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”⁠, Anwaret al2024 (research challenges in scaled LLMs)

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

• A history of Vaswaniet al2017 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”⁠, Gerstgrasseret al2024 (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”⁠, Begget al2023

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• ⁠“Genetic gains underpinning a little-known strawberry Green Revolution”⁠, Feldmannet al2024

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”⁠, Meissneret al2024

• “Self-protection as an adaptive female strategy”⁠, Benensonet al2021

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

• “Cat Ownership and Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Psychotic-Like Experiences: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”⁠, McGrathet al2023 (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”⁠, Pageet al1998 (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”⁠, Oranchaket al2024 (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)