Rees D.

What I Read the Week of 2026.08.02

List • 388 Words • Books, Favorite Media, Weekly Media, 2026 • 08/09/2026 • View in graph

Read and liked! A very important distinction.

There are 438 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 3 minutes to read it.

This article was published 2026-08-09 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.

It took an estimated to develop this article from conception to publishing.

Books

• This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

  • I’ve been in a terrible reading slump so this has been slowly bringing me out of it I hope. I haven’t finished it yet and am only about 10% of the way through, but that was all in one day!

  • DCC books are especially easy to binge.

Substack

The Dark Night of Mathematics — Ossuary Lost at Sea — Kirwin Hampshire

I’ve been scrolling a lot about the flurry of AI math discoveries and what that means for the field and knowledge work/research in general in the face of AI in fields with verifiable rewards! Good to hear someone’s perspective from within math instead of from people already entrenched in the AI space.

What’s the point of seeing the world? — Low Resolution — Sarah Davidson

I’m someone who doesn’t always love to travel, so it’s always interesting to read different people’s perspectives and bring people back down to earth a little bit about travel and how it isn’t always so glamorous.

Talking to Strangers — Jake Gloudemans

An article made by a friend I met via a DC meetup of readers of Escaping Flatland! He describes something that I desperately need to try, but am not psychically ready for yet.

The Look of Legibility — Negative Space — Anna Zhang

As I said in my re-stack note:

A great essay on the trend of the aesthetics of tech/computer vision: a very meta way of viewing things that brings to light the invisible things of computation.

While I do find this lens visually interesting, I am equally if not more excited to see how computing as an artistic medium will continue to evolve. I hope to see more really interesting things like Chia Amisola’s hypermedia real-time desktop cinema work for instance.

Articles

• In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley — Stephen Wolfram (Twitter)

  • A truly lovely and heartbreaking eulogy of intellectual equals and true life partners.

• Why Is There No J Street in Washington, DC? (Google)

  • The more you know!

• AI-Safety for Mathematicians (Twitter)

  • A project from Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman who promptly left mathematics to work at OpenAI on AI Safety.

• Five Interesting Indie Platforms You Might Not Have Heard Of (RSS)

  • A great writer on the IndieWeb who I follow and always is highlighting interesting parts of the web.