links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2026

• https://archive.ph/xGv5E rationales, stated and unstated, for US action in Venezuela
• https://www.asimov.press/p/nature how Nature became a prestigious science journal: first by publishing fast and, later, by courting lots of submissions so they became more selective by necessity. it wasn't always considered "good"; its credibility waxed and waned under different editors.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve
  • "The Bézier curve is named after French engineer Pierre Bézier(1910–1999), who used it in the 1960s for designing curves for the bodywork of Renault cars".
  • they're a polynomial basis with the convenient property that you can define them by any number of points and they'll form a smooth curve between them. Widely used in industrial design. those computer graphics programs where you can drag points and distort curves accordingly? Bézier curves.
• https://read.isabelunraveled.com/p/manifest-rationally decent article on "manifestation" without woo.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday it takes 30 hours to read Ulysses out loud.
• https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ argument to AI-skeptic engineers that they should be using coding agents.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter,_Peter,_Pumpkin_Eater he originally murdered his wife
• https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/20/pretending-to-care-pretending-to-agree/ VGR classic. very complicated; once again revolves around his dichotomy of "hotter" people with a lot of social feelings and involvements, vs "cooler" people like himself who are disengaged. I'm definitely the former, and as his model predicts, I sometimes experience the difficulty of having to hide how I feel ("pretending to agree") and never experience the difficulty of having to hide that i don't feel anything ("pretending to care"). And then he goes into technology having an individualist, "exit", bias; anti-communitarian, anti-emotion. I have never really bought this dichotomy. I'm a believing individualist, a fan of technology, a thinker, and sometimes a loner who's attached to my privacy and autonomy, but I literally never feel this blah indifference or detached un-involvement from social/emotional issues. I think that's just a thing where temperaments differ.

• https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-retro-hopes-it-has-found-alzheimers-trial Retro Bio enters the clinic for Alzheimer's! I know people there and I'm rooting for them.