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

• https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-altman-and-masa-back-episteme-louis-andre Episteme, Sam Altman-funded "new Bell Labs" for science. sounds potentially exciting.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas the name "Texas" comes from a Caddo word for "friends"
• https://machinephase.systems/ these people say they want to build true molecular nanotechnology
• https://yiddishsongs.org/rozhinkes-mit-mandlen/ it's a touching lullaby about...hoping your kid will go into the import-export business. also railroads.
• https://sproutstack.substack.com/p/is-mike-wazowski-jewish-or-polish my vote is for Polish
• https://lettersfrombethlehem.substack.com/p/i-was-born-with-a-defective-brain personal account of a brain malformation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_sequence you can do a bunch of real analysis from a constructivist approach.

links 11/05/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-05-2025

• https://www.thirdoikos.com/p/life-in-the-third-oikos-jesse-genet description of daily life for an entrepreneur turned homeschool mom, interview by Nicole Ruiz
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumash_people they're still around!
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/arts/television/maria-riva-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yU8.uFZP.tjEhyXyNasNz&smid=url-share Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich's daughter, had a  rough time growing up
• https://builders.genagorlin.com/p/the-hidden-belief-that-kills-great by [[Gena Gorlin]], if you don't have high standards for employees it might because you're misanthropic, aka you secretly believe "everyone sucks except me" and must be accommodated.

• https://transluce.org/ AI interpretability org

   

links 11/4/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-04-2025

• https://thenewfrontier.substack.com/p/unintuitive-things-about-impact-philanthropy This is exactly what it's like.
• https://oldenlabs.com/ once again someone is trying to do smart cages for animal research. I want somebody to win here.
  • Animal research is so, so, so low-quality, especially when it's not IND-enabling. It costs less to mistreat your mice. And to have too few mice, so your studies are underpowered. And to cut corners on experimental method & disease-model validation in every way. Without the FDA breathing down their necks as tightly as they do for human clinical trials, scientists and their funders do not shell out the cash or spend the time to do animal experiments right.
  • Animal welfare and scientific integrity are extremely aligned here. And if you can get the cost of high-quality animal husbandry down (with automation or any other means), we might start to get "we cured cancer [IN MICE]" to be less bullshit.
• https://substack.com/@foxchapelresearch/p-177604037 skeptical post criticizing Substrate. I'm skeptical of the skepticism.
  • he says "the founder is a known con artist" and describes his former sleep tracker startup Hello as a "scam". This is a giant abuse of language. Hello, it seems, built a product that was poorly reviewed in the tech-skeptical press, took a long time and a lot of VC funding to ship hardware, and ultimately fizzled. That is what we call a "failed startup." Not a crime.
    • Hello was also incorrectly described as James Proud's "last project." In fact, in 2020 he founded Config, a hardware design software company. This is substantially more relevant to his transition into the semiconductor industry.
  • The author claims that Substrate's images are suggestive that they're using maskless lithography, which indeed allows for smaller feature sizes, but is not used at scale for semiconductor fabrication because it's too slow. The argument is essentially that Substrate only gets their small feature sizes by using a method that the semiconductor industry has already rejected for good reason.
    • BUT:

      • actually maskless lithography is used in the industry, for things like rapid prototyping and making masks. it would be classic "disruptive innovation" for a company to specialize in a new (x-ray-based, in this case) maskless method for these "minor" applications, and then figure out a way to transition to the "major" application of mass production of leading-edge semiconductor chips.

        • "you say you compete with the juggernaut monopoly, but today you only outperform them on this narrow use case" is the story of SO MANY SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES that left the monopoly in the dust.

         

links 11/3/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-03-2025

• https://derangedphysiology.com/main/required-reading/cardiovascular-intensive-care/Chapter-642/ecmo-circuit-configurations  probably only of practical interest if you work on an ICU, but there's some dark humor as well
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_tea  originally invented in Taiwan in the 1980s; became popular throughout East Asia before taking off in the US
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-bidens-white-house-press-secretary-is-leaving-the-democratic-party Karine Jean-Pierre gets the Chotiner treatment. Nice schadenfreude.

• https://news.mit.edu/2025/your-brain-without-sleep-1029  the glymphatic hypothesis of sleep strikes again; attention lapses during sleep deprivation coincide with CSF flushing

   

links 10/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-30-2025

• https://substrate.com/our-purpose
  • Substrate is using x-ray lithography instead of EUV. but i thought XRL was a dead end because it's ionizing radiation that can blur features by damaging the mask or the substrate. last i looked it up, minimum XRL feature size was 30 nm, worse than EUV's state of the art ~16-18 nm gate length for a "3 nm node".
  • so what's going on?
• https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-to-kill-2-monopolies-with-1-tool Substrate is reporting 12 nm features and 0.25 nm CDU (a function of feature variability, typically like 3 standard deviations). so this is a claim of substantial improvement over SOTA.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_light_source  when you run electrons real fast in a circle they emit very bright, very coherent x-rays. this is what Substrate is doing. there might be something about the coherence or the intensity that helps with blur? but the details are a trade secret and Substrate isn't saying.
• https://www.epistemic.garden/ Twitter analysis tools
• https://www.owlposting.com/p/there-arent-enough-smart-people-in  once again, it is not "boring" to work on repurposing (best biotech approach EVAR if you want to specialize in computational vs. laboratory capabilities) or CROs (if you want to improve on SOTA of experimental or manufacturing technology, and build a business around that, it is much harder to do that within a biotech startup that also needs to build a pipeline, than to specialize in experiments or manufacturing as services)
• https://builders.genagorlin.com/p/reflections-upon-turning-40  probably helpful to do a timeline of your life and the milestones in it, as seen in this post. it's kind of a trip to see just how *many* things i've tried in life by age 37, and how like...20% at best? were unqualified successes.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ljeg4e/women_of_reddit_whats_something_they_never_tell/ most of these are very common pregnancy experiences that I also had.
• on readiness potentials and volition in neuroscience
  • https://socsci3.tau.ac.il/rmukamel/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Neural-correlates-of-intention_book.pdf
  • https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(21)00093-0
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168010215000309 [[Parkinson's]] patients show delays in W-time (they don't notice having decided to move until right before they do)
  • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2024/05/01/2024.05.01.592070.full.pdf pupil dilation tracks and precedes self-reported intention to move?
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393215300786 readiness potentials in phantom limbs look just like they do in actual limbs with real movements
  • https://www.academia.edu/32463447/Do_meditators_have_higher_awareness_of_their_intentions_to_act not sure i agree with the interpretation here; looks more like "nonmeditators show different brain activity between voluntary movement tasks when asked to introspect vs not; meditators' brain activity looks like the activity for the non-introspection case in both tasks"
• could direct lithium brine extraction get cheaper?
  • yes, with new adsorbent materials https://newatlas.com/energy/volt-low-cost-lithium-extraction/
  • or with new membrane materials https://www.greyb.com/blog/membrane-based-lithium-extraction/
  • https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79178.pdf this is already priced into NREL's techno-economic analysis; this document projects scale-up of various technologies that are currently benchtop or pilot scale.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03057-9 6 distinct "biotypes" of depression based on fMRI clustering; show different symptom patterns and patterns of performance on cognitive tests, and different responses to treatment.
  • this seems pretty rigorous
  • otoh i wish there were characteristic "types of depression" that were more recognizable on the symptom/behavioral level, such that a therapist or psychiatrist could make a guess as to which type a person might be. this isn't that.
    • old-school "melancholic depression is when you don't eat, don't sleep, frown super deeply and wring your hands, have intense guilt, and have high cortisol" would be an example of a much more stereotype-able depression subtype, the kind that's more useful in practice than any of the 6 "biotypes".

links 10/23/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2025

• https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-anti-intellectual-university
  • Sure, I respect the integrity of standing by your work and your student, and I have no opinion on the correctness of the work, but I can't stand this contrary streak in Bryan Caplan. If you say straight out "I don't care if I make people mad", then you make ME mad!
• https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-the-ai-buildout
  • Dwarkesh Patel predicts the AI buildout. There's a lot of money in it. Maybe so much money that it can overwhelm regulatory barriers and ordinary incompetence, and lead to a nontrivial increase in electricity generation??? I can't imagine this actually happening, but it is a lot of money.
• https://vividvoid.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-your-family
  • if I'm going to "fight" my family, i'm going to fight foolishly and insanely. if i have self-control, why am i fighting at all?
• https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/dont-build-an-ai-safety-movement
  • again, i don't get it. it would be no great loss if all chatbots were banned. and I'm x-risk skeptical and very anti-regulation in general and a power user of LLMs. It's just that this is a technology we can live without, because we did live without it five years ago! it's mostly used for dumb memes and cheating on homework! Banning AI is technically against my principles, but I'd miss it barely more than I'd miss the legal sports betting apps I don't use.
• https://quintinfrerichs.xyz/human-enhancement-companies very intriguing
• papers related to (perceived) volition and the decision to move:
  • https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(10)01082-2?innerTabvideo-abstract_mmc3= certain neurons in the medial frontal cortex increase their firing rate prior to the decision to move, peaking at "W-time", the point where people report making the decision to move (about 200 ms before actual movement)
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1160 damage to the parietal cortex makes people report "w-time" later, close to the actual movement
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1388245723005953 patients with tic disorders mostly report making a "decision" to move prior to moving, same as healthy subjects. no significant differences between W and M times.
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330627/ summary of various experiments on W time

  • https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1523226113 the "readiness potential" does not represent a final decision to move; people can "cancel" the movement later, going up to but not beyond W-time. in other words, the time at which people actually make the final decision whether or not to move is pretty much the time at which they report deciding to move.

     

links 10/22/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-22-2025

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melino%C3%AB  Melinoe is the bringer of nightmares, mentioned only in one of the Orphic Hymns. she is the daughter of Zeus and Persephone; her name means quince-colored (aka yellow-green) and she is described as saffron-robed.

• https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here interim US attorney rants to journalist 

   

links 10/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-21-2025

• https://theaisummer.com/diffusion-models/  summary of how diffusion models work
• https://stampy.ai/  a chatbot about AI safety
• https://www.kerista.com/And_to_No_More_Settle.pdf a personal account of Kerista, a utopian polyamorous commune

I like this article, but I think I sort of "don't believe in scenes", or believe they're inherently sort of disappointing or contain a kind of tension.

A team has a goal orientation and some kind of merit-related criterion of membership (can you contribute?)

A clique can openly be arranged for the benefit of its members. There's nothing "unfair" or "nepotistic" about prioritizing your family, your friend group, a social club with formal membership like the Elks, or a subculture  like the Juggalos. The right answer to "What makes your clique better than anybody else, such that you should spend your time and effort on them?" is "nothing! i love it because it is mine. it suits me. something else might suit you."

A scene is neither merit-based nor inward-looking. It's sort of making a promise to collectively pursue the Art, but it also can't really kick you out if you suck at the Art. It hasn't committed to a membership boundary (like a clique, which exists for the benefit of these specific people) or an effectiveness boundary (like a team, which exists to get a specific thing done). It's not willing to own its ruthlessness (like a team) or its self-servingness (like a clique). At best it's fertile ground for building real teams and cliques. At worst, it seems to promise mutual support and progress towards common goals, but lots of people are going to be disappointed that they can't count on that support or that progress actually materializing.

For instance, I think there are a lot of individual people in the LessWrong community I'd want to be on a team with because I respect them on merit-based grounds. I also have affection and loyalty to the community as a clique, as a place I feel at home, a subculture I'm fond of, a group with a high density of personal friends, regardless of whether it's objectively "better" than any other community. But I don't actually think community membership is evidence of merit. I think that sort of self-flattering narrative is built into the "scene" format and that people who critique it have a point.

Agreed that more people should share anecdotes. 

We don't have to bring logic into it; I think logical reasoning is good and possible and there's no need to insist that "most people don't do it" (and thus that we shouldn't either??)

Anecdotes are way better than arguments because they point to the history of how someone came to believe a thing (causally, why, how come you believe that) rather than focusing on the legitimacy of believing that thing.

 If I want to understand your perspective, and figure out what I think about it, I can suss that out more efficiently by understanding what examples or details motivated you. Maybe the anecdotes will be enough to change my mind. Maybe I'll be like "oh, ok, i'm familiar with those and ALSO many other things that point in the opposite direction, so my opinion is unchanged." Definitely, if the claim being made is an abstract one like "class is important", motivating examples help narrow down in what sense the person means they think class is important.  You just get more new information faster, in most cases, if someone is honestly tracing the origin of their beliefs, instead of trying to convince you of them.