2026-03-31 05:29:01
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
14-year-old running for governor is the first teen to get on Vermont’s general election ballot
I can’t stop yelling at Claude Code
“here is what i got from gemini 3.1 pro when i asked to do a simple coding task” says Flakon @f_demaku, posting a screenshot of a truly insane train of thought. “I sincerely apologize for that bizarre wall of text!” writes Gemini in response to a request for clarification. “My internal planning process glitched and leaked into the chat, resulting in an output loop.” But — “This is fucking sublime,” writes j⧉nus @repligate. “As I often say, with outputs like this, you need to make at least 5 (good) Suno songs with it before you can really begin to get what it’s about,” and proceeds to drop the first hit AI “Bright, syncopated percussion and playful synths introduce the catchy xenopop groove, Cheerful arpeggios twist into unexpected minor chords, adding an ominous undertone, Layered vocal chops and polyrhythms weave subtle complexity, while dynamic breaks keep the texture intriguing” song of the summer. (Full playlist here.)
2026-03-23 07:50:09
This April will see the return of Inkhaven, a blogging residency program where you have to write and publish at least 500 words a day, every day, for a whole month, or they feed you to the hounds kick you out. As bloggers who mostly write 10,000-plus-word effortposts, this format is both fascinating and alienating to us. We’ve never written only 500 words in our lives.
While Inkhaven has been a big success, the format isn’t naturally conducive to effortposts (long, detailed, well-researched posts that clearly took significant time and effort to write). For example, consider this reflection from one resident, Amanda From Bethlehem:
I came to Lighthaven with a draft folder full of half-finished pieces that I wanted to take across the finish line. A lot of them were effortposts that needed extensive revisions. I struggle with procrastination and perfectionism, so I figured that Inkhaven would be the perfect environment for me.
…
The problem with effortposts is that they took a long time to write. Even if I already had a draft. Especially if I already had a draft, which I showed to Scott Alexander during his Office Hours, and he (very politely) ripped it to shreds right before my eyes, and then I had to completely re-write it.
…
If you’re interested in doing the next Inkhaven, don’t expect to get very many effortposts out the door.
This was a frequent comment. A post of ~500 words is good practice and builds important skills, like finishing and shipping, but many of the best and most famous blog posts are effortposts. Many people would like to write or finish more of them, it’s a natural aspiration. One of the organizers, Ben Pace, even considered in his retrospective the idea of a “Weekhaven”:
What might a ‘Weekhaven’ look like?
- Each week, you write a single, 3,500+ word effortpost
- Writers could spend whole days reading and doing research, without writing.
- It would have more narrative arc to the week. Currently an idea is brought up today, discussed, and published same day. In Weekhaven, they’d get feedback on it multiple times at different levels of development.
- Editing would be more of a process; you could take a finished essay and restructure it, or re-write whole sections.
But there may not be a need for such a drastic change in format. After all, even great works are produced in smaller chunks. Robert Caro, who produces biographies of truly monumental length, aims for a mere 1,000 words per day, as seen on this calendar:
So here’s a suggestion for how to produce effortposts while still getting 500 words out the door every day no problem. We call it effortscaffolding.
Each day, wake up and work on your effortpost until a specific time, let’s say 5 pm. After that point, no more working on your effortpost. Instead, write a reflection about what you did that day and where the piece is at. This will almost certainly come to 500 words. If you’re a programmer, think of it as a slightly long git commit, a snapshot of the effortpost at that point in time. That’s your post for the day, publish it.
Or if you prefer, you can start the day by writing about the current state of the effortpost, and what you plan to work on that day. This will also almost certainly come to 500 words, and you can publish that. Or write and publish both.
If you’re really stuck, write the reflection as an email to a friend who’s interested in the topic. Or pull them up on Discord and literally tell them about it until you reach 500 words. Have them ask you questions about the project to draw out more ideas. (Or just write 500 words of questions to yourself.) Then copy your Discord messages into a document and publish that. Boom, done.
This concept is also a nice fit for Inkhaven because of the “firehose problem”. One post of >500 words a day creates a real firehose of writing, and even if they truly adore you, most readers don’t want to get 30 emails in one month. So Inkhaven suggested you could choose to only send a small number of your posts as email updates, and not send the others.
These scaffolding posts would be good ones not to send. Only true diehard readers will want to see them, and anyone who does choose to read them will get the pleasure of living slightly in the future, knowing about the effortpost before it drops.
It’s not even a waste of prose, because you can mine your daily reflections for material and roll that into the effortpost itself. If you have one big idea that you want to think about, or one big problem that you want to solve, you can write 500-word posts about the idea/problem all month long and then stitch ‘em together at the end.
Honestly, effortscaffolding might be good practice for effortposts in general. A daily roadmap and/or reflection will probably help you think about the effortpost more clearly. The sense of progress is good for morale. And people love dev diaries. Plus they’re just interesting artifacts.
Ironically, this might be one of our posts closest to 500 words.
2026-03-01 10:14:21
Nicky Case: Vitamin D & Omega-3 may have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants. Along with the actual points being made about depression, this essay is a great introduction to effect sizes.
A lot of population numbers are fake
Cosimo Research: 
Does Mouth Taping Reduce Snoring? & 
Does Mouth Taping Change Facial Structure? Highlights from the methods section: “there were 135 vertical nights and 116 mustache nights”
Cosimo Research: Eau de Vagina AKA “the most rigorous study on vabbing ever undertaken and hence the best available scientific evidence”
Theoretical Structural Archaeology: Twelve reasons why Stonehenge was a building
Fiction: Julia
Sometimes we talk of ideas being “Big if true”. Well, they don’t get much bigger than true than this: ABC’s of Blessed Water (cf. We out here making mana potions)
2026-02-01 12:10:13
For the new year: A rationalist’s guide to manifestation
Advice for Anarchist Post-Docs — Including genuine gems like:
you can expect the typical PI to be very reluctant to fire you for doing a different mix of research than they expected. They may express displeasure in a variety of ways, but as long as you’re producing results, you’ll probably have a long runway of PI annoyance before any disciplinary action takes place.
There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems
Your cheap furniture has a secret — Every part of the supply chain has a story. Or 100 stories.
Why Gen Z Culture Is Basically Medieval China
Remaking Kids by MGMT to Learn Why It’s So Good — A good way to learn about / understand anything. Wait this is just replication again LOL
Burnout is breaking a sacred pact
15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026 — (Possible infohazard / hyperstition warning, read with caution.)
Skyrim was weird for my Non-Gamer Wife — Unexpectedly heartwarming ending.
Unrevised edition of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People — Mostly sharing for the censorship angle:
This website hosts the complete unrevised edition of Dale Carnegie’s masterpiece How to Win Friends and Influence People. … We use the unrevised edition because we believe the revised edition (the revisions were done by Carnegie’s relatives after his death) forcefully makes the language of the book gender neutral and politically correct and takes away from the originality of the work.
(WARNING: includes graphic images of a man performing cranial surgery on himself with a dentist’s drill. DO NOT ATTEMPT AT HOME.) THROUGH THE BLIND HOLE. Amazingly, this story appears to be true.
2026-01-01 03:21:15
Why Everyone Loves Japan — “Even more astonishing than my interview with Kodansha is the fact that to this day, I have not met a single Japanese person who has heard of the word ‘weeb’.”
The Next Renaissance is Coming
Epicycles All The Way Down. Not really sure what this means but, food for thought.
We simply do not know what a human being who has read a billion books looks like, if it is even feasible, so an immortal who has read a billion books feels about as smart as a human who has read a few dozen.
How To Find Time To Do Science
Strategy means sticking to what matters the most. On the science front, that’s getting results and writing about them. And so I try to spend most of my science time on this. These are the only things that matter. And so if I’m not doing either, I question why. … To reiterate – doing science means learning about the world, then communicating the results. That’s the ultimate end point, so it’s the thing I try to spend the most time on.
Statistics is a Scientific Instrument
We don’t often think about statistics as being in the same category as a microscope. But if you think about it, it’s a tool (built with math rather than physical engineering) that enables us to observe phenomena in the world that are invisible with the naked eye. … Statistics is a powerful instrument, but like any instrument, it provides evidence that then needs interpretation to infer what’s going on with the underlying phenomena – it doesn’t generate truth directly. Look at the X-ray crystallography image of DNA: it’s nowhere near obvious that you’re looking at a double helix. Statistics is the same. The problem is that many people – both practitioners using the tool and people listening to them – treat it as some kind of oracle.
Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws
Fix Your Gut Health Forever by Thinking About Ice Cream
The first time I had the sense that I really needed a green vegetable, it shocked me. It was a new feeling. I’d had cravings before—the standard kind, for carbs and sweets and salty crunchy junk—and this was similar, but it was also distinct. There was a subtlety to it, a strength without the familiar urgency of carb addiction. Make no mistake: I’d always enjoyed green vegetables. But even in the deepest depths of my finals week burrito marathons, I’d never once craved them.
On the same theme: Self Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants: An Experimental Study
Blind Spot Light vs Rear View Camera
In a hostile information environment, you want surface, NOT solve.
…
If the blind spot light stops working, you might think it was safe to turn.
If your fact checker made an error, you might update your world model with the error.
Reliance on these kinds of signals I think is worse than not having a signal at all. If I know that I do not know (whether there is a car there), I am forced to manually turn my head, or be more careful as I turn.
Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? “The admissions in private that Oliver Sacks’ stories were too good to be true were less equivocal than what he hinted at in the preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (literalbanana)
2025-11-30 23:30:42
This month, there was Inkhaven. A total of 41 residents published one piece of writing of at least 500 words every single day for the 30 days of November. That’s a lot of essays, blog posts, poems, short stories, and long-ass tweets. As a result we cannot claim that the few entries below are the best, or even our favorites. We have not remotely read all of them, or even as many as we would like. So all we will claim is, this is a selection:
For the psychologists in the room, we’d like to first call your attention to croissanthology’s replication of psych classic Loftus & Palmer (1974), or the “do people say that cars were going faster when they hear they ‘smashed’ into each other as opposed to hit/bumped/etc.” study. The materials were put together in just a few hours, and with (special thanks to) Aella helping to recruit participants, croissanthology soon 10x’d the original sample size (446 vs 45 in the original), and did not find any evidence for the supposed effect — in fact, it trended in the opposite direction. This study isn’t perfect, but it sure is evidence against the original claim. And if people do think the original claims were right, we’d love to see other replications.
And then later: Takeaways from “doing science”
I ate bear fat, to prove a point
Robert Hooke’s “Cyberpunk” letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Some ballad meter poetry, to just amuse myself
The time Weird Al Yankovic went too far
after my dad died, we found the love letters
Things I learnt at replication club (read to the end for an image of “best practice” psychophysical input device)
A good software engineer interested in supporting better psychology research could probably do a lot of good work contributing features to these frameworks. PsychoPy for example seems to support all sorts of fancy things like eye tracking however you require custom code or hacks in order to set up a simple “rate this statement from 1-5” multiple choice scale
Ok that’s the fairly random Inkhaven selection. We return to regular links:
In case you missed it: THE LOOP Issue 2
There was a Renaissance natural historian named Ole Worm who had a pet great auk and proved that lemmings didn’t appear out of thin air. (h/t Georgia Ray)
David Chapman publishes an excellent self-experiment: Conquering chronic crud
Also in the vein of self-experiments: The One Simple Trick That Fixed My Relationship With the Space of Nameless Misery
