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

   

links 8/18/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-18-2025

• blog posts by Naomi Kanakia, who continues to fascinate me; she's a true original.
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/if-your-book-has-shallow-lifeless "modern privileged life is meaningless" stories are basically warmed-over Christopher Lasch and there isn't much point in writing them, if you don't add some variation, some new value the reader can get out of the lesson.
    • One thing I like about Kanakia is that she focuses on the value literature can provide. Just because it's a subjective value (like pleasure or consolation), or an unquantifiable one (like wisdom, practical insight, or spiritual elevation) doesn't mean you can't grade books and courses and schools on whether or not they're providing it. Claims of value shouldn't be unfalsifiable.
    • And, Kanakia really believes in practicing what you preach. If you're going to write about literature at all, or teach it, you damn well should believe in at least some literature and defend its value. Value ought to be possible, in the real world; if some subset of the world really merits utter despair then don't spend your time there. Say it's doomed briefly and then move on to something that isn't.
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/when-your-leading-intellectuals-gather this is an odd, fictionalized, account of a conference that is almost certainly LessOnline.
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/highbrow-literature-has-acquired a meditation on how the highbrow literature scene today is disjoint from the ordinary reader. The guy who does read books, including challenging books and classic literature, but not necessarily new litfic, and who has no idea what's trendy in the "scene" today. I am, pretty much, this "ordinary reader" -- contemporary litfic lost me at some point in the early 2000s. I read genre fiction, nonfiction, and old books. I read to learn things and have fun, and I lost faith that contemporary literary fiction even wants to do that for me; and at any rate, there's hundreds of years' worth of books that I haven't read yet and that I know are good. It seems like Kanakia spends a lot of time in a world that assumes the "ordinary reader" is an idiot, and also a lot of time around ordinary readers who have no idea what the "literary world" is like, and is trying to bridge that divide.
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/this-working-class-writer-has-turned What is the deal with Raymond Carver anyway? I wasn't really familiar with his work and this was a good intro
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/its-the-most-powerful-ideology-of what would a world after nationalism look like?
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/the-next-great-literary-scene sort-of-a-review of a new book of plays
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/short-stories-used-to-be-very-popular This is the first I learned that O. Henry had a reputation as a bad writer, and was later somewhat rehabilitated. Also a bit of background about the magazine ecosystem in which he, and other short story writers, flourished. People liked short stories then! it was considered a basic element of the sort of information-and-entertainment you went to a magazine for!
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/how-to-sell-a-creepy-guy-to-an-audience another "add value to the reader" piece. Nobody wants to read about a dismal man with a dismal life where the whole point of the story is "this sucks." That doesn't mean the reader can't deal with tragedy or flawed characters -- but do something with it. Make it mean something. Make an entertaining plot with some absurd or ironic twists. "It bad" is one bit of information; a book needs more!
• https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/welcome-to-the-argument Lots of controversy about this new magazine -- whether the world needs more essays at all, whether it's bad for OPP to fund a politically non-neutral magazine, whether the web design sucks. I say, this is great news. I am a liberal, I think liberalism needs a spirited defense*, and I think the people involved will do a great job.
  • *liberalism also needs a styles section, but that's another story; the two greatest strengths of liberalism are argument and enticement into a pleasant life, and I don't think The Argument is focused at all on the latter, but that's a separate project and I can't really blame anyone for specializing in their strengths
• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/how-ai-reshapes-software-engineering/ Patrick McKenzie interviews Yoav Tzfati on vibecoding. pretty basic takes, all of which I agree with, plus details on how the vibecoding bootcamp worked and what people did.
• https://american-innocence.com/p/tyranny-as-tragedy Anna Gat is writing longform now! this one is basically "don't let America slide into dictatorship; you can do something about it." plus some thoughts on how tragedy (as in Romeo and Juliet) works at a structural level, the narrowing of options as the characters make avoidable decisions that increasingly commit them to the bad outcome.
  • it's very much a Substacker's thinkpiece, in the way that Naomi Kanakia's writing never is; Gat doesn't give us the concretes. in what way shall we resist dictatorship? if it is irresponsible to not search for reliable information sources, what are your recommendations for such sources? I hope subsequent posts will offer those details.
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoNLfX3ihXSZJwqK/church-planting-when-venture-capital-finds-jesus how new Evangelical churches get founded. fascinating stuff.
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f3zeukxj3Kf5byzHi/underdog-bias-rules-everything-around-me "Underdog bias" (the assumption that your team is always the underdog) is a useful concept, but I wonder what actual problem or frustration in particular motivated this piece by Richard Ngo
• https://andymasley.substack.com/p/product-recommendations Andy Masley's product recommendations. I wish more bloggers (and more women, in particular!) wrote posts like this about their favorite objects.
  • I strongly agree with him about the Vitamix blender (holds up under very heavy use), Celsius (tasty, zero-calorie, ultra-high-caffeine soda), creatine (the only actually-evidence-based workout supplement; it will make you slightly stronger and less fatigued), and Claude (my favorite LLM).
• characters I looked up from Journey to the West:
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_Guang an ocean dragon
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mother_of_the_West a mother goddess, the one whose peaches bring immortality
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_Shen has three eyes, a spear, and a hunting dog; "associated with water (flood control), justice, warriorhood, hunting, and demon subdual."
    • the programming language Erlang is unrelated; it's short for "Ericsson Language."
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezha a boy warrior who defeats demons
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Jing_(deity) Nezha's father, who carries a pagoda that can trap any demons
• https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/  a Python library that can do basic image manipulation
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/sam-altman-brain-chip-venture-is-mulling-gene-therapy-approach Sam Altman is funding a brain-chip company called Merge Labs, meant to be a rival to Neuralink

links 8/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-15-2025

• https://jsteinhardt.stat.berkeley.edu/blog/beyond-bayesians-and-frequentists  classic post about the relationship between Bayesian & frequentist methods (they're not enemies! use the right tool for the job!)
• https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air Dean Ball suggests that data centers exchange priority access to the grid for a commitment not to use energy on the highest-demand days of the year, so they can pick up the (usually ample) spare capacity.
• https://tk555.substack.com/p/force-and-freedom  no shit, the last defense of rights is literal armed self-defense, this is true even if you aren't a conservative

• we do not understand delirium:

  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41572-020-00223-4
  • https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7326/AITC202010060