AI

• “My First NetHack ascension, and insights into the AI capabilities it requires: A deep dive into the challenges of NetHack, and how they correspond to essential RL capabilities”, Mikael Henaff

Matters Of Scale:

• “Anthropic hits $3 billion in annualized revenue on business demand for AI”

• “Natural Language Processing (Almost) from Scratch”, Collobert et al 2011 (training windowed MLPs for NLP tasks on 0.8b word corpus: “Can we learn…the world by leveraging the 0.2 BPC that separate humans from n-grams?”)

• “How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?” (the extreme 1:20 human brain ratio of maintenance/online-learning vs active thinking)

• “The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting” (did any of the AI prediction markets or forecasting contests about AI scaling/trends do any good?)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Deep learning based phenotyping of medical images improves power for gene discovery of complex disease”, Flynn et al 2023

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World”, Johnson2009

• “Delphi method”: iteratively elicit predictions+rationales from experts to go beyond narrow quantitative forecasts like prediction markets

Politics/Religion

• “Q1 AI Benchmarking Results: Pros Crush Bots”, Metaculus2025 (“…most important factor for good forecasting is the base model”); “Pitfalls of Evaluating Language Model Forecasters”, Paleka et al 2025 (reasons to doubt LLM forecasting successes with current/small models: logical leaks in backtesting benchmarks, and temporal leaks in search/models)

Psychology/Biology

• “Remote Instruction and Student Mental Health: Swedish Evidence from the Pandemic”, Björkegren et al 2024

• “From Synapses to Dynamics: Obtaining Function from Structure in a Connectome Constrained Model of the Head Direction Circuit”, Duan et al 2025

• Peter Putnam (1927^–₆₀1987_38ya): the tragedy of a forgotten early philosopher of model-free RL / predictive processing neuroscience

• “The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions: Shortly before Daniel Kahneman died last March, he emailed friends a message: He was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland. Some are still struggling with his choice”

• “The Art of Hanakami, or Flower-Petal Folding”

• “A cellular entity retaining only its replicative core: Hidden archaeal lineage with an ultra-reduced genome”, Harada et al 2025

Technology

• “Seaweed for War: California’s World War I Kelp Industry”, Neushul1989

Economics

• “The Long-Run Effects of Government Spending”, Antolin-Diaz & Surico2025

• “Tanpin Kanri: Retail Practice at Seven-Eleven Japan”, Lal & Han2011

Philosophy

• Henri, le Chat Noir (“I have no opposable thumbs. Yet I oppose everything.”)