2026-06-30 03:20:47
Vesuvius Challenge: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets:
People make a lot of claims about digestion, nutrition, and diet on the internet. … It is helpful, then, to have a heuristic to tell the iconoclastic geniuses apart from the grifters and bullshitters.
I end up with a pretty similar strategy to what I do when I see or hear random claims about finance (e.g. on Twitter.) I keep some questions in my head that test basic understanding, then either ask the person or, if I feel like I have enough data, imagine how they would answer. …
Some of these questions have objectively correct answers, others are more of an opportunity to say something stupid that hopefully, the person you’re talking to will pass up. “I don’t know” is a wonderful answer.
SovietRxiv — Translating forgotten Soviet research papers into English.
“Kevin Smith dropped a wild story on Joe Rogan: After his heart attack, he tried the extreme ‘just potatoes’ diet for two weeks, nothing but plain baked potatoes, no butter, no salt, no nothing. He lost 19 pounds (8.6 kg) in 14 days” – h/t @JamesMcDaniel
The Independent Science Society:
The Independent Science Society is testing if good science can be done the ol’ fashioned way — at home and in your free time.
Doing science means hypothesising and testing the natural world. This requires a lot less than people think. Most scientists in history worked independently. They worked outside of formal institutions, and often part-time. We think more people should be doing this.
Draft: Amos and the Alphabet Society
Deadlock in the Parliament of the Self
GitHub repo with data of 156 countries’ obesity rates measured from household surveys as often as it’s comparably available. You may ask, “why does this repo exist? I was unsatisfied with existing obesity-rate data. For example, the data at @OurWorldInData uses outputs from a model, so it’s *predictions* instead of real data.”
We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides
“Since time immemorial, man has sought to destroy Florida. But people may not realize how close the United States once came to severing that cursed peninsula from the mainland and liberating us all.” Visualizing the Past (Part Four)
2026-05-31 22:17:20
Para-academia is the future — Bold enough to use the word “sucks” in the first sentence.
Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
“Potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner” diet
Leaking Abandoned Well in West Texas (h/t A. Weis)
2026-05-01 07:17:22
The big news in blogging this month is Inkhaven 2 (sponsored by WordPress dot com). The first Inkhaven happened back in November 2025, and this one is even more. Wow.
This time, about 55 residents (it’s hard to count exactly since some staff members are also ~residents) published one blog post of at least 500 words every day all 30 days of April, and only one person failed to publish each day before midnight! Some people even managed to consistently post more than once a day. Wow again. The organizers will likely be running another Inkhaven in autumn 2026, so if this has you feeling curious, you can express your interest here.
Below is a list of some of the Inkhaven blog posts we liked a lot. We can’t claim that these are the best, or even our favorite posts. Some of our favorite posts, we have almost certainly forgotten to list here. There are simply too many. And the list is biased towards posts that came out early in Inkhaven, because we are still working to catch up on the more than 1,500 posts and more than 800,000 words produced. But all that said, here’s a selection:
Other highlights from Inkhaven include Speedhaven, “a one-night speed-writing competition at Inkhaven Fair, 25 April 2026” where “writers raced the clock; the audience picked the winners.” You can read the entries on the archive, including a riff on one of the best memes of all time: Bottomless Pit Supervisor Performance Review.
Feeling anxious about all these blog posts you might be reading? Well then you are in luck. In collaboration with one of these very authors, we are looking for anxious people to participate in some research: What’s Up with Silexan? A Pilot Study on a Promising Anti-Anxiety Drug
We should also announce the third issue of our science zine THE LOOP. It is available here, and what’s more, this and all previous (and future) issues are now available on THE LOOP SITE at looploop.blog — enjoy! For commentary on one submission, you may also like conq’s piece In the Loop.
Finally, blogger and statistician Andrew Gelman weighs in on Inkhaven: Blogging and writing style. We are tickled by some of his descriptions, such as: “I started to read the very first post, Kill Yourself Cave, by Remy, but then halfway through some sort of ad popped up and I couldn’t read the rest–I guess I’d need to buy some sort of subscription?”
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)
