AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline: R3GAN”, Huang et al 2024

• AI timeline & risk interviews 2011^–₂2013_12ya, by Alexander Kruel (with Shane Legg, Juergen Schmidhuber, Matt Mahoney, Timothy Gowers etc)

• “20 Years of Bitext”, Peter Brown & Bob Mercer 2013_12ya (on early NMT, n-grams, finding & cleaning large linguistic corpora)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “‘Life in a Germ-Free World’: Isolating Life from the Laboratory Animal to the Bubble Boy”, Kirk 2012_13ya; “Looking Out from the Isolator: David’s Perception of the World”, Murphy & Vogel 1985_40ya (the cognitive distortions of growing up a ‘bubble boy’ due to lack of direct exposure to things like “the other side of a building”—contra François Chollet)

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method”, Summerscales2023

• Seriation (archaeology)/Ordination (ecology) (generalizing sorting; R)

Politics/Religion

• “The Secret Pentagon War Game That ​Offers a Stark​ Warning for Our Times: The devastating outcome of the 1983_42ya game reveals that nuclear escalation inevitably spirals out of control”

• Emperor Norton

Psychology/Biology

• “GLP-1 programs the neurovascular landscape”, Chen et al 2024

• “The Effects of Diagnosing a Young Adult with a Mental Illness: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Doctors”, Bos et al 2023

• Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions published at last, with new revelations: “Once you know he was bipolar, a lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense.”

• “Intestines of non-uniform stiffness mold the corners of wombat feces”, Yang et al 2021

• “How to transport a polar bear, and other idiosyncrasies in providing emergency medical services in the Arctic”, Harring et al 2024

• “Seasonal Hair Growth in the Adult Domestic Cat (Felis catus)”, Hendriks et al 1997_28ya (a cat will shed its weight in fur every ~31 years)

• “Hoover damn! A brief look at sexual injury by vacuum cleaners”

Technology

• “Operation Pluto”, WWII: in 4 days, the UK laid a fully-operational oil pipeline across the English channel, which pumped 0.8b liters of oil to support the invasion of Europe; see also: the Mulberry harbours

• “The Little Can That Could”, Daniel 1987_38ya (‘good design is invisible’: how American & British engineers reinvented the German jerrycan poorly because they didn’t understand its requirements nor solutions)

• Boyer-Moore majority vote algorithm (a surprisingly simple algorithm for counting the majority of a list)

• “Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions”, Nicholas Carlini2025 (writing & compiling to a VM for regexp-based loop-free programming)

• “Stimulation Clicker”, Neal Agarwal (best clicker game I’ve seen in years)

• “Group Theory in the Bedroom: An insomniac’s guide to the curious mathematics of mattress flipping”, Brian Hayes 2005_20ya (no memory-less optimal algorithm for rotating a mattress to even out wear & tear)

• Navy shower

Economics

• “The Lifetime Costs of Bad Health”, De Nardi et al 2024

• “The Psychology Of Poverty: Where Do We Stand?”, Haushofer & Salicath2024

• “The Effect of Financial Resources on Fertility: Evidence from Administrative Data on Lottery Winners”, Tsai et al 2022 (fertility is not about wealth)

Philosophy

• “Why is the Speed of Light So Fast? (Part 2)” (on the fragility of atoms & complex structures)

Fiction

Miscellaneous

• “The Color of Memory: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet”