Links For July 2026 (Part 1)

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: You Are Quoting Bentham: Shakespeare gets credit for coining the most new commonly-used English words, but second place must go to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented maximize, minimize, international, percentage, monetary, marginalize, collaborator, unaffordable, the prefixes self-, post-, and infra-, and many more. He also sort of invented jogging?

2: @HashtagGriswold: The name of “Acme”, the generic corporation from Looney Tunes, is a “gag lost to time”. During the early 20th century, hundreds of companies named themselves Acme because it was at the intersection of signaling quality (“acme” is Greek for “pinnacle”) and being very early in the alphabet (meaning it would come first in the phone book, a “Great Depression version of SEO”).

3: @nekokolife brings us a great predictive coding demo (hard before you know the answer; obvious afterwards) - find the cat in this image. Hint: it’s not hiding in shadow; its entire body is fully visible. Answer here (X).

4: In my last Bay Area House Party post, the characters ordered dinner from “La Maison du Claude”, an AI-subsidized “RestaurantBench evaluation [project]”. In a case of life imitating art, Andon Labs got Gemini to run a cafe in Stockholm (X). “A pile of packages just arrived. It seems the cafe agent ordered 3000 nitrile gloves. The guy running the bar told me this happens about once per day.”

5: Overdoses of the edible mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica have only two side effects: stomach upset, and seeing hallucinatory gnomes and elves for the next ~week. As far as anyone can tell, the mushroom isn’t psychoactive in any way besides the gnome hallucinations (ie users are still completely lucid, and understand that what they’re seeing isn’t real). It’s not culture-bound or placebo, because the mushroom grows in China (Yunnan) and the Philippines, and both places have independently noticed this, apparently without any contact or discussion with one another. I went down this rabbit hole a little; answers to some obvious questions:

• We have no idea what chemical is involved; state-of-the-art in analyzing the mushroom’s pharmacology is this extremely boring and result-free paper.

• There’s no way to get this mushroom outside of China or the Philippines; all attempts to turn up online vendors have failed.

• Even within those places, it’s not really distinguished from several other similar-looking mushrooms, and your chances of locating it without being a Chinese-speaking mushroom expert are low.

• There is no good information about what constitutes a normal dose, what constitutes a hallucinogenic overdose, and whether there is some even worse level of overdose that will actually hurt you (nobody has described the latter, and it seems unlikely within the bounds of normal Chinese cooking failures, but it might be a different situation if a Westerner who knew nothing about this mushroom took a random amount trying to overdose on purpose).

• The elves and gnomes are described as “mischievous” and are capable of interacting with objects in the environment, eg climbing tables.

• The hallucinations seem similar to other gnomeogenic conditions like Charles Bonnet syndrome, but it’s unclear why this should be true, since the latter usually involves visual injury rather than psychoactive chemicals.

• If you know more than this, email me at [email protected].

6: What If Homer’s Ithaca Wasn’t An Island? This article was great practice in remembering my own limitations. I read it, found it extremely convincing, asked Claude for a fact-check, and learned why it was probably all balderdash. Everyone should have this experience as often as possible in order to stay sharp.

7: A rare video of Istanbul/Constantinople in the year 1905:

8: Extremely related: South Carolina’s Republican challenger for Senate, Mark Lynch, finds a novel topic for an attack ad (X): “Under [my opponent] Lindsey Graham’s watch, the famous Christian cathedral Hagia Sophia, was turned over to the Muslims.”