January 2026 News
January 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
January 2026’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, December 2025 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Nonfiction blogging advice: First, Make Me Care
Gwern.net: better ‘filmstrip’ video thumbnails;
seriate.py: have a LLM sort arbitrary text in some logical order (potentially useful for helping clean up notes without turning them into ChatGPTese)
Links
AI
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
“The Himalayan Fossil Hoax is one of the largest and most infamous palaeontological frauds, one man damaging the entire scientific reputation of India by faking decades of work. The perpetrator eventually resorted to making death threats and allegedly even hitjobs against those who exposed him”
Politics/Religion
“The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?” (South Korea)
“Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit” (hoaxster used LLM+imagegen to generate fake expose, design doc, company badge, and pressured multiple journalists to publish the scoop without checking)
Psychology/Biology
Technology
Economics
Philosophy
“LLM poetry and the ‘greatness’ question: Experiments by Gwern and Mercor”, Hollis Robbins; “From Whitman to Instagram with Claude” (satirizing Rupi Kaur with SVG poem-illustrations)
Fiction
Books
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated: