Linkdump

Some readings from Oct 2025 to Aug 2026. These were collected by scraping Matter and old emails. Claude was used to add attributions and link to existing notes on the bookshelf.

Machine learning

• Distillation Scaling Laws, Dan Busbridge et al.
• Beyond Chinchilla-Optimal, Nikhil Sardana et al.
• How Much Do Language Models Memorize?, John X. Morris et al.
• Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network, Geoffrey Hinton, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean.
• Inoculation Adapters Improve Upon Inoculation Prompting, Maxime Riché et al.
• Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model, Thinking Machines Lab.
• Interaction Models, Thinking Machines Lab.
• Where the Goblins Came From, OpenAI.
• Sanity-checking "Incompressible Knowledge Probes", Sturb and LawrenceC.
• Deriving Muon, Jeremy Bernstein.
• More Than Image Generators: A Science of Problem-Solving Using Probability, Depth First (video).
• The LLM Shoggoth Meme Is Weirder Than You Think, HedonicEscalator.
• AGI Ruin and the Road to Iconoclasm, JD Pressman.
• The Second Half, Shunyu Yao. (notes)
• Horses, Andy Jones.
• Models Don't "Get Reward", Sam Ringer.
• The Hot Mess Theory of AI Misalignment, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein.
• Interpretability Creationism, Naomi Saphra.
• Machine Studying, Jacob Li.
• Following the Text Gradient at Scale, Stanford AI Lab.
• Optimizing a Layer Normalization Kernel with CUDA: a Worklog, Arya.
• The Nuts and Bolts of Deep RL Research, John Schulman.
• Who Invented Backpropagation?, Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• There Is Plenty of Room (and Pain!) in Physical AI Research, Haptic Labs.
• Extending the Context of Pretrained LLMs by Dropping Their Positional Embeddings, Yoav Gelberg et al.
• Cartridges: Lightweight and General-Purpose Long Context Representations via Self-Study, Sabri Eyuboglu et al.
• AutoGo: a Tutorial, Eric Jang.

AI strategy

• Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, Leopold Aschenbrenner.
• Superintelligence Strategy, Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang.
• Can $500 Billion Win the AI Race?, Anton Leicht on 80,000 Hours (video).
• The Sample Efficiency Black Hole, Dwarkesh Patel.
• Notes on Space GPUs, Dwarkesh Patel.
• The ASIC-GPU Standoff, MBI Deep Dives.
• Why Does China Open Source Their AI Models?, Jason Hausenloy.
• We Live in the Funny Timeline, Jason Hausenloy. (notes)
• The Deep Roots of China's Robotics Dream, Irene Zhang.
• Searching for God in Silicon Valley, Avital Balwit.
• How AI Will Reshape Computer Systems by 2035, Helen Wright.
• Robotics' End Game, Jim Fan on Sequoia Capital (video).
• Does Anything I Write Matter Anymore?, Noah Smith.
• Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz.
• The Intelligence Curse, Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine.
• The Game Board Has Been Flipped, LintzA.
• What If the Third Wave Is a Puddle?, Morgan Fairless.
• AGI Trades, Daniel Gross.
• AI Safety Is Bottlenecked, Brian Davies.
• AI Safety Needs Great Engineers, Andy Jones.
• The Case Against AI Control Research, John Wentworth.
• Why I Don't Persuade People to Do AI Safety, Jason Hausenloy.
• A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics, Terence Tao.
• Conditional Commitments, Jason Hausenloy.
• When AI Builds Itself, Anthropic.
• I Think Anthropic and OpenAI Have Found Product-Market Fit, Simon Willison.

Finance

• First Brands Did Some Round Trips, Matt Levine.
• Musk Mars Merger, Maybe, Matt Levine.
• AI Builds Some Pyramids, Matt Levine.
• You Can Just Not Buy SpaceX, Matt Levine.
• Finance as Culture, John Luttig.
• The Jackpot Age, Alex (Scimitar Capital).
• Pizza Wheels Are Bad, Japanese Toilets Are Great, Noah Smith.
• The Stable Marriage Problem, Ajeya Cotra.

Work

• Advice to Young People, Jason Liu.
• Top Performers Are Pathologically Ambitious, Matt Beard. (notes)
• Zugunruhe, Nathan Zhao. (notes)
• Play in Hard Mode, Zvi Mowshowitz.
• Tryhard, Jasmine Sun. (notes)
• Fission // 20, Will Savage. (notes)
• Tempering Hardcoreness, Ajeya Cotra.
• Building Something No One Else Can Measure, Sriram Krishnan.
• Where Are the Builders?, Near.
• The Wu Tapes, Jeremy Stern.
• Overcoming Sincere Prestige Bias, Robin Hanson.
• Live Versus Dead Players, Samo Burja.
• Psychokinetics, Manav Ponnekanti.
• Things You're Allowed to Do, Saul Munn.
• Escaping Flatland: Career Advice for CS Undergrads, space.ong.ac. (notes)
• The Old World Is Dying, Jasmine Sun.
• College Advice for People Who Are Exactly Like Me, Ben Kuhn.
• How to Get New Ideas, Paul Graham.
• Terraform Talent Development, Casey Handmer.
• Leaving 1X, Eric Jang.
• My Infant Year as an AI Researcher, Alfred Yao.
• The Value of Experiments, Neel Nanda.
• Stables and Volatiles, Rands.
• Slack, Zvi Mowshowitz.
• Sabbath Hard and Go Home, Ben Hoffman.
• A Torch in Darkness and On Caring, Nate Soares.

Thinking & writing

• A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy.
• When Is Better to Think Without Words?, Henrik Karlsson.
• A List of Books and Essays That I Love, Henrik Karlsson.
• Days Are Enormous, Henrik Karlsson.
• On the Pleasure of Reading Private Notebooks, Henrik Karlsson.
• The Joy of Browsing, Visakan Veerasamy.
• Why Were You Late?, Visakan Veerasamy.
• Why Read Novels?, Dynomight.
• Taste Games, Dynomight. (notes)
• Treat Your To-Read Pile Like a River, Not a Bucket, Oliver Burkeman.
• You Can't Reach the Brain Through the Ears, Adam Mastroianni.
• Belief in Belief, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Writing One Sentence per Line, Derek Sivers.
• My Productivity App Is a Never-Ending .txt File, Jeff Huang. (notes)
• Republic of Letters, Wikipedia.
• Please Don't Throw Your Mind Away, TsviBT.
• A Blog Post Is a Very Long and Complex Search Query, Henrik Karlsson.
• The Need to Read, Paul Graham.
• How I Learned to Read Way, Way More, John Paul Brammer.
• I Deleted My Second Brain, Joan Westenberg.
• The Serendipity Machine, Nabeel Qureshi.
• Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?, Tim Ferriss.

Living

• You're Always Stressed, Your Mind Is Always Busy, You Never Have Enough Time, mingyuan.
• Digital Intentionality Is Not About Productivity, mingyuan.
• This Life Gives You Nothing, Blackbird Spyplane. (notes)
• Industrialising Ourselves Crazy, Dan Davies.
• Digital Hygiene and Chemical Hygiene, Andrej Karpathy.
• Surrender as a Non-Stupid Life Strategy, Sasha Chapin.
• Relax for the Same Result, Derek Sivers.
• Rest in Motion, Nate Soares. (notes)
• Friendships Should Feel Like Playing on the Same Team, Neel Nanda.
• Always Invite Anna, sharif.io.
• I Love the Bay Area, Ava (Bookbear Express).
• Radical Fun, Ava (Bookbear Express).
• The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again, Tim Urban.
• The Tail End, Tim Urban.
• Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful, Dynomight. (notes)
• The Parable of the Talents, Scott Alexander.
• The 1/8th Sleep, Near.
• The First Thing I Did Last Year Was Run, Henry.
• Integration, Vincent Huang.
• Zugunruhe, Aidan Smith.
• How to Make a Lot of Friends and The Problem of Long-Term Close Friendships, Kasra.
• Why Are Late Night Conversations Better?, Human Invariant.
• "The First Two Weeks Are the Hardest": My First Digital Declutter, mingyuan.
• The Attention-Span Class Divide, Xochitl Gonzalez.
• Does Creatine Make You Smarter?, Dynomight.

Misc

• Why I Love Mormonism, Simon Critchley.
• Do You Know How Weird the Gospels Are?, Fergus McCullough.
• What God Has to Do in Mathematics, Gavin Leech.
• The Human Project, Logan Graves.
• What Is Humanism?, Cognition Café.
• On Creating New Knobs of Control in Biology, Abhishaike Mahajan. (notes)
• The Worthlessness of Vitamin D Is Mildly Exaggerated, Dynomight.
• Pax Astra, Part 1: Intergalactic War Is Unlikely, Sam Harsimony.
• Walking Tours, Matthew Jordan.
• A Love Letter to MIT's Blackboards, Ben Spector.
• Out of Order, on Technicality, Armaan Gomes.
• The Foothills of Bay Area House Party, Scott Alexander.
• The Hope of a Condemned Man, Joan Miró.
• Music in Human Evolution, Kevin Simler.
• Asymmetric Justice, Zvi Mowshowitz.
• Staying Like Foragers and Our Uphill Battle, Robin Hanson.
• Superrationality, Wikipedia.
• Jacob Tsimerman Wins 2026 Fields Medal, Kevin Hartnett.
• India's One Simple Trick to Reduce Alcohol Mortality, Nicholas Decker.
• Did a Climber Leave His Girlfriend to Die at the Top of a Mountain?, William Finnegan.

Watching

• General Relativity from First Principles, Adam Brown on Dwarkesh.
• AI Disproved a Famous Math Conjecture. Now What?, Grant Sanderson on Dwarkesh (video). (notes)
• Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI's Real 100x, Dylan Patel on Sequoia Capital (video). (notes)
• What Remains Scarce After AGI?, Alex Imas and Phil Trammell on Dwarkesh. (notes)
• In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai (film).

Fiction

• Mono no Aware, Ken Liu.
• Understand, Ted Chiang. (notes)
• The Whispering Earring, Scott Alexander.
• Alignment, Vincent Huang.
• Lunch in Tokyo, soso.
• Stop Rock Climbing, You Are Leading to the Downfall of Civilization, soso.