links 1/27/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2026

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807  last invoked in the 1990s LA riots
• https://www.sluggish.xyz/p/are-we-all-just-having-understandable 
  • one annoying thing about anti-psychiatry people is that they equivocate between "the person labeled insane is behaving in a valid fashion, and deserves acceptance/respect rather than pathologization" and "the person labeled insane is causing their own problems and ought to stop; they deserve criticism rather than therapeutic treatment"
  • either of these can, imo, sometimes be true, but it's weird when someone is trying to pose as both the defender of the misunderstood and the teller of hard truths to malingerers.
• https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology  not a lot of news in here; Dario Amodei lays out "Anthropic-ism", the summary of their research & policy programs of the past several years.
  • he and Paul Christiano deserve credit as the architects and prophets of the age we're living in. things did, after all, turn out their way. i was always critical of their theories as basically blurring boundaries between "real intelligence" and the thing LLMs do, but in their defense, that boundary has turned out to be blurrier than I expected.
  • i think i might be at least sympathetic to Anthropic-ism. it turns out that a world with these kinds of gradually-and-quickly-improving AI tools is pretty nifty, and also involves all kinds of novel risks that are short of the "everyone dies instantly" scenario but are still quite worrying. sure, if they had listened to Eliezer they could simply have not chosen to go down this path, and there's more than a hint of vainglory in the motivations of people who want to build powerful AI, but all in all I'd rather the 2020s had these tools than not. it's not like the "end of the end of history" wouldn't have happened anyway, and at least this way we have some powerful opportunities as well as depressing developments.
• https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bagehot-lombard-street-a-description-of-the-money-market  1873 classic about central banking
• https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04  this sounds quite complicated but interesting. multi-agent management system.
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/a-more-intelligent-comment-than-most-of-the-emotional-reactions-we-are-seeing.html  why do comments have to be "intelligent" per se? you can just say the obvious thing that expresses your values! simple things can be correct.
• https://epirium.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GSA2025_Poster_Epirium_MF-300_Phase-1.pdf  that sure is a drug for sarcopenia in phase 1 trials
• https://www.axios.com/2026/01/24/ice-cbp-shooting-minneapolis-democrats-reaction imagine, congress actually putting checks on the executive branch!
• https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/how-ai-safety-is-getting-middle-powers too much inside baseball for me, but probably a useful pointer to what experts think
• https://corticallabs.com/ sounds like a joke? you do not want to do any computation on neurons, they are slow and fragile. (you might want to run brain-inspired algorithms, but on semiconductors!)
• https://centuryofbio.com/p/sid extreme personalized medicine approach to cancer -- it worked! after the standard of care failed, single-cell sequencing exposed a fibroblast-like phenotype, and an anti-fibroblast radiotherapy shrank the tumor enough to be operable.
• https://www.sam-rodriques.com/post/the-humanity-project this sounds entirely desirable but insanely expensive. sure, i'd like this, and a pony too. and world peace. can you just do that these days? i'd be delighted if so.
• https://defenseanalyses.org/work/the-maha-pentagon/ ehhh like so much DARC stuff it's hard to tell if they're serious. biohacking for soldiers?
  • what I'd really like to see in the health/military space is to take advantage of the DOD's truly massive biobank resources & make more data accessible to researchers from modern omics techniques.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanfu_Movement historical costume is big in China.
• https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/writing-a-good-claude-md keep it simple, stupid (one perspective)