetic gains underpinning a little-known strawberry Green Revolution”, Feldmann et al 2024

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War” (more on Haldane1927)

• “My Hunt for the Original McDonald’s French-Fry Recipe: Veteran line-cooks, experts, and die-hard fans tell the story of the fries that birthed an empire, then disappeared—until now”, Fater2020

• The Rootclaim Debate format is unfit for purpose as it is unable to detect falsified quotes & graphs

Politics/Religion

Psychology/Biology

• “Trial of Lixisenatide in Early Parkinson’s Disease”, Meissner et al 2024

• “Self-protection as an adaptive female strategy”, Benenson et al 2021

• “Night Shifts: Can technology shape our dreams?”, Clune2022

• “Cat Ownership and Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Psychotic-Like Experiences: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, McGrath et al 2023 (don’t worry about the cat/Toxoplasmosis correlation: small, inconsistent age-wise, even without controls, and so almost surely trivial causally)

• “Cicadian Rhythm: Insecticides, Infant Health, and Long-term Outcomes”, Taylor2022

Technology

• “Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design”, Ripple2021 (the classified roots of civilian fusion power & the untapped potential for much more powerful H-bombs); “What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos”, Ashutosh Jogalekar

• “A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’” (the in-car map navigation system decades ahead of its time)

• “Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself: 15 years on, Winamp”still lives”—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping”

• “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web”, Page et al 1998_26ya (surprisingly relevant, describing some capabilities no longer available like personalized PageRank or PR visualization by URL)

• “The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher”, Oranchak et al 2024 (with help from Louie Helm)

• Leibniz was not inspired by the I Ching

• Scribe.rip replacement for Medium articles: freedium.cfd

Economics

• “No one buys books: Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ”

• “Cocytarchy: Lessons From the American Inferno” (prison gangs & the problem of being judgment-proof)

• “When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain”, Kent & Martínez-Marquina2022

• “The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution”, Mankiw & Weinzierl2010

• The Van Sweringen brothers

Philosophy

• Daniel Dennett (1924^–₁₀₀2024)

Fiction

• “[Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols]”, Bill Hibbard2007

Miscellaneous

• “The Beautiful Islands of San Serriffe: The story of the most elaborate April fool’s joke ever printed”, Doug Wilson2016 (and notorious offshore banking haven)