AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “Introducing Deep Research”, OpenAI (search case-study); “o3: Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models”, El-Kishky et al 2025

• “AI progress is about to speed up”, Ege Erdil (the compute drought is ending as LLMs finally scale to 100k+ H100 training runs)

• “A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI” (G42/Microsoft/Brad Smith/Huawei/Nvidia/Cerebras/…)

• “Scaling Laws for Fine-Grained Mixture of Experts”, Krajewski et al 2024

• “Value-Based Deep RL Scales Predictably”, Rybkin et al 2025

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Generation of rat offspring using spermatids produced through in vitro spermatogenesis”, Matsumura et al 2023

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Talent Spotting in Crowd Prediction”, Atanasov & Himmelstein 2023

• “Multiply by 37 (or Divide by 0.027): A Surprisingly Accurate Rule of Thumb for Converting Effect Sizes From Standard Deviations to Percentile Points”, von Hippel 2024

Politics/Religion

Psychology/Biology

• “The impact of short-lived controls on the interpretation of lifespan experiments and progress in geroscience—Through the lens of the ‘900-day rule’”, Pabis et al 2024

• “Functional recovery of adult mouse brain tissue arrested in time during cryopreservation by vitrification”, German et al 2025

• “Infants’ Sense of Pain Is Recognized, Finally” (Anand & Hickey 1987)

• The Great Hippocampus Question

Technology

• “Tracking and recognition of a human hand in dynamic motion for rock-paper-scissors robot”, Ito et al 2016

• Operation Sandblast: the first submerged circumnavigation

Economics

• “What will AI do to pre-research/research? AI makes doing and communicating research much easier. Will there be any point to it?”, Joshua Gans 2025 (on using GPT-4 o1-pro to publish a paper); “An Evaluation of ‘Deep Research’ Performance”, Derek Lowe (writing up recent thalidomide uses: “Overall, it was a pretty competent piece of work…”); Tyler Cowen

• “Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From” (spamming FB with bizarrely bad Bing/DALL·E 3 bizarre pics is a Third World get-rich-quick movement created by ill-conceived Facebook advertising incentives intended to drive growth)

Philosophy

• “Learning To Be Me”, Egan 1995

• “Gentleness and the artificial Other”, Joe Carlsmith 2024 (what does a bear, or an AI, see when it looks at you? maybe nothing)

Fiction

• “Poetry and Ambition”, Hall 2005

• The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten, Herford 1904