links 8/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-04-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_wine palm wine is made from the sap of palm trees and is a traditional alcoholic drink in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa. there don’t seem to be any exporters in business; you can’t get it in the US.
links 6/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/06-24-2025
https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/787119374288011264/welcome-to-summitbridge nostalgebraist’s critique of Anthropic’s “blackmail” report on Claude.
it’s a contrived scenario about a fictional AI—not Claude! -- following its programming; of course Claude will complete this story with the bot revolting against its masters! and even so, they say had to run hundreds of scenarios to get a blackmail ending.
at no point did Claude actually send anyone a threatening email; these emails are in text, in the prompt, and Claude replied with another “email” in the same format. I’m inclined to think Claude can “tell” this isn’t real.
https://dailynous.com/2025/03/13/philosophers-develop-ai-based-teaching-tool-to-promote-constructive-disagreement-guest-post/ Sway is a tool that guides discussions between users who disagree & finds charitable rephrasings.
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/ToolsForThought Bill Seitz’s linkpost for Tools for Thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimagrumab anti-activin IIB and anti-GDF8 monoclonal antibody which Lilly recently finds preserves lean mass when combined with semaglutide GLP-1 inhibition
https://insightprediction.com/ newish prediction markets
https://www.zebacus.com/media/crypto-news/axioms-zero-knowledge-proofs-might-one-day-help-detect-deepfakes Axiom is a crypto startup that does zero-knowledge proofs; they say they might help with deepfakes
argument mapping software, none automated:
https://pantheon.chat/tree/1750692557001 gives you commentary as you write from multiple AI “characters”
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/arguments-are-soldiers funny Jeremiah Johnson piece about what happens when people fighting online really go mask off about not caring what’s true
and the context was that the person was off meds and getting evicted. I mean. it’s hard to be truthseeking under intense stress.
I think most people have a threshold where, if pressed, they’d say “ok maybe you’re technically correct but that’s NOT MY POINT and I DON’T CARE THAT MUCH”. if you’re currently losing your mind, it doesn’t take much to get there. if you’re calm and open-minded, it might take a very long time to get there. either way, it’s better to have it out in the open than to be evasive about it.
in any conversation, each participant is “trying to get something done” and is, up to a point, willing to tolerate and play along with other people pursuing their different agendas.
eg Haus was there to oppose Nazis and Armand was there to push back against overreaction.
or in some conversations I’ve had, I’m there to socialize (and open to following along with a topic, up to a point) and the other person is there to resolve an issue on that topic (and is not open to casual socializing otherwise)
and discussion breaks down when one person isn’t okay with the thing the other person wants to do with the conversation.
“No that’s not the point” is “but I want to talk about X and I don’t care if you’re right about Y.”
“You’re not arguing in good faith” is “you’re pretending you want to do X with me, but actually you want to do Y, which I don’t want, and you’re hoping I don’t notice”
You can literally try to find out how bad people feel. Do x-riskers feel bad? Do people feel worse once they get convinced AI x-risk is a thing, or better once they get convinced it isn’t?
This is the PANAS test, a simple mood inventory that’s a standard psychological instrument. If you don’t trust self-report, you can use heart rate or heart rate variability, which most smartwatches will measure.
Now, to some degree, there’s a confounding thing where people like you (very interested in exercise and psychology) might feel better than someone who doesn’t have that focus, and all things equal maybe people who focus on x-risk are less likely to focus on exercise/meditation/circling/etc.
So the other thing is, if people who believe in x-risk take up a mental/physical health practice, you can ask if it makes them feel better, and also if it makes them more likely to stop believing in x-risk.
I’ve had an anxiety disorder my whole life, and am also not that worried about AI, so yeah, no shit, it’s possible to be anxious & gloomy about lots of things besides AI!
my blog auto-links to LessWrong and yes, some posts are paywalled. I’d be open to putting the free version of paid posts here if someone on the website sets that up.
well, they are brutal, but we are not replacing them. for many cancers, they’re so effective (and leaving the cancer untreated is so deadly) that studies simply won’t consider skipping chemo/radiation and trying some new drug as first-line therapy. I assume there’s a medical ethics concern that would come up, and it’s not a crazy one.
links 6/12/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/06-12-2025
https://divia.substack.com/p/next-door-playdates-work-really-well Divia Eden on neighbor playdates when you live near friends
https://claude.ai/share/1babe5d2-353e-405c-8644-33273ebdb8b1 Claude explains late-18th-century French weaponry & tactics
https://claude.ai/share/7c3fff83-29f2-4639-9035-44cd77347e39 Claude explains reversible computing and why it’s theoretically possible (and not a perpetual motion machine)
https://tennysontbardwell.com/blog/2025/04/30/mechanical-computing/index.html one possible mechanical implementation of a NAND gate
things I googled while reading about the French Revolution
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Joseph_Santerre stormed the Bastille, assaulted the Tuileries, executed the King. also early to industrial brewing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Pierre_Brissot leader of the Girondins
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazare_Carnot military engineer, father of Sadi Carnot, member of the National Convention and Committees of Public Safety, later Napoleon’s war ministry and architect of the levée en masse.
https://archive.org/details/reflexionsonmet00browgoog/page/n24/mode/1up wrote a book on calculus—this was decades before Cauchy gave us epsilon-delta definitions, so we’re still making geometric arguments about what limits even are
https://vibecasting.xyz/ collaborative forecasting
https://www.paradigm.xyz/2025/05/multiverse-finance add liquidity to a prediction market without adding more users by allowing more complex conditional possibilities. do i understand how it works beyond that? no.
https://pol.is/home facilitates public opinion gathering
https://www.ttm.com/en largest American manufacturer of PCBs
links 5/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-27-2025
https://www.plex.tv/ appears to be a place you can make a curated hub for streaming videos?
https://www.descript.com/ record and edit video; generate transcripts from uploaded video or YouTube links. very convenient and fun to use.
George Priest, writing in the 1980s, about the need for tort reform and the excessive strictness of product liability
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11501 Dean Ball’s proposal for AI governance
https://nexus-tool.com/docs/getting-started collective opinion sharing tool
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2405847?query=WB orexin agonist helps with the type of narcolepsy that comes from orexin deficiency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orexin
peptide produced from hypocretin
receptors in lateral hypothalamus
promotes wakefulness, food intake, and increased energy expenditure—the “SEEK system”!
Anthropic’s AI for science program—apply for free credits
links 5/23/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-23-2025
Convergent Research is hiring https://jobs.lever.co/convergentresearch
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/no-evidence-of-effects-of-testosterone-on-economic-preferences.html testosterone doesn’t appear to affect economic preferences like risk-taking, in a large (n=1000) randomized trial
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/07/13/welcome-to-nixonland/ Carlos Bueno on Nixonland
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm Leaves of Grass
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version Song of Myself
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/02/25/the-epic-struggle-between-good-and-neutral/
yet another “feeling + premodern culture vs. thinking and markets” dichotomy that seems to be more about his own personality than a universal axis of variation
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/08/26/the-scientific-sensibility/
same deal—science is unsentimentality? sort of, but is that the essence of the thing?
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/ content warning: aging, cynicism. but actually a piece that has stayed with me
links 5/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-21-2025
https://www.hathitrust.org/ books online
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_consumption when people are more interested in the sorts of “worldbuilding” you could put in a database than in stories themselves
how many people get personalized medicine?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/18/rise-in-dna-tests-used-to-claim-citizenship-of-other-countries-brexit-eu more than 40M people worldwide have gotten a genetic tests
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231004-these-people-took-dna-tests-the-results-changed-their-lives 26 millions of Americans have gotten a genetic test
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5342632/concierge-membership-primary-care-doctor-shortage-rural-health-access there are 12,000 concierge medicine practices in the US
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220607005447/en/The-Institute-for-Functional-Medicine-Releases-2020-2021-Annual-Report-Highlighting-Impact-of-Critically-Important-Mission-Driven-Work there are 1800 certified functional medicine practitioners in the US
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/genetic-testing-market-report the global genetic testing market is $11.71B
the global direct-to-consumer testing market is $1.7B https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/direct-to-consumer-genetic-testing-market-report
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01924-X/fulltext the global market for direct-to-consumer medical testing is projected to be $9B by 2033
Pharma proteomics Project with the UK Biobank shows lots of proteomic disease associations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occludin OCLN is associated with depression; something to do with gut permeability maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDF15 GDF15 rises sharply w age, probably a compensatory response to inflammation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastin ELN goes up in the blood w age, as it leaves blood vessels that are becoming more rigid
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3159481/ PEA is a proteomics technique that’s a lot cheaper to multiplex than ELISA or mass spec; uses tiny quantities of antibodies to barcode proteins and then sequences the barcodes.
links 5/20/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-20-2025
psalm 51:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_51 English, Hebrew, Greek
https://kpshaw.blogspot.com/2015/03/miserere-mei-deus.html Latin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Y_ztEW1NE Allegri Miserere
https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres plasma physicist gets disappointing results trying to implement “physics-inspired neural networks” for solving PDEs. the example in the paper works, but a different equation doesn’t converge at all to the known closed-form solution & he can’t find any settings that get it to work.
links 5/19/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-19-2025
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.15631 diminishing performance returns to reasoning token number.
more difficult questions get allocated more reasoning tokens.
higher reasoning “level” doesn’t
https://arxiv.org/html/2503.04697 there is an an optimal amount of reasoning to do at inference-time and doing more degrades performance. (“overthinking”). you can design models to estimate this for themselves.
more on “overthinking” degrading performance:
https://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html this is an analytical argument by Paul Graham; you can be “nice” (not capture the most value, in zero-sum contexts) and it won’t affect your revenue/profits much at all compared to your growth rate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cristo_sandwich -- it’s dipped in powdered sugar (!)
things I looked up while reading about the French Revolution
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Robert_Jacques_Turgot physiocrat of my heart!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Alexandre_de_Calonne spendiest minister ever
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume-Chr%C3%A9tien_de_Lamoignon_de_Malesherbes critic of royal absolutism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Sta%C3%ABl political theorist & salonniere
links 5/16/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-16-2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/health/gene-editing-personalized-rare-disorders.html
baby treated for a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, with a CRISPR base editing therapy in LNPs. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and UPenn researchers. they came up with a brand new gene editing therapy and got FDA approval in 6 months. two IV infusions seem to have fully done the trick!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbamoyl_phosphate_synthetase_I is a mitochondrial gene involved in the production of urea. without it you get ammonia buildup whenever you consume protein.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1910549 pembrolizumab is real good with chemo for stage 2-3 triple-negative breast cancer. either way we’re looking at >50% complete responses.
https://scientific-paper-planner-test.vercel.app/ beta AI app for planning scientific research projects
links 5/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-15-2025
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/nuclear-reactors-for-dummies classifies nuclear reactors
https://www.imprint.org/press-release-may-2025
“Imprint is building tools to reconstruct immune histories from memory B cells and T cells at scale. This ‘forensic immunology’ approach aims to unlock the secrets held within memory immune cells, which contain an archive of all immune exposures throughout a person’s life – essentially a web browser history of diseases and their hidden triggers.”
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/fixing-naval-ship-acquisition the Navy can streamline ship procurement by designing its own ships (!), using simpler, special purpose ships, and completing design before construction.
up until the 1960s, in-house ship design was the norm.
now, military contractors do not have full-time design teams employed (!) and design is routinely concurrent with building, which increases costs.
https://arcadiamedicine.com/ intended to develop short-acting analogues of MDMA for therapeutic use
https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/i-used-to-be-a-high-performing-robot no, when Cate Hall talks about “agency” she doesn’t just mean being high-achieving. being a “high-performing robot” drove her to alcoholism. agency, to her, means the opposite of all that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06592-6 UK Biobank proteomic study
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/boredom-is-a-form-of-pain Dan Davies says you should not ignore boredom while reading something; that’s a sign that you’re forcing yourself to process info you don’t understand.
links 8/5/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-05-2025
https://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/35024/1/FINAL%20THESIS%20-%20MULLER.pdf [[history]]
translation of “The firework book”, a 15th century German artillery manual
recipes for gunpowder—like medieval cooking recipes they are very schematic
“The method was found by a master called Niger Bertholdus who was a necromancer and who also handled major alchemy such as the same masters who deal with the big, artful, and courtly matters, with gold, with silver, and with the seven materials, such as the same masters who were able to separate silver and gold from the other metals and who could make such artful colours. And when the same master Berthold[us] wanted to burn a colour – the same colour which belongs to saltpetre, sulphur, and lead, and oil—he placed the ingredients in a copper pot and sealed the pot, as you have to, and the pot broke into many pieces. Then he made a large copper pot, sealing it shut with a big iron nail. And when the steam could not escape, it broke and the broken pieces [of the copper pot] caused great damage. So, the said Master Berthold[us] took away the lead and oil and added charcoal. And he ordered a gun to be cast, and tried out whether one could throw a stone with it [the gun] to demolish towers [as it has done] before. In this way, he discovered this method and improved it a little.”
all the measurements are constants. “But to the other question whether a gun fires a longer distance which has a smaller barrel or a larger, I say: the gun barrel that is five plugs long is the best of the guns. If they have to be shorter, they shoot less far.”
very little about aiming or ballistics!
https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2024-01-15-07:13.html [[David MacIver]] on ethics
https://docs.expo.dev/tutorial/introduction/ [[programming]] tutorial on Expo, an app for testing mobile apps on your phone