Reading Queue

Imported from Google Keep on 2026-03-23 and cleaned up on 2026-04-01.

Neuroscience / cognition

• Mice in the Manhattan Maze: Rapid Learning, Flexible Routing and Generalization, With and Without Cortex

  • https://jieyusz.github.io/publication/manhattan

• Competition between parallel sensorimotor learning systems

  • https://elifesciences.org/articles/65361

• Understanding scientific understanding — Brain Inspired podcast

AI / LLM / tools

• What if you don’t need MCP at all?

  • https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/

• The Google Brain Team — Looking Back on 2017

  • https://blog.research.google/2018/01/the-google-brain-team-looking-back-on.html

• A History of Large Language Models

  • https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2025/10/01/large-language-models/

• Does Computer Science Still Exist?

  • https://davidbau.com/archives/2026/03/20/does_computer_science_still_exist.html#more

• Reachy Mini

  • https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

• Hallucination and semantic entropy

  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07421-0

• A mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AIs — Kenneth Harris

  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.05142

Complexity / methods / teaching

• Foundational Papers in Complexity Science

  • https://www.foundationalpapersincomplexityscience.org/tables-of-contents

• How to teach a paper

  • https://www.thetransmitter.org/how-to-teach-this-paper/

• The sudden surges that forge evolutionary trees

  • https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-sudden-surges-that-forge-evolutionary-trees-20250828/

• Intelligence evolved at least twice in vertebrate animals

  • https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals-20250407/

• Evolution is coupled with branching across many scales

  • https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/292/2047/20250182/234476/Evolution-is-coupled-with-branching-across-many

• Constrained roads to complex brains

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2609

Statistics

• There is only one test

  • https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2011/05/there-is-only-one-test.html

• There is still only one test

  • https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2016/06/there-is-still-only-one-test.html

Notes

• One useful framing: ask how often you would observe a difference at least this extreme under the null.
• ”We could construct a test statistic that captures this domain knowledge.”

Follow-up

• Write all statistical tests in the above framework.

Biology / genes / related

• Multiplex Gene Editing

  • https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oSy5vHvwSfnjmC7Tf/multiplex-gene-editing-where-are-we-now?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

• Viviana Gradinaru lab / neuropathology drug design

  • https://glab.caltech.edu/research/

• Genomic language models

• DDM model

  • https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/96997#c51

• Neural network and spin glass

  • https://www.sciencecast.org/casts/rbw8pjzik4gn?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

• HG antagonistic pleiotropy

  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37102-8#:~:text=Antagonist%20pleiotropy%2C%20where%20a%20gene,as%20Huntington’s%20disease%20(HD).

Added later

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231226008696

Added 2026-05-25

Neuroscience / computation

• Simple input–output dependencies explain neuronal activity — Patrick Mineault, Nature Physics
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03306-3

Complexity / physics

• More is Different — P. W. Anderson (1972)
  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393

Added 2026-05-18

Biology / origin of life

• Planned detour in spiders
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4751061/
• Robert Rosen biology — origin of life guy

Books

• Failure: Why Science Is So Successful

Math / econ / complexity

• Arrow’s theorem