Mid-October Links

October 15, 2025

i am tired so here is a linkpost. i'll try not to do more than two of these a month

  1. Misha Gromov mathematizes biology (in an IHES lecture series). See also his manuscript on ergosystems.
  2. Gauge/string dualities as special cases of Schur-Weyl duality.
  3. Tao on when eigenvalues are stable under (small) perturbations, what gauges are, and orders of infinity.
  4. Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages.
  5. Negarestani on the alien will, toy aesthetics, and toy philosophy. He also has a complexity sciences reading list which is surprisingly reasonable.
  6. A 3000pg algebraic topology reference with pictures.
  7. Tsvi on gemini modeling and counting down vs. counting up coherence.
  8. Schulman on when low-rank LoRA underperforms and matches fullFT. In particular, 1-rank LoRA is sufficient for RL tasks.
  9. Associative memory in an optical spin glass made of rubidium Bose-Einstein condensates. Ganguli is a co-author.
  10. Lada Nuzhna on where are all the trillion dollar biotechs?
  11. Francis Bach with some more "classical" settings for scaling laws. See accompanying blog posts.
  12. Andrew Critch has an interesting blog post on Newcombian implications on self-trust. Christiano also has a blog post on integrity for consequentialists.
  13. Homotopy is not concrete.
  14. Nick Bostrom profile in the New Yorker.
  15. Dean Ball on what it's like to work in the White House. He ~wrote the AI Action Plan.
  16. Vitalik on memory access actually taking $O(N^{1/3})$ time, low-risk defi as an Ethereum business model, copy-left vs. permissive licenses, and musings on ideologies. His posts are great. Highly recommend.
  17. Ben Kuhn on how taste can be the leading contributor to impact. See also Chris Olah's exercises for developing research taste.
  18. Exposition of homotopy type theory with $\infty$-topos semantics by Emily Riehl. I really like these! They're cogent and clear.
  19. The Ohio State University is hosting an International Conference on Ancient Magic this weekend.
  20. Aging as a loss of goal-directedness, from the Levin lab.
  21. Eliot's The Hollow Men and Blake's The Proverbs of Hell.
  22. An optimistic case for protein foundation model companies.
  23. Grokking as a first order phase transition in neural networks. Good example of mean field theory as a thermodynamic theory of learning.
  24. If you like the items on this list, or especially if you wish the items on this list were better, email me!