AI

Matters Of Scale:

• Anthropic Mythos: cybersecurity capabilities; card; safety; Project Glasswing

• “Introducing Claude-4.7-Opus”; “Introducing GPT‑5.5” (new pretrain/model series)

• “Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler, and then (mostly) walked away. Here’s what it taught us about the future of autonomous software development”, Carlini 2026

• “The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived: AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning”

• “Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930” (“we can grow our corpus to >1t tokens of historical text…to create a GPT-3.5 level model”; could probably be much smarter with better OCR and data cleaning); “Are ‘Vintage LLMs’ the start of a new humanistic field? Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930”

• “Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities: Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks”, Kapoor & Narayanan 2026

• Vera: a modern programming language for LLMs (does a lot of the things I would’ve suggested)

• “The Strange Origin of AI’s ‘Reasoning’ Abilities” (discovery of inner-monologues on 4chan & LessWrong)

• “A Humanoid Robot Races to a Record Half-Marathon Finish; The android won a half-marathon for robots (and humans) on Sunday in Beijing, achieving a technological milestone while finishing faster than any person in history”; “Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot”, Dürr et al 2026

• “Tracing the Thought of a Grandmaster-level Chess-Playing Transformer”, Lin et al 2026

• “The Podcast Where You Can Eavesdrop on the AI Elite: Dwarkesh Patel was a bored college sophomore looking for intellectual stimulation. Now he commands interviews with Jensen Huang & Mark Zuckerberg and holds his own with deeply nerdy researchers”; $20k Dwarkesh Patel AI scaling essay contest (deadline: midnight 2026-05-10)

• “Agents of Chaos”, Shapira et al 2026 (OpenClaw agents are highly unreliable: “Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing…”)

• “LLMs as Giant Lookup-Tables of Shallow Circuits”, Niplav (metaphor for how to think of NN learning/capabilities—I sometimes talk about NNs as ‘search over Turing machines’ which start with memorization and reluctantly move towards generalization/algorithms, but it may be more helpful to think of them as ‘bags of heuristics’ or ‘lookup tables of shallow programs’.)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “The pleasures of doing science and technology in the Planiverse”, Gardner 1980_46ya (sequel)

• “Principles”, Nabeel S. Qureshi 2025

• “The Urinal Problem”, Kranakis & Krizanc 2010_16ya; “Urinal protocol vulnerability”, Munroe 2009

Politics/Religion

• “Power Lies Trembling: a 3-Book Review”, Richard Ngo

• “The Billionaire Backlash Against a Philanthropic Dream” (Giving Pledge struggles, including Peter Thiel lobbying against it as ‘Epstein-adjacent’); “Jeffrey Epstein Encouraged Peter Thiel’s Political Journey”

• “‘The Cult of Cesar’: Inside the Mountain Compound Led by Cesar Chavez; In his remote headquarters, the United Farm Workers leader began to see himself as not just a union leader, but a visionary healer” (Of all the things to turn into a New Age cult, ‘organizing illegal immigrant farm laborers in California’ was definitely far down my list.)

Psychology/Biology

• “The Hair-Loss Drug Rewriting the Rules of Masculinity: A pill to cure baldness is changing the way men age—and how they see themselves” (regular finasteride is too terrifying to use for vanity, but topical finasteride might be safer and some new drugs might come on market soon?)

• “Too early to add lithium to drinking water? No association between lithium and suicides in a pre-registered Swiss study”, Pichler et al 2024 (It was always a long shot, but after a long run of nulls, especially from population registry studies, it’s probably time to give up on the hope that trace mineral supplementation in drinking water might have any meaningful population-level psychiatric benefits)

• “Lab method deodorizes a skunk-afflicted pet”, Krebaum 1993_33ya (I had no idea that removing skunk spray was now so easy: just hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap! This would’ve been a great comfort to me to know a few months ago being chased by a remarkably territorial skunk across a university campus.)

• “When a Mosquito Can’t Stop Drinking Blood, the Result Isn’t Pretty” (video; Gwadz 1969)

• “Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans”, Ikegami et al 2026 (giant school-bus-sized octopuses probably preyed on ocean dinosaurs)

• “Name use by companion parrots”, Benedict et al 2026

Technology

• “What Really Happened in Y2K?”, Thomas 2017 (the Y2K dangers were real and widespread, but were fixed successfully in the largest software upgrade campaign in history—cf. Project Glasswing?)

• “Do Posts with Links Affect Content Performance on Twitter? We analyzed 18.8 million Twitter posts from 71,000 accounts to uncover how link posts really perform in 2025” (yes; part of why Twitter is dying)

• “Dancing Naked on the Head of a Pin: The Early History of Microphotography” (NSFW)

• “A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury”, Ian Duncan 2026

• The Eiffel Tower

• “Fantastic Voyage: Creating the Futurescape for The Fifth Element”, Magid 1997

• “The Curious Case of Retro Demo Scene Graphics”

• “Buying the gnome” (cf. Levy 2011) (seeing like a state / legibilizing is something that AI can do a lot about…)

• “It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up”, Alexey Guzey

Economics

• “Curious cases of financial engineering in biotech”, Abhishaike Mahajan (the mixed success of portfolio engineering in drug development)

• “What I Like About Scrooge: In praise of misers”, Landsburg 2004_22ya; “How funerals keep Africa poor: Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead”, David Oks (‘cruelty is the kindness of the philosopher’)

• “The Car-Crash Conspiracy: High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy” (clannism, adverse selection etc.)

• “How Costco Won In Japan: Costco had to re-think its real estate, merchandising and warehouse design to succeed in Japan, which is now its largest market outside of North America”

• “Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams”

• “Egg prices have taken a beating. What’s behind the drop?” (Why? The answer is simple: egg sellers had a collective change of heart and stopped being greedy. Probably happened around Christmas, judging from movies.)

Philosophy

• “Masterpiece”, Richard Ngo 2024 (Maybe the true ‘AI art’ will be the sculpting not of pixels or words, but minds. That would explain why there is still no truly great AI game or art.)

• “Introducing LIMBO: Managing the Simulation to Maintain Optimal P(DOOM)”

• “The Most Important Woman in Kant’s Life: Suggestions of an Emotional Affair with Countess Caroline von Keyserlingk”, Daniel Andreas 2026

Fiction

• “Tomás Bjartur: The Last Prodigy”, Linch 2026

• “Glory”, Robert Pinsky 2003

• You Have Not Been a Good User (LessWrong’s second album)

• “Julia”, Fernando Borretti

• “Gyre”, vgel

• “Friendship Is All You Need: Subliminal Pony Propagation in Large Language Models, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sparkle”, Sparkle et al 2026

• “The Reluctant Grandmaster: Alfred Bester, the James Joyce-loving showbiz kid who helped birth modern sci-fi… then vanished. Mostly”; “My Affair With Science Fiction”, Alfred Bester 1975

• “The Secret History of ‘Ultimate Marvel’, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever”

• “The Ones who Feed their Children”, xhnk7jwvqj-max 2025-12-24

• “DIY Chinese penis euphemisms ft. Jingsu”

• “The Challenge From Beyond”, Howard et al 1935_91ya (a round-robin writing exercise dull up until the final Robert E. Howard twist)

• Bette Davis (Old Hollywood star biographies are often interesting; in this case I’m struck by how unsuccessful she was for so long, perhaps related to not being conventionally attractive and having a difficult personality, only to rise to the top and those to be what set her apart in movies like All About Eve.)