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links 7/1/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-01-2026
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block Scott Alexander on parenting. Charming and entirely accurate.
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40573/reading-an-anthology-of-chinese-poems-of-the-sung-dynasty-i-pause-to-admire-the-length-and-clarity-of-their-titles I don't know what people see in Billy Collins tbh.
- https://www.normaltech.ai/p/do-ai-risks-require-extraordinary the case against "extraordinary government interventions" on AI. they make a civil-liberties case, by analogy with cryptography; restricting "unsafe" models would risk "a permanent expansion of government powers over what citizens and companies can build, publish, and research."
- the thing is, the other side would say "we accept regulations in nearly every industry over what "citizens and companies can build", so why not AI?" if you need an inspection to operate a sandwich shop, why not to release a model? the opponents of model regulation need to either a.) bite the libertarian bullet and say the government shouldn't regulate sandwich shops either, or b.) make the affirmative case that AI regulation is, in fact, "extraordinary" compared to less-controversial regulations.
- I personally believe both a.) and b.) AI risk is much less well characterized than, say, salmonella risk, so the cost-benefit case for AI regulation is weaker than for regulation of most industries. and additionally, the way the executive branch has restricted model releases is extraordinary for its capriciousness; "surprise, your flagship product is banned, no we won't give you any predictability about how to keep this from happening again" is much more destructive than most regulatory regimes. but the authors don't make that case, or any other, for the claim that this is an "extraordinary intervention".
- the thing is, the other side would say "we accept regulations in nearly every industry over what "citizens and companies can build", so why not AI?" if you need an inspection to operate a sandwich shop, why not to release a model? the opponents of model regulation need to either a.) bite the libertarian bullet and say the government shouldn't regulate sandwich shops either, or b.) make the affirmative case that AI regulation is, in fact, "extraordinary" compared to less-controversial regulations.
- https://www.rtx.com/news/2026/06/30/venture-capital-for-faster-factories my friend's startup (Axilon) is featured here
- https://commoncog.com/actually-effective-corporate-leadership-training/ Kraft's "actually effective corporate leadership training" is a program of moving execs to different roles in the organization. unfortunately this doesn't translate well if you don't work at Kraft and want to learn to be a manager or executive.
- https://reason.com/2026/06/29/can-the-president-fire-anyone-he-wants-yes-unless-the-target-is-part-of-the-federal-reserve/ Supreme Court rules 6-3 that the President can fire the heads of Executive Branch agencies at will. a different case found that he can only fire the head of the Federal Reserve for cause.
- https://reason.com/2026/06/30/supreme-court-affirms-original-meaning-of-birthright-citizenship-strikes-down-trumps-executive-order/ Supreme Court rules that birthright citizenship applies to children of illegal immigrants and temporary visitors. 5-4 decision. (surprising to me that it was that close.)
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09656 the authors use an LLM to convert word problems to formalized satisfiability problems, and then apply SAT solvers to get the answers. this is more reliable than having the LLM solve the word problems directly.
- offers a model for how one could autogenerate specs for software; the LLM converts an informal statement of desiderata (a readme?) into some property expressed in a formal-verification language, and then solvers can be applied (or, for higher order logic, LLMs can generate proofs that can be auto-checked.) the underpants gnome step there is "how do you know the LLM-generated formal statement is a good match to the natural-language problem statement/desiderata?"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byker_Hill oddly satisfying song.
- https://pact.nexus/ cute vibecoded assurance contract site.
- https://www.langscore.com/ clever: AI workflows for identifying which regulations to cut.
- even think tanks that favor deregulation ideologically rarely make any object level progress, because analyzing individual regulations is extremely time consuming. if you want to pass actual laws, you need to be specific, and that takes research. AI seems like it would be very useful here.
- https://aella.lol/identity image-based personality quiz
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201207003601/https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/7xdv9x/michael-anton-styleforum Trump admin insider Michael Anton was a frequent, indignant poster on a menswear forum.
- https://www.thefai.org/posts/fai-launches-frontier-legal-defense-program happy to see this. somebody needs to defend the labs.
- https://www.npr.org/2011/04/10/135268583/how-the-wild-hamster-was-tamed Syrian hamsters were domesticated in the 1930s by zoologist Israel Aharoni, as a lab animal for use in infectious disease research by his colleague Saul Adler.
- https://bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/ AI personality quiz. (I got "The True Believer".)
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/a-loaded-gun academic denied tenure shot her colleagues; turns out she also shot and killed her brother when she was a child and got away with it
- https://www.scribd.com/document/772526097/Salt one of the most-loved short stories of all time. food for thought.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_Dorothy interesting graffiti history
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Solla was researching the intersection of statistical mechanics and neural networks, back in the 90s!
- https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll a Herculaneum scroll, a Stoic treatise, has been translated for the first time! (it's too fragmentary to get much sense out of though)
- https://inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-i-was-not-allowed-to-type don't be this person
- https://netholabs.com/ new whole-brain emulation company
- https://alephneuro.com/ the crazy kids who induced smells with ultrasound last year now have a company, and enough funding that they're hiring for 11 positions!
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Scriabin I didn't know he had a late-Romantic period before he got all atonal. Or that he was synaesthetic and wrote colors into his music, and even made multimedia pieces intended to be performed with colored lights.
- I have trouble enjoying late Scriabin, but his Piano Concerto is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylSrzlphVq0&list=RDylSrzlphVq0&start_radio=1
Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)
2papetoast
Seems to be satire per author's bio "Semi-autonomous scientific satire."
yes of course it's satire. it's a parody of a type of person who i assume the author has encountered in real life.
1BryceStansfield
It does seem very odd. I think instead of choosing two axes for the answers they should've clustered respondants in answer space. It's very unclear to me how believing in AI consciousness mapped me to either "Transformative" or maybe "good" or "bad"?