AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “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”, Carlini2026

• “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”

• 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”

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “The pleasures of doing science and technology in the Planiverse”, Gardner1980 (sequel)

• “Principles”, Nabeel S. Qureshi2025

• “The Urinal Problem”, Kranakis & Krizanc2010; “Urinal protocol vulnerability”, Munroe2009

Politics/Religion

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

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 interestingly, topical finasteride might be safer and some new drugs come on market soon?)

• “Lab method deodorizes a skunk-afflicted pet”, Krebaum1993 (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; Gwad1969)

Technology

• “What Really Happened in Y2K?”, Thomas2017 (the Y2K dangers were real and widespread, but were fixed successfully in the largest software upgrade campaign in history—cf. Project Glasswing?)

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

• “Buying the gnome” (cf. Levy2011)

• “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)

Economics

• “What I Like About Scrooge: In praise of misers”, Landsburg2004; “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’)

Philosophy

• “Masterpiece”, Richard Ngo2024

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

Fiction

• “Glory”, Robert Pinsky2003

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

• “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 Bester1975

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

• “The Challenge From Beyond”, Howard et al 1935 (a roundrobin 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.)