AI

• “Optimal Caverna Gameplay via Formal Methods”, Stephen Diehl (formalizing a farming Eurogame in Lean)

• “Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals”, SelfMadeHuman 2025-07-30 (emotional harm from visualizing life regrets using image generators)

Matters Of Scale:

• “NanoGPT Slowrun: Language Modeling with Limited Data, Infinite Compute” competiton (5.5x data efficiency so far from proper multi-epoch training, heavier regularization, SwiGLU, & ensembling; of course LLMs could still be much more sample-efficient…)

• “How Well Did Superforecasters and Experts Predict Wet Lab Skill Uplift from LLMs? An RCT tested whether LLMs could help novices at molecular biology tasks. Here’s what forecasters predicted before the study, and how they updated their views on biorisk after learning the results”, Forecasting Research Institute 2026-02-19 (mid-2025 LLMs, cf. METR)

• Claude-4.6-opus substantially helps Donald Knuth on an open research problem

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research)”, Nicholas Carlini2026

Politics/Religion

• “AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed”, Russell et al 2025

Psychology/Biology

Technology

• Toothpaste § Striped toothpaste

Economics

Philosophy

Fiction

• “Dear Aliens: a writing contest for humans”, Taylor Troesh2026 ($2,500 in prizes; I’ll be a judge)