October 2019 News
October 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on DL scaling, SDAM, and public goods; 1 book and 2 opera reviews.
October 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, September 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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Nothing completed
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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Engineering:
AI:
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Matters Of Scale:
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“Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning”, et al 2019 ( blog; discussion)
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“Solving Rubik’s Cube With A Robot Hand”, et al 2019 ( blog; video: Dactyl followup with improved curriculum-learning of machine-generated domain randomizations in a simulation; the diversity of simulations leads to emergent meta-learning, and zero-shot sim2real transfer & robustness to untrained interference. An example of harder tasks leading to better learning (see previously 2019), because neural nets are lazy!)
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“T5: Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer”, et al 2019 ( summary; finetuning Colab; SuperGLUE—introduced this year to challenge NN LMs—already almost solved by 11b-parameter Transformer trained on <750 GB text)
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“Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges”, et al 2019; “Simple, Scalable Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation”, et al 2019 ( blog)
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“Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification”, et al 2019 ( blog)
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Artbreeder: now with the anime portrait StyleGAN (upgrade over TWDNE: random generation, exploration, image attribute editing, saving to a gallery, and crossbreeding portraits)
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“Animating gAnime with StyleGAN: Part 1—Introducing a tool for interacting with generative models”/part 2, Nolan Kent (re-implementing StyleGAN for improved character generation with rectangular convolutions & feature map visualizations, and interactive manipulation)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
Politics/religion:
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“The Corporate Governance of Benedictine Abbeys: What can Stock Corporations Learn from Monasteries?”, et al 2010
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“How Airbnb Is Silently Changing Himalayan Villages”, Shanu Athiparambath (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…”)
Psychology/biology:
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“In A Perpetual Present: The Strange Case of the Woman Who Can’t Remember Her Past—Or Imagine Her Future” (on having no autobiographical memory but not being amnesiac either: “Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory” (SDAM); an extreme form of aphantasia? See also: /r/SDAM; et al 2015 ; et al 2018 ; et al 2015 ; 2019)
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On why Henry Darger, an elderly, solitary dishwasher, wrote and illustrated a 15,000+ page unpublished fantasy novel (on Henry Darger; Geschwind syndrome?)
Technology:
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“Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, Nadia 2016 (background on report; the still-unsolved funding problem of open source software: we all use it, it’s incredibly valuable, but no one is paying for it, and volunteerism & commoditize-your-complement dynamics only go so far. Do we need new funding models? Perhaps something like a Public Lending Right general tax with allocation based on quadratic funding like Gitcoin’s CLR experiment?)
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“How can we develop transformative tools for thought?”, Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen 2019 (preliminary report on Quantum Country’s integration of SRS into QC physics tutorial as new education approach; HN)
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Yahoo is deleting the Yahoo Groups email groups & newsletters 2019-12-14 (>2.1b emails) (ArchiveTeam; HN; archiving example)
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“The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway” (the colored stripes of the MTA for regional transport derive from a printing shop mistake)
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“The Chudnovsky Brothers and the Mountains of Pi” (on the Chudnovsky brothers’ record calculations of π by building a Beowulf cluster in their bedroom to run their parallelizable Chudnovsky algorithm; see also their work on the Unicorn tapestries)
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“Getting started with security keys: How to stay safe online and prevent phishing with FIDO2, WebAuthn and security keys”, Paul Stamatiou (now that Firefox supports WebAuthn and simjacking is epidemic, it’s time to get serious about real 2FA)
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“Evaluating the Design of the R Language: Objects and Functions for Data Analysis”, Morandat et al 201212ya (parsing CRAN to see what from the strange set of R features is used in the real world—not laziness or its weirdo context-dependent scoping, turns out)
Economics:
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“End-To-End Arguments In System Design”, Saltzer et al 198440ya; “Observations on Errors, Corrections, & Trust of Dependent Systems”, James Hamilton (the end-to-end principle)
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“Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident”, 2019 (the seen and the unseen)
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“When Delivery Is Free, Will Ownership Survive?”, Seth Miller (see also 2016, “Status as a Service”, “Welcome to the ‘Airbnb for Everything’ Age”)
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“On the Resilience of the Dark Net Market Ecosystem to Law Enforcement Intervention”, 2019 (uses seized SR2 server data; also includes best literature review of DNM research to date)
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“Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668?” (running Vickrey auctions for optimal presales & learning keyboard collector demand curves; HN discusses more recherché keyboards)
Fiction:
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“Neon Genesis Evangelion: Graphic designer Peiran Tan plumbs the typographic psyche of the celebrated anime franchise” (a look into the signature typefaces of Evangelion: Matisse EB, mechanical compression, and title cards)
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Roar (198143ya film) (“Roar used real lions during filming, resulting in at least 70 cast and crew being injured. A crew member was scalped, another had his throat bitten out, and much of the footage of attacks was used in the final cut of the film. The blood seen in the movie is real.”)
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The Beginning Was the End, 1971 (“eating brains produces an aphrodisiac effect & this caused apes to become addicted, organizing brain hunts wherein the males of another tribe were eaten & females raped in a frenzy of brain-induced sex & violence…The book contains no references whatsoever, based alternately on alleged conversations with present-day cannibals, the eating of ape brain by the author and direct insight from deep meditation.”)
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
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Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte (not a sustained presentation but rather a set of clippings of particularly nice visualizations Tufte has come across, roughly grouped by a theme, such as use of color, highlighting examples like Byrne’s Euclid or the use of rubrication)
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Web Typography, 2017 (review)
Film/TV
Live-action: