Links For July 2026 (Part 1)
This is the first read I’ve logged from my phone; I’ve been on a trip to CA for the last 2 weeks & have not been able to log reads from my computer in that time. I have been reading on the substack app, as well as my own Stacks: Offline Reader app (on the App Store!) while on airplanes.
Claude
Summary. This is one of Scott Alexander's regular link roundups, a grab-bag of forty-odd items ranging from etymology (Bentham's neologisms) and mycology (a Chinese/Filipino mushroom that induces gnome hallucinations) to AI news (Gemini running a cafe, AI solving the unit distance conjecture, an AI encyclical from Pope Leo) and social commentary (a Monet-vs-AI-slop 'trapped prior' experiment, the forgotten 19th-century American taboo against beards). It also touches on GLP-1 weight maintenance data, Berkeley's housing/rent trends, dating apps, and various political and religious curiosities.
On the note. There's a nice bit of irony in logging a links-roundup post from a phone while traveling, since half the links here are themselves about interface fragmentation and app-mediated attention; you might enjoy pairing this trip's reading stack with Introducing Mercury OS, which imagines doing away with the app-switching you're describing between Substack and Stacks entirely. As for the mushroom and GLP-1 items Scott flags as genuinely mysterious, it's worth noting how much of this post is Scott explicitly admitting he doesn't know the mechanism — a rarer move in aggregator-style writing than it should be.
Related
- AI solving open math problems faster than forecasters expected ↔ pushed-back timelines paired with steeper growth curves (AI 2040: Plan A) · The unit distance conjecture falling while a Manifold market sat below 50-50 just months earlier is a concrete case of the 'pushed-back timelines paired with steeper growth curves' pattern: forecasters keep underestimating discrete capability jumps even as they nominally account for AI progress.