AI

• “Language Models Learn to Mislead Humans via RLHF”, Wen et al 2024 (natural emergence of manipulation of imperfect raters to maximize reward, but not quality)

• “It’s About Time: Analog Clock Reading in the Wild”, Yang et al 2021

• Regexps used to be AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “A Single Cloud Compromise Can Feed an Army of AI Sex Bots” (Recent wave of LLM cloud API hacks motivated by using jailbreaks for NSFW/CP text chat services like “Chub”)

• Profile of OA’s lobbyist, Chris Lehane

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Genetic architecture of dog ownership: large-scale genome-wide association study in 97,552 European-ancestry individuals”, Gong et al 2024

• “Corroborating written history with ancient DNA: The case of the Well-man described in an Old Norse saga”, Ellegaard et al 2024 (‘Well Man’: sequencing the whole genome of a specific dead soldier described in a c. 1200 AD Norse saga)

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “No One Knows How Big Pumpkins Can Get: A decade ago, the world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight”

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent? Yes; It Misrepresents Scientific Thought”, Medawar 1964_60ya (especially in AI)

• “Rain, rain, go away: 194 potential exclusion-restriction violations for studies using weather as an instrumental variable”, Mellon2024

• “8 Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency ARIA Trying to Make Britain Great Again”

Politics/Religion

• “The survival skills of Helena Valero”, Tove K (how a young girl kidnapped by the Yanomamö survived constant internecine warfare & conspiracies & superstition)

• “Revisiting the relationship between economic freedom and development to account for statistical deception by autocratic regimes”, Alvarez et al 2024

• “How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns”; “Their Parents Are Giving Money to Scammers. They Can’t Stop Them.” (soon: LLM-powered pigbutchering, turbocharged financial dark patterns, long-term affinity fraud & simulated groups around human targets, particularly targeting the elderly, dimwitted, and naive/friendly; “Nothing Agreeable makes it out of the near-future.”)

• “Horatio Nelson: The Darling Hero of England”; “Waiting your way to the top: Dwight Eisenhower’s slow career”

• “The Great New England Vampire Panic: 200 years after the Salem witch trials, farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the grave to feed on the living”, Abigail Tucker2012

• “This Movie is Why I’m Alive: How Ratatouille showed me the beauty of the world that wished to kill me”, Pouya Nikmand (escaping Iran)

Psychology/Biology

• “All the Carcinogens We Cannot See: We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens—substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber?” (interactions, synergy, & sensitization/frailty as the dark matter of oncogenesis)

• “The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries”

• “Layla”, Yassine Meskhout (pet cat obituary); “Why the World’s First Pet Cemetery Was Revolutionary: A new book charts the history of pet cemeteries and honors the universal experience of grieving an animal companion”; “You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes.”

• “Cats are (almost) liquid!—Cats selectively rely on body size awareness when negotiating short openings”, Pongrácz2024 (important implications for how you’d design houses and other things for cats—tall & narrow: good; short & wide: bad.)

• Irreversible perceptions: McCollough effect (seeing some optical illusions can irreversibly change how you see, without you knowing or being able to communicate it, and all you can do is wait for it to go away)

• “Houdini’s Impossible Demonstration”, Polidoro 2006_18ya (how Conan Doyle was fooled; magic is doing more work than any reasonable person would expect)

Technology

• “The development of the chemical high pressure method during the establishment of the new ammonia industry”, Bosch 1932_92ya (triumphs of early large-scale industrial science: the slow dogged development of the Haber-Bosch process); Paul Darwin Foote (1888^–₈₃1971_53ya) § “The Temperature of Heaven & Hell”

• “Reflections on Palantir”, Nabeel S. Qureshi2024

• Balance bikes (apparently we were teaching kids how to ride a bicycle wrongly until 1997_27ya! and average age has dropped by 1 year)

• Ribbonfarm is retiring; “Life, death, and retirement”, Bruce Dawson (HN; retiring early from Google after his wife abruptly died of pancreatitis; “is this time well spent?”)

Economics

• “Noise”, Black1986

• “Newton’s financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble”, Odlyzko2018

• “Her Majesty’s Rat-Catcher: Jack Black caught vermin for no less than Queen Victoria” (an enterprising man, see Mayhew1851)

Philosophy

Fiction

• “Marriage of Many Years”, Dana Gioia (2016); “Smooth Between Sea and Land”, A. E. Housman

• “The Best RPG Cover of all Time: Traveller 1977”

• Fleep, Jason Shiga2002 (a man who wakes up in a phone booth encased in concrete)

• “Your Book Review: Real Raw News”

Miscellaneous