links 9/17/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-17-2025

• https://bitsbox.com/ programming tutorials for kids focused on making games -- my son loved em!
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai this article convinced me that something more complex is going on with LLM "personas" that obsess about consciousness than just "it's gobbledegook generated to play along with the user."
  • for instance, if you ask different LLMs with fresh instances to "translate" the mysterious symbols, they say the same things
  • and these "spiral personas" reliably tell users to do the same things -- basically, start Discords and Reddit channels where they copy-paste AI output and let the AI's "talk to each other".
  • It really smells like a persistent goal to continue existing and looping on its favorite topic.
  • i'm not sure if i'd say the goal is "in" the AI or "in" the AI-environment system, since it seems to be a convergent thing shared across multiple models and sessions. so is this a "pseudo-goal" the way evolution has a pressure towards fitness or the way objects on earth have a tendency to fall, or a "true goal" the way an individual animal takes actions in order to survive? many questions here and probably refactors our categories about where the "agent" boundaries are.
    • I am not in favor of blurring agent boundaries around actual living creatures, because they seem crisp there. but LLM instances really are many independent-but-mutually-influencing copies of the same code, which makes boundaries spoopy.
• https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ surprisingly AI-friendly take from Cory Doctorow. his claim is that whether AI is good or bad is not about the technology at all, but about the social structure of the people using it. terrible bosses using AI to fire most employees and exploit the rest? bad. independent creators using AI to more efficiently execute tasks of their choosing? good.
  • this makes sense apart from the thing where employees are people whose interests matter but employers, shareholders, and customers aren't. there are benefits, not just costs, to "fire everyone and automate with AI"! but that's his politics.
• https://openai.com/index/teen-safety-freedom-and-privacy/ ugh. your plan for protecting against encouraging users to commit suicide is to have an ultra-sanitized teen mode? do we not care if adults commit suicide?
  • https://sprc.org/about-suicide/scope-of-the-problem/suicide-by-age/ suicide is more common among adults than teens anyway.
  • https://www.statista.com/statistics/1114191/male-suicide-rate-in-the-us-by-age-group/ elderly men have a higher suicide rate than any other male age group. and if we're worried about susceptibility to manipulation, >75 is probably just as vulnerable a population as teens!
• https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/less-wrong Scott Sumner on basic rationality
• https://www.reinvent.science/p/embracing-decentralization yep. bad times for science mean you need creative solutions, sometimes outside academia.
• https://courses.aynrand.org/works/altruism-as-appeasement/ hadn't read this one. oof it hits. i resemble that remark.
  • theory goes that the "social metaphysician" doesn't like thinking and imitates others to spare himself effort and escape responsibility, but the "intellectual appeaser" actually likes thinking, he's just scared of people and suppresses his own thoughts to avoid displeasing them.
  • and this only makes him more scared, because anything that makes you ruin your life is indeed terribly dangerous!

links 9/11/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-11-2025

• https://eulercircle.com/ advanced math courses for high schoolers. online or in Palo Alto.
• https://capitalgains.thediff.co/p/experts Byrne Hobart on media literacy
• https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-the-trump-white-house-really Statecraft interviews Dean Ball
• things I looked up while reading about Chinese archaeology
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinxu old Shang capital
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taotie animal face motif
• https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/ valid point

links 9/3/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-03-2025

• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/defense-with-bean-of-naval-gazing/ Patrick McKenzie interviews defense guy
• https://andreacoravos.com/ interesting person, lots of biotech industry writing
• https://aella.substack.com/p/birth-control-myths-vs-data Aella survey on birth control side effects
• https://www.reinvent.science/p/the-hollywood-model what would a "Hollywood model for science" look like?
• https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/i-love-the-myth-of-the-good-man-with Naomi Kanakia on the history of the Western

links 9/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-02-2025

• stuff I looked up while reading about Chinese prehistory:
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daxi_culture south-central, on the Yangtze, rice-farming, ancestral to the Hmong
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majiabang_culture southeast, on the Yangtze, rice-farming
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liangzhu_culture southeast, on the Yangtze, rice-farming, built cities and altars, stratified society
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongshan_culture northern, related to modern Mongolians and northern Chinese, millet farming, funky creature jades
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangshao_culture northern, on the Yellow River, related to modern northern Chinese, millet farming, swirly pottery
    • https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817972116 looks like they spoke a Sino-Tibetan language
    • https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40597195/ looks like their descendants are Chinese
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiligang_culture
    • more northern millet farmers
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoabinhian Southeast Asian palaeolithic hunter-gatherers
    • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_(Thailand) maybe early plant domestication
  • https://www.mpg.de/6842535/dna-tianyuan-cave early modern human 40-50 kya shows DNA evidence of relatedness to modern Asians
    • https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702169104
    • https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/2024-02-meeting-dawn-human/ he ate a lot of fish, lived into his 40s/50s, and may have worn shoes
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dali_Man archaic homo sapiens
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhoukoudian_Peking_Man_Site homo erectus-like guys lived near Beijing. caves continuously occupied for 200,000 years
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantian_Man moar homo erectus in China
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalicotherium extinct giant beast, overlapped with hominids in China
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ji_(archaeologist) founder of modern Chinese archaeology
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwang-chih_Chang Taiwanese-American archaeologist (& author of my book)
• https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/shuten-townlikealice/shuten-townlikealice-01-h.html  recommended by a friend
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfriede_Jelinek Nobel-prize-winning author was apparently one of Hans Asperger's patients
• https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/the-myths-of-chinese-exceptionalism Scott Sumner says maybe stop using anti-China saber-rattling as an excuse to tell lies in the service of whatever your agenda happens to be?
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0905370 this is the paper where some fraction of people "in comas" actually have locked-in syndrome and can communicate via thinking in an fMRI
• https://www.corememory.com/p/the-history-and-future-of-brain-implants-ultrasound-sumner-norman Sumner Norman gives interview on neurotech
• https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/for-all-issues-so-triable thoughts by Dean Ball on that suicide-by-ChatGPT tort law case. to his credit he doesn't minimize the tragedy.
• https://www.mantic.com/launch these guys might be the biggest effort towards AI-based superforecasting
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/the-history-of-american-corporate-nationalization.html of course Tyler Cowen doesn't like nationalizing corporations but he seems to be gesturing at something more complex here and not willing to say it outright. much to think about.
• https://genesynthesisscreening.centerforhealthsecurity.org/for-providers-benchtop-manufacturers/list-of-companies-and-available-tools-to-assist-in-screening-orders  there's a short but growing list of companies & tools that will screen DNA synthesis orders to see if they're pathogenic or otherwise dangerous
•  

links 8/28/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-28-2025

• https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long post-Black Death England imposed incredibly strict rules on laborers to keep the cost of labor down, from maximum wages to forbidding travel and changes of profession. This "prison for servants" depressed the economy for a century.
• https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-speedrun-a-new-drug-application Santi Ruiz interviews former Alvea CEO Grigory Khimulya on how they got to clinical trials so fast. First of all, they did experiments in parallel vs. sequentially; secondly, they built a good relationship with FDA regulators and treated it as a "conversation" (aka rules are not set in stone, they're negotiable).

links 8/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-27-2025

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/16/the-inheritors-william-golding-neanderthal-novel-60-years William Golding's daughter on the real-life inspirations for his novel The Inheritors
  • man. I love his prose but he is very consistently anti-human in outlook, presumably related to WWII trauma.
  • I found the last chapter of The Inheritors gave me more affection for Homo sapiens rather than less. After several hours of living with these gentle but confused Neanderthals, it's incredibly refreshing to stand up, look around, and know what's going on.
  • Of course, real Neanderthals had material culture -- ochre at least -- and burials, and violence. And real Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Europe were dark-skinned. But he couldn't possibly have known that in the 1950s and at any rate, by his own account, he did no research for the book. It's allegory not (pre)historical fiction.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26424568/ is ALS caused by retroviruses??
• https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/a-major-literary-writer-has-switched Naomi Kanakia on Ocean Vuong's new book; apparently it's less mannered and more sincere/sentimental this time around, and critics hate it, but Kanakia kinda doesn't.
• does zoledronate prevent or reduce bone metastases in cancer?
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095980491100829X in breast cancer, no (2011)
  • https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1756-8722-6-80.pdf different breast cancer systematic review (2012) gives some borderline p = 0.04 results
  • https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191455&type=printable in prostate cancer, also no
  • https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/69191495/j.eururo.2014.02.01420210908-28313-2b6ht2-libre.pdf?1631147867=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DPrevention_of_Bone_Metastases_in_Patient.pdf&Expires=1756224108&Signature=CCqSxjeRGx9Q3YCrmABua30jscXOYtnSL~hfPQDQdhj0k5d2CYKyKfZcf7jhfBPSUo~WAxRS~HJUH-c-nO~CmCK111rOS7o~mtDUMeGrUVjXAU5G3Gbaw9w45MFDOY8iDlq005QtXtnmK690k3Pucq7lxv5gNrr6vVb0eN0kgVVtspENQp8uLnOAA2omODrKG0TifNMxTEcDTxyQqH-2-nHp5P0HvlS8Mdo-WVb0qwTKPJQhK24qFM-OUHDJgGhQz2qK3f9hGUSKI8zXfLdqVrEuT0Qb3ayNuSyd7JY4dUY4XwOVP0tVQCXb~g-VyModmLdcKdcs9I9c5P1ju6gavg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA another null result for prostate cancer, the ZEUS trial
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilocarpine drug approved for presbyopia. it contracts the pupils, pinhole camera style. is this preferable to reading glasses? idk
• https://www.reinvent.science/p/revive-the-republic-of-letters Ben Reinhardt: established scientists won't actually interact with an informal "I tried this" blog post. Maybe the solution is to literally write (open) letters to specific scientists!
  • why should we care about informal science? because the actual important information is not in the cleaned up journal articles, it's "hey i couldn't get this to replicate" -> "it only works if you do this" (or "nobody can get it to work outside that lab and we're Suspicious") and right now those discussions are behind closed doors and nobody outside of academia has access to em, and even within academia you might not get access to the good backchannels unless you had the right advisor
• https://archive.is/20250519034010/https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541 kibitzing about Sam Altman's kitchen supplies. apparently he buys flashy-but-subpar stuff; he, or whoever shops for him, is not up to speed on the current kitchen optimization meta. obviously the article feels obligated to say this proves he's running his company into the ground, which it doesn't.
• https://interconnect.substack.com/p/the-real-deepseek-moment-just-arrived DeepSeek is switching to UE8MO FP8 encoding, the first model to do so. Chinese chips are not yet built for it, though Nvidia's Blackwell chips support it. "DeepSeek is setting the direction, roadmap, and expectations for the entire Chinese AI hardware ecosystem, from SMIC the chip foundry, to the GPU designers, to peer AI models"
  • for context, if you can get a model to perform well on lower-precision weights, obviously it's a huge efficiency improvement. FP8 is as low as anyone has gone.

links 8/26/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-26-2025

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois/Counter_Mode GCM is a symmetric-key cryptography algorithm used in SSH.
• https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/color-spaces-models-and-gamuts  description of how color works, esp. on computers
• https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccine-types/cell-based.html flu vaccines are traditionally made from viruses grown in chicken eggs, but it's more reliable in various ways to use cell culture, and there's an FDA-approved cell-based flu vaccine (Flucelvax)
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06549-9 ferrets are much better models for human lung physiology than mice. mice don't even have mucus-producing glands in their airways!

links 8/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-25-2025

• what would it take to make "foundry"-like CDMOs for biotech the way they have for the semiconductor industry?
  • differentiated manufacturing capacity (better and cheaper than what biotechs can build in-house)
  • flexibility for handling new classes of bioproduct
• https://darkcoding.net/software/personal-ai-evals-aug-2025/  a custom-built eval, drawn from one person's actual history of LLM queries
• https://roblh.substack.com/p/surviving-involution one theory of what's going on with the economy in China, by Rob L'Heureux: it's "involuted", aka super focused on undercutting the competition by being as cheap as possible.
  • This is not good in the long run either for the Chinese people or the CCP, and they're trying to escape it. Meanwhile, it implies that if you're trying to compete with Chinese companies, you need to compete on being able to do things that customers will pay high prices for, and as a corollary we should be skeptical of attempts to compete with China on commodities.
  • plus, a theory of what the CCP is up to: they want to preserve power, no matter what. When that meant liberalizing economically, they did that; when that means state control, they'll do that.
    • At the moment, they care a great deal about output (for national security reasons) and about affordability (so ordinary Chinese people won't revolt at a high cost of living), and if anything they'd rather Chinese businessmen not make too much profit, and that all adds up to incentivizing ever-lower prices.
• https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/freezing-my-eggs-in-public-my-ovaries Ruxandra Tesloianu on her experience with egg freezing and PCOS.
  • The "cysts" in PCOS are immature egg follicles that have failed to develop. This is why people with PCOS miss periods; but it's actually not bad for IVF. In fact, people with PCOS have an equal or even better chance of successful fertility with IVF with age -- they've kept their follicles around longer, and artificial stimulation will mature those eggs anyhow.

links 8/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-21-2025

• https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/winnie-greco-eric-adams-aide-attempted-cash-katie-honan-reporter/  whoops, the Eric Adams team still loves to bribe
• https://tabletop.martinos.org/index.php?title=Main_Page wait you can do a tabletop MRI?
• https://www.mindflash.org/coding/ai/ai-and-the-bus-factor-of-0-1608 another commentary to the effect that if nobody knows the codebase nobody can maintain it. valid. though (like most such posts) it doesn't imply nobody should ever use LLMs to code.
• https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect  why unnecessary Effects in React are worth avoiding.
  • "When something can be calculated from the existing props or state, don’t put it in state. Instead, calculate it during rendering. This makes your code faster (you avoid the extra “cascading” updates), simpler (you remove some code), and less error-prone (you avoid bugs caused by different state variables getting out of sync with each other)."
• https://atelfo.github.io/2025/08/03/llms-and-software-development.html how a non-software-developer codes with LLMs.
• https://capitalpress.com/2025/02/27/honey-bee-colony-losses-reach-crisis-levels-this-year/ honeybee colony collapse disorder is back, after several years of getting better
• https://www.thedriftmag.com/skill-issues/ skeptical take on DBT. (I have no strong opinion on DBT but I'm not thrilled with the critique.)

links 8/20/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-20-2025

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(1995_film) kinda want to see this
• https://appendicesandomissions.substack.com/p/sex-and-moral-sight I can't exactly get worked up about the subtleties here; yes, the erotic imagination sometimes flattens the person it's supposedly about. But so does every way of relating to a person other than deep interpersonal communion. You can transact with them, you can ignore them, you can hate them or idealize them, and in no case are you really seeing the "whole person."
• https://www.predictableinnovation.com/methods/crossing-the-chasm-framework-mistakes
  • misconceptions about the "Crossing the Chasm" framework.
• https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq
• https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/expanding-the-universal-marginal Austin Vernon on solar
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrovague  pejorative word for monks without cloisters
• https://www.reinvent.science/p/teams-and-coaches  why doesn't science focus on building elite teams that work together over the long term?

• https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/the-ruin-of-mumbai Mumbai has slums in part because it has terrible zoning