AI

Matters Of Scale:

• Mythos: “LLM-driven security reports disrupt coordinated disclosure”; “Behind the Scenes: Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview” (more security bugs in April 2026 than in past 15 months combined); “Project Glasswing: An initial update”

• “Anthropic raises $65b in Series H funding at $965b post-money valuation”

• Claude-4.8-opus

• “Advancing Mathematics Research with AI-Driven Formal Proof Search”, Tsoukalas et al 2026; “An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry”

• “Crashing Waves versus Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks”, Mertens et al 2026

• “A Year Late, Claude Finally Beats Pokémon”, Julian Bradshaw

• “How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI” (case study of cognitive deskilling and the ‘illusion of depth’ in learning)

• “AI won the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition” (as well as several 2026 finalists)

• Usenet dataset

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “In Vivo Base Editing of PCSK9 with VERVE-102 for Hypercholesterolemia”, Vafai et al 2026

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It”, Michael Abramov; “Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything? We all know they’re casinos. It’s time to look at the data behind the froth”, Dan Schwarz

• “How Φ80 Infiltrates Research Labs: While some bacteriophages play vital roles in laboratory research, others are bent on sabotage”

Politics/Religion

• “Notes on a non-profit [SPLC] indicted for bank fraud”, patio11

• “California has some of the last nudists left. I went to see why they’re still there.”

• “The Unexpected Pleasures of a Dirty Soda: Fountain drinks spiked with syrups, creamers, and fruit purees became a sensation among Mormon mothers in Utah. Now they’re finding fans across America”; “Crumbl, The Cookie That Broke the Internet: A pair of enterprising Mormon entrepreneurs used TikTok to cook up a $2 billion-dollar baked goods empire. Then things got personal” (Mormon addictions are interesting, but my only hot take on Mormonism is that banning “hot drinks” was probably a mercantilist protectionist policy put in place as part of nation-state building autarchy/foreign-exchange-conservation, intended to ban expensive imports of cocoa/coffee/tea—a policy which has many historical precedents in other colonies/new nations (including the USA in multiple eras). As such, the proper originalist interpretation has nothing to do with caffeine nor coffee/tea per se, and Mormons in the continental USA should be banned from not just coffee or tea, but also hot chocolate (~0 indigenous production of cocoa), imported herbal teas (which is most of them), and most ‘dirty soda’ with exotic ingredients; but they should probably be permitted yaupon tea (caffeinated, but indigenous to the USA), and regular soda (so long as it is bottled in the USA with non-imported sugar, and is not forbidden Mexican imports).)

• Dune as critique of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

Psychology/Biology

• “Lilly’s triple agonist, retatrutide, delivered powerful weight loss in pivotal Phase 3 obesity trial”; “Two Years After Stopping GLP-1s, Most Patients Sustain at Least Some Weight Loss”

• “Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing; By restoring some functions to intact brains from deceased donors, the startup Bexorg hopes to create a better drug development test bed for neurodegenerative diseases”

• “A clinical impact of apoptosis inhibitor of macrophage on feline chronic kidney disease”, Tezuka et al 2026

• “Coalitionary intra-group aggression by wild female bonobos”, Pashchevskaya 2025 (how female bonobos gang up to murder a male)

• “I Couldn’t Escape Poison Oak. So I Started Eating It. The search for immunity from poison oak and ivy takes one reporter to unlikely places. Leaves of three, let them be…lunch?” (“I tell the tale that I heard told / Mithridates, he died old.” Immunology is difficult. I looked at some of the mentioned literature and it seems like it sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. But it seems pretty clear that it does sometimes work, so the question is just what individual differences or methodological differences influence success? I’d guess probably dose schedule is key and inconsistent dosing might sabotage efforts—at least one of the critical papers is like, “we gave them a high dose and it didn’t work!”, which doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to do gradual prophylactic Mithridatism.)

• “Free-Roaming and Captive Cats Prefer Silver Vine to Catnip for Self-Anointing”, Uenoyama et al 2026 (Silvervine is more expensive, but if your cat responds to it, I recommend it instead of or in addition to catnip, because it generally comes out superior in comparisons.)

• “The Science of Blunders: Confessions of a Textual Critic”, Willis 1991

• “The Many Lives of Inkhaven 2: a collection of 40 life stories”

Technology

• “[Intergalactic] Space Warfare Seems Mostly Defense Dominant”

• “How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image: Terakeet, a reputation management firm, used online tricks to downplay the friendship of the Goldman Sachs general counsel” (useful look into how reputation management SEO works these days)

• “How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow”

• “Donlyn Lyndon, Last Surviving Creator of the Sea Ranch, Dies at 90”

• “ISSpresso Development and Operations”, Di Tana & Hall 2015

Economics

• The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre

• “Banking and Interest Rates in a World Without Money: The Effects of Uncontrolled Banking § Common Stock and Portfolio Money”, Black 1970_56ya (do we need ‘money’?)

Philosophy

• “What Makes Art Great? Some notes toward an answer”, Nabeel S. Qureshi 2026

• “Grooks by Piet Hein”

Fiction

• “Pied Beauty”, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877_149ya)

• “Borges thinks you should try a little harder”, Willis Barnstone (via Le Ton beau de Marot)

• “Obituary: Daniel Calhoun, murine music author, dies at 132; Man, mouse, musician”, ctrlcreep 2024

• “The Life and Grind of the Buddha How One Prince 10×’d His Pipeline and Disrupted the Entire Suffering Vertical”