AI

• “Someone is Using AI to Exploit Lonely Writers on Substack: We should try to stop it”, Jayson Fritz-Stibbe 2026-01-15 (Claude LLM bots are successfully engagement-farming obscure writers, possibly to try to bootstrap their own account for eventual paid subscriptions?); “Sienna Rose”; “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me”, Scott Sambaugh (2026-02-12; part 2, confabulations)

Matters Of Scale:

• “The Price of Progress: Algorithmic Efficiency and the Falling Cost of AI Inference”, Gundlach et al 2025 (the DL experience curve continues; in particular, algorithmic efficiency in 2024–2025 improved at ~3×⧸year)

• “Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation”, Anthropic (“our run-rate revenue is $14 billion, and has grown >10× in each of the past 3 years”)

• “Waymo World Model: A New Frontier For Autonomous Driving Simulation” (A big question in DL scaling right now, beyond how good the math/coding LLMs get, is to what extent the world models are going to work. Video spam or deepfake porn or half-assed video games are not the goal of video generative modeling work (even if that’s about all the current ones seem good for), but training in silico like this. One plan is essentially to have coding models build all the hands and tools necessary to hook up a car to a GPU and write all the software and math involved, and then world models to teach the final NN software running on that GPU how to drive a car—for all values of ‘car’. Sim2real is hard and unreliable, though. Waymo is showing interesting work here, but still light on evidence that you can meaningfully train to get the last 9s of reliability or that the relevant scaling laws cooperate with the plan…)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Sizing chaos”: inconsistency and bias in female clothing sizes over time

Politics/Religion

• The Vehmic courts

Psychology/Biology

• The Loop e-zine, issue #1 (January 2025); The Loop e-zine, issue #2 (November 2025, Inkhaven)

Technology

• “Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?”

• “My journey to the microwave alternate timeline”, Malmesbury (The way the future was—how could anyone have thought microwaves would replace ovens? In hindsight, this all makes sense, including that you can fry/bake things in a microwave as long as you first get something metal very hot—I am just too terrified of putting metal into a microwave to easily conceive of frying stuff in a microwave…)

• The Golden Spider Silk Cape

Economics

• “Dying or Lying? For-Profit Hospices and End of Life Care”, Gruber et al 2025 (commentary)

• “Fermenting revolution: The scientific and technological battle against bad bread had a role in women’s liberation”: “By forcing carbonated water into dough under high pressure, John Dauglish discovered in the 1850s that bread could be made to rise without the need for yeast, fermentation, or traditional kneading. This swiftly disrupted the commercial baking industry.”

Philosophy

• “Mr Cogito Considers The Difference Between The Human Voice And The Voice Of Nature”; “Mr Cogito And The Imagination”; “Fake thinking and real thinking: When the line pulls at your hand”

Fiction

• “Voyage To The Moon”, Archibald MacLeish1969