May 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on cloning, DRL, religion, parasites; 6 movie reviews.
May 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, April 2019 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
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TWDNEv2: upgraded anime faces to ‘portrait’ samples (bigger crops of faces, showing ears/hats etc) & some 345M plot summaries; GPT-2 poetry: upgraded to 345M (plus new “nucleus sampling” generation)
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Behavior Genetic Research Methods: Testing Quasi-Causal Hypotheses Using Multivariate Twin Data”, 2014
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“How genome-wide association studies (GWAS) made traditional candidate gene studies obsolete”, et al 2019 (apropos of SSC on et al 2019 revisiting the candidate-gene & gene-environment debacles)
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Engineering:
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full genome synthesis of E. coli: 4 million base-pairs (media)
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“Birth of clones of the world’s first cloned dog”, et al 2017 (“We’ll always have Snuppy. Here’s looking at you, pup.”)
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AI:
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“Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features”, et al 2019 (‽)
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“Meta-learning of Sequential Strategies”, et al 2019; “Reinforcement Learning, Fast and Slow”, et al 2019; “Meta-learners’ learning dynamics are unlike learners’”, 2019; “Ray Interference: a Source of Plateaus in Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2019 ( Bayesian RL interpretations of meta-DRL & why DRL is so sample-inefficient)
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“GROVER: Defending Against Neural Fake News”, et al 2019 (training a GPT-2-1.5b on news articles to generate super-realistic fake news: online demo; oddly, GROVER can also do fanfiction/riddles/poetry)
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“EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks”, 2019 (a simple architecture design trick to get new ImageNet SOTA at a fraction the model size; comments)
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“Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice”, et al 2019 (really?)
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SOLAR: “Model-Based Reinforcement Learning from Pixels with Structured Latent Variable Models”, et al 2019; VICE-RAQ: “End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering”, et al 2019 (highly sample-efficient robot arm training)
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Bruteforcing Breakout (optimal play by depth-first search of an approximate MDP in an optimized C++ simulator for 6 CPU-years, which is possible because your computer is faster than you think; crazy gameplay—like chess endgame tables, a glimpse of superintelligence)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments”, et al 2019
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Life On the Infinite Farm, 2018 (Hilbert’s farm)
Politics/religion:
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“Medieval Monogamy”, 1995
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“‘This place is pryson’: review of Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550, ed Jones”
Psychology/biology:
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“Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation”, Del 2019 (SSC; is the complexity of brains largely accidental complexity, protective obfuscation against parasites, including design features like literally poisonous neurotransmitters?)
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“The Family That Feels Almost No Pain: An Italian clan’s curious insensitivity to pain has piqued the interest of geneticists seeking a new understanding of how to treat physical suffering” (more fodder for my backstop essay)
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“Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity”, 2019 (media; only sort of works for me)
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“An astounding, one-of-a-kind trove of stories and drawings reveals what life was like for young men growing up in rural 19th-century America” (on the Nelson Brothers’ Colonial America paracosm, “the Big, Long, and Round Continents”)
Technology:
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“SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit”
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Rivest’s LCS35 time-lock crypto puzzle has been broken 15 years ahead of schedule by 2 different groups (HN; background on time-lock crypto)
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RIP: FBI has seized Deep Dot Web and arrested its administrators (indictment; mirrors of select DDW pages)
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“The Paris Compressed-Air Network” (cf. “The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network”)
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“Dictionary of Numbers, Putting numbers in human terms” (a browser extension for replacing large numbers in text with familiar quantities, Fermi-estimate-style)
Economics:
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“The Optimistic Thought Experiment”, Thiel 2008 (globalization, bubbles, technological progress, & survivorship bias)
Fiction:
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“Killing Rabbits”, Miroslav Válek (WWII/Cold War/vegetarianism etc; from One Hundred Years of Slovak Literature: An Anthology, ed 2000)
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Sicario (2015; cruelly perfect)
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Terminator 2 (entertaining but aside from great style, has little substance; I spent much of the time thinking about how ‘cheap’ the liquid metal special effects look now but how cutting-edge & excruciating those special effects were to pull off in 1991: “The tech of Terminator 2—an oral history”)
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Dialogues des Carmélites opera (review)
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Laura (1944; film noir murder mystery which benefits from sharp dialogue and casting, even though the culprit turns out to be precisely who you would guess a few minutes in and can hardly be considered to be a ‘mystery’)
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Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019; review)
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It Follows (2014; review)
Animated:
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Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011; review)
Music
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“きらめきの谺” (Foxtail-Grass; ‘つきよがたり。’ {R15}) [folk]
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“乱 -Ran-” (Stack; 第14回博麗神社例大祭 会場限定おまけCD {R14}) [rock]
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“Till The Next Journey” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]
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“The Cattail’s Head” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]
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“A Pub” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]
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“The Ray of Light” (NAGI☆ feat. Vivienne; Increase Beat {R14}) [pop]
MLP:
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“The Daring Explorer” (Jyc Row; Jyc Row Orchestral Compilation Vol. 3—SOLAR {2018}) [instrumental rock]
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“478,000 Miles (Shining Forth)” (loophoof; Rebirth {2018}) [house]
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“Heir of the Moonlight (EnsionD remix)” (EnsionD & Synthis feat. FritzyBeat {2018}) [trance]
Doujin:
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“エヴリデイドリーム” (c-hicken; My Secret Cute {M3-39}) [acoustic]