no, sometimes it's short

links 1/14/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-14-2026

• https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/functional-core-imperative-shell 
• https://blog.spec.tech/p/spectech-lessons-and-updated-hypotheses-d9f Ben Reinhardt on lessons learned at SpecTech in 2025.
• https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-fridge-magnet-medicine-nonfiction-labs-cancer drugs whose binding affinity is magnetosensitive -- so you can target to tumors and not other organs
•  

links 1/11/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-11-2026

• https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aaw7243 TRPM7 is involved in mechanosensing
  • https://karger.com/cpb/article-abstract/19/1-4/1/207934/Direct-Mechano-Stress-Sensitivity-of-TRPM7-Channel
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12032-017-0987-1 TRPM7 is involved in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in multiple tumor types 
  • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3233/CBM-190666
  • https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/72/16/4250/575870/TRPM7-Is-Required-for-Breast-Tumor-Cell
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006295223004483
• pharmacologically targeting TRPM7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38362-3
• DRP1 and mitochondrial fission in cancer https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304419X25001957
• DNML1 in cancer https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11540555/
• the anti-apoptotic protein FLIP as a cancer target https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/febs.14523
  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/JIR.S519885
  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1517/14728222.2013.736499
• GUK1 and cancer: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12148050/
• ELL, involved in the elongation phase in transcription, in cancer: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc2915
• SEPHS2 & selenium metabolism in cancer: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006497118585554
  • https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00109-025-02563-8
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-020-0224-7
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-52718-0
• trial of transferrin receptor drug in cancer: https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/144/Supplement%201/1496/531990/Results-of-a-Phase-1-First-in-Human-Study-of-INA03
  • more on transferrin & cancer: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304416511001826
• NMT1, myristoylation, and cancer: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-13529-8
  • and phase 1 trial of drug with this target: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10637-024-01448-w
• ADSL and cancer
  • https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hep.31685
• PH5A and cancer: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-44899-6
  • https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12885-024-12620-z.pdf
  • https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12967-022-03821-w.pdf
• YRDC and cancer: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cnr2.70325
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-024-00748-7
• https://platform.opentargets.org/ Open Targets Platform, info about many drug targets
• https://depmap.org/portal/ DepMap, cancer dependency database
• https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/among-the-agents how Dean Ball uses Claude Code 
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/the-tyranny-of-the-complainers.html most complaints to government agencies come from a few very active complainers
• https://x.com/mollycantillon/status/2008918474006122936?s=20 account (AI-written?) of how someone uses Claude Code for everything. seems potentially appealing
• https://www.alexkesin.com/p/a-better-proxy-than-the-rat-and-dog foundation models for toxicology 
• https://www.asimov.press/p/research-forms metascience
• https://archive.ph/20260108173745/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/07/ice-minneapolis-shooting-deportaitons-escalation/  this is scary

• https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial this is probably the best defense of affirmative action -- 'you weren't that good at picking the best anyway, it's mostly biases and vibes, so you may as well decide to correct historical inequities'. i think even to the extent this is true you could argue that the policies actually enacted were unwise, but i do think it's a point worth addressing.

   

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.

   

links 12/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-30-2025

• https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-parameterizations/ CPPNs make beautiful image parametrizations 
• https://towardsdatascience.com/reveling-what-neural-networks-see-and-learn-pytorchrevelio-a218ef5fc61f/ layer activations of image classification neural networks 
• https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-explores-new-contracting-approach-advance-public-health-innovation not sure what to make of this
• https://reason.com/2025/12/29/the-trump-america-ai-act-is-every-bit-as-bad-as-you-would-expect-maybe-worse/ yep, it's very over-broad.

• https://www.asimov.press/p/clinic-loop detailed information from "failed" clinical trials can be very useful in iterating therapies. worked for CAR-T!

   

links 12/29/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-29-2025

• https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ AI agents are sending unwelcome "thank you" emails
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike creator of the Go programming language and contributor to Unix. these days very anti-AI
• https://reactormag.com/for-he-can-creep-siobhan-carroll/  story inspired by "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey"
• https://newaesthetics.art/ i agree, we need a new 21st century aesthetic paradigm to rival the Bauhaus's influence over the 20th century. "but we have..." no we don't. every magazine is still laid out according to Bauhaus principles. your "modern" typeface is 100 years old.
  • you need a new visual design vocabulary from the ground up; as Art Nouveau derived curvilinear elements from Ernst Haeckel's invertebrate illustrations, and the Bauhaus derived geometric elements from engineering diagrams, maybe today's design movement needs to derive its primitives from DeepDream/DALL-E artifacts or something.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eko05d/in_little_women_set_in_1860s_massachusetts_amy/ the "pickled limes" in Little Women were actually popular among schoolchildren at the time, and yes, they were salt-pickled limes. 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce  seems like a pretty standard medieval military leader
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_milk  yes, you can "fry milk" if you solidify it with cornstarch

links 12/22/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-22-2025

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewan_MacColl  the founder of the folk music revival in England in the 1960s. their version of Alan Lomax. married to Peggy Seeger!
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddy_Prior  Maddy Prior is from Blackpool in Lancashire
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire  basically ground zero for the English ballad tradition. also used to contain Liverpool, which is of course where lots of sailing songs come from or mention.
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13724  PROTON, a graph transformer model trained on neuroscience datasets and literature, produces in silico screens, ranking proteins by association with a disease or its biomarker (Parkinson's and alpha-synuclein in one case) and finding they recapitulated experimental screens. also predicts drug hits in organoid models of bipolar and drug repurposing candidates for Alzheimer's.
  • i'd have expected something like this to be able to produce these results; not a huge update for me, mostly useful as a marker for what people are doing in this space.

It's also surprising to me! 10 years ago I was convinced by the case made by a (now out of business) self driving truck company that long-haul trucking is a technically easier problem than city driving. That doesn't seem to have mattered, and I don't know why.

links 12/19/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-19-2025

• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16856 Seb Krier thinks about what AI safety would look like in a polycentric world of different AI agents interacting in markets
• https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/23/1123897/ai-models-are-using-material-from-retracted-scientific-papers/ AI research tools include retracted papers; it's going to be important to evaluate paper quality and rule out or clearly label "bad" papers.
• https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/30/weight-loss-ozempic-nobel-prize-science/ story of GLP-1 discovery
  • more story: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415550121
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12022 the GPQA AI benchmark
• https://www.futurehouse.org/research-announcements/hle-exam the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark has a bunch of wrong answers
• https://www.futurehouse.org/research-announcements/demonstrating-end-to-end-scientific-discovery-with-robin-a-multi-agent-system how FutureHouse did "end to end scientific discovery" guided by a lit review AI tool
• https://www.mackenziemorehead.com/what-to-do-if-energy-gets-cheap/  analysis of trends in solar and other forms of energy
• https://github.com/sarah-quinones/faer-rs  apparently there's now a Rust-based BLAS/LAPACK competitor
• https://www.nmccarty.com/p/this-openai-wet-lab-blog-is-actually Nico McCarty reviewss OpenAI's report of an AI-optimized molecular biology protocol
•  

As I've said before, there's an automatic link between LW and my substack, so every time i make a paid post, it shows up here. Happy to take it down or put up a free version, whatever the mods prefer.