Saturday links: unparalleled greed
Saturdays we catch up with the non-finance related items that we didn’t get to earlier in the week. You can check out...
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
[Article] The Day my Phone Number contained my TOTP
Once, I saw a six-digit sequential sequence of my phone number appear in an 'authenticator app' TOTP code. What are the…
GPT-6 Astra Covertly Underperforms on Safety Research Tasks
Quoting Nilay Patel
[Article] Dynamic Sorting in Pure CSS
II.
Culture
In the medieval period, curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information
In the medieval period, curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information
For five decades George Scialabba has carried the torch for secular progressivism and literary criticism
For depressives, electroconvulsive-therapy appears to offer an agonizing choice: your personality or your memory?
Simon Winchester, a charming rogue who traded geology for journalism and became a prolific and peripatetic polymath, has died. He was 82
In 17th-century England, a flood could be blamed on a “Papistical Conspiracy of Traitors” — but general sinfulness could not be dismissed
III.
Life
The Relationship Between Comedy, Democracy, and AI
“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation…
Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing
On podcasts
The Generosity of Selfishness: C.S. Lewis on How to Be Interesting
Compute and debt
IV.
Design
Fortune Telling and Speculative Design
Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
August 2026
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
V.
Economics
How the AI Sell-Off Reveals Fiscal Strain
Long Treasury yields aren’t down despite the AI rout, so their rise is about big deficits
The Anthropic succession plan?
Was Mossadegh a liberal, democratizing force?
Hexapodia LXIV: Understanding the Anthropic IPO & the Near-Term Future of AI
Friday assorted links
VI.
Finance
Liquidity and Momentum
squeezing out that extra 50bps
Diversification & Drawdowns
Friday links: embracing change
What Do We Really Know About Private Fund Performance?
The economic divide in Italy
VII.
History
Yet More Flying Notes From Egypt
The Confessions of a Very Reasonable Man
The US Election in 6 maps
Why Italy ruled Europe but couldn’t rule itself
The Art of Blaming Israel For Everything
The future of Britain in 7 maps
VIII.
Philosophy
Suggested Readings
A few recommendations by Figs in Winter for your reading pleasure
Taking Torture Seriously
The Wokest Theodicy Ever
Time in Heaven
Do we need to take reincarnation seriously? – Part II
IX.
Psychology
When there is no right answer
Most questions we encounter have a clear answer, even if it takes effort to find it. But some don’t, and we seem remarka…
Brave Men, Reproductive Effort, Motivation
The art of political decision making
Sometimes It Hurts to Ask
Separating the art from the artist
X.
Science
Missing the boat on extreme event attribution
Almost every attack on attribution science is an attack on the scientists. Almost none of them engage the science.
What Is a Quantum Field Theory, Really?
XKDR Newsletter - Issue 55
He Won the Fields Medal. He Says AI Beats Him.
Mark Solms: Consciousness Isn't in the Cortex
Culture · Feature
The Match Archive
The Match Archive is creating “the first research-grade, digital archive cataloging American matchbooks as primary sources for graphic design, commercial culture, and social history”. They haven’t launched a website yet (they’re working on it), but they’ve been sharing some of their collection on th...
From the Stacks
Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.
- I. Science
Scott Aaronson: “I Heard That a Robot Solved the Math Problem You Worked On”
- II. Tech
Reading List 10/24/26
- III. Culture
It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It: Emily St. John Mandel’s Worlds of Trouble
- IV. Life
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
- V. Design
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale