Links Post #5
At least half free before the paywall, as always
1) Hilarious banger of a post where Vishal Prasad parodies 4 common styles of Substack post. This was literally an “instant subscribe” for me - anyone that can pull this off has a mind worth hearing from.
It’s a sign of how well done it is that it’s difficult to even excerpt funny and representative quotes, because he builds the tension and inside jokes about the style over time so well. But here’s two:
“Evolutionary psychology has shown that everything is bullshit. Love? Bullshit. Morality? Bullshit. Happiness? Sorry pal, that’s bullshit too.
Surprisingly, scientists have shown that evolutionary psychology is the only thing in the world that is demonstrably not bullshit. Sadly, there were no evolutionary psychologists in the ancestral environment, so it took us a while to figure all this out.”
“anyways, a couple of cracked programmers i met at a sf kiwi-eating party got claude fable to break the partiful backend, so ive been “stalkmaxxing” leopold aschenbrenner, i.e. showing up at all the same events he’s at. now that’s what i call situational awareness!”
2) Lichter et al construct synthetic profiles of the husbands that today’s unmarried women would marry, based on the actual husbands of demographically comparable married women. These men have 58% higher incomes, are 30% more likely to be employed, and are 19% more likely to hold a college degree.
This fits neatly with what we know of IVF data (around 40-50% are single women with money using sperm banks to fully optimize the quality of the mates they can’t get in person, across multiple countries).
In a related note…
3) For a fun pre-phone take on “do screens kill your sex life,” we have “Does Television Kill Your Sex Life?” where television reliably decreases sex at every time interval between the past 7 days and past 12 months, with high p-values.
Surprising nobody, this is primarily in women, with men showing no effect, which we should entirely expect from the punishing 1-2 whammies of median men having a libido at the 75th percentile for women (ie, only 1-in-4 women will match-or-better the average man on sex drive), coupled with the absolutely laughable performance bar men achieve (~9 minutes median interejaculatory latency time, excluding premature ejaculators). So women are much happier to replace bad sex with TV or other screen time versus men, due to reasons of both intrinsic motivation and quality.
Man, I keep telling everyone the solution to the Fertility Crisis is gengineering men so they stop sucking so much, and become Nietzschean ubermensch capable of laying some serious pipe, but nooooo, I’m the crazy one! :-P
4) Interesting post arguing that “transhumanists” basically won in the sense that we’re all collectively pumping ourselves full of hormones and peptides at ever-increasing rates at a population level, but that rather than the future getting weird and spiky, everyone is doing it in the service of trying to be more “normal” and to conform to group consensuses.
https://www.gleech.org/enhance
It also features a fun timeline of various human enhancements, some of whose timelines surprised me, like sunscreen (1940 - really? That recently?), and glasses (1300 - well before Newton and Leeuwenhoek, and also surprising to me - don’t you need micrometers? A theoretical understanding of optics to grind to the correct curvature? How do you even measure the degree of correction needed in the EYE back then? Just yolo a bunch of lenses and choose the closest one?)
5) Cremieux’s masterclass non pareil on when you can or can’t control for things.
“To see why, imagine two restaurants: any old McDonald’s and a featured Michelin 3-Star fine dining establishment. After we’ve controlled for the quality of ingredients, preparation, atmosphere, clientele, and price, the two cannot be (statistically) distinguished. So, you may conclude, they’re really not all that different. But you would conclude wrong, because you’ve controlled for too much and the comparison no longer makes sense.”
On active controls:
“Empirically, when people run IQ-boosting interventions with passive control groups, they tend to find substantial effect sizes. But when an active control group is used, effect sizes evaporate and estimates move towards zero and generally become nonsignificant.”
6) Paul Bloom’s advice on how to give a good talk:
Why you might want to listen here, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom got his Phd at MIT and has written 7 books (including Against Empathy and How Pleasure Works, both worth reading), appears on radio and TV all the time, and has given a Ted Talk, he knows what he’s talking about.
I endorse all his tips, and a lot of them apply to writing too, especially making things “oniony.” To truly communicate to an audience, either via public speaking or writing, I think you need 1) some sort of hook, story, or narrative, 2) to have ONLY 2-3 main ideas you’re trying to communicate, and 3) to keep coming at those 2-3 ideas from different angles, to try to get them to “click” with different sets of people.
Also two good points of advice I strongly agree with from the other piece he mentions by Victor Kumar on giving a good talk:
“Every bad talk is bad in its own way, but some flaws are common. The slides are a parallel track and don’t help you understand what the speaker is saying. Small text. Colored text. Walls of text. The speaker is too quiet or subdued. They suffer from the curse of knowledge, taking for granted ideas that the audience needs help to understand. Or they make the opposite mistake, belaboring blindingly obvious points. They cram in too much material. Some speakers run way over, and when informed they’re running out of time, make no adjustments to wrap up—the offenders, of course, are always established academics.”
“The very best speakers don’t focus on the material itself. They focus on you, the audience, and they have such a deep grasp of the material that it just flows through them effortlessly.”
7) Claude Code steganographically marks whether you’re in a Chinese time zone, known to them, and / or affiliated with a Chinese AI lab.
It works by encoding 3 bits of information in the string it puts out for dates in the terminal, the top line string that says “Today’s date is 2026-06-30.”
If you’re in a Chinese timezone, the dates get slashes instead of dashes. And if you’re known or affiliated with a Chinese lab, the apostrophe is made with a different unicode character.
Now in their logs, they’ve flagged everyone in China and can keep track of everyone they know and who is lab affiliated, without ever indicating it. Super interesting!
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
This actually led to Chinese labs using Anthropic / Claude materially less when the story broke. Let’s see if that holds, bc obv they need to distill Fable to have a chance to stay within sight of us.
8) Sentences that feature the many and varied English pronunciation of “ough:”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
“The rough, dough-faced ploughman fought through the borough to the lough, hiccoughing and coughing.”
“The wind was rough along the lough as the ploughman fought through the snow, and though he hiccoughed and coughed, his work was thorough.”
“Though I thought the rough man coughed while walking through the borough beneath a bough, he was only admiring the lough after a hiccough.”
9) Interesting article where new-to-substack Zac Hill argues that the vibecession is mainly driven by parent spending subsidizing a lot of the important stuff like houses, healthcare, education, and this is why those things are harder to get and have vastly outstripped inflation. So even if number go up, and Millenials and Zennials both make more than prior generations at the same age, the overall felt sense is everyone making more and you never having enough.
Basically, there’s pools of dark money bidding everything up above even those better-earnings-at-that-age. And sure, this can only be true for the top 10-20% of households, nobody else even has money to bid things up. But that would drive exactly the dynamic you see! That top decile or whatever is doing fine and NOT complaining, and it’s the 80-90% of Zennials who aren’t so benefited who are. Solid premise, worth a read:
10) The complexity of Fable’s token-constrained chain of thought:
And a Reddit thread where some astonishing proportion of the commenters think this is gibberish(!) instead of just high information density. And this is r/accelerate! To be honest, that explains soooo much about the AI skeptics - if even the enthusiastic proponents misunderstand and misattribute the level the AI’s think and operate at now this badly, imagine the ones who only interact with the Gemini Fast search results or free ChatGPT.
Paywall and Coupon
I’m not here for money, I’m here for reach - but “the algorithm” as they call it rewards you for having more paying subs.
Enjoy a lifetime 90% off coupon here if you’re interested in the rest of the links, or in bumping my substack in the algorithm to higher readership:
