Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Germline burden of rare damaging variants negatively affects human healthspan and lifespan”, Shindyapina et al 2019

  • “Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes”, Clark et al 2019

• Engineering:

  • “Technological challenges and milestones for writing genomes: Synthetic genomics requires improved technologies”, Ostrov et al 2019

AI:

• Matters Of Scale:

  • “Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning”, Vinyals et al 2019 (blog; discussion)

  • “Solving Rubik’s Cube With A Robot Hand”, Akkaya 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 Clune2019), because neural nets are lazy!)

  • “T5: Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer”, Raffel 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)

  • “Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges”, Arivazhagan et al 2019; “Simple, Scalable Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation”, Bapna et al 2019 (blog)

  • “Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification”, Yalniz et al 2019 (blog)

• Artbreeder: now with the anime portrait StyleGAN (upgrade over TWDNE: random generation, exploration, image attribute editing, saving to a gallery, and crossbreeding portraits)

• “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:

• How often do researchers not read the papers they cite?

Politics/religion:

• “The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments”, Coppock et al 2020

• “The Corporate Governance of Benedictine Abbeys: What can Stock Corporations Learn from Monasteries?”, Rost et al 2010

• “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:

• “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; Palombo et al 2015; Palombo et al 2018; Zeman et al 2015; Wilkins & Clayton2019)

• On why Henry Darger, an elderly, solitary dishwasher, wrote and illustrated a 15,000+ page unpublished fantasy novel (on Henry Darger; Geschwind syndrome?)

• “Chess Masters’ Hypothesis Testing”, Cowley & Bryne2004

Technology:

• “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, Nadia Eghbal2016 (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?)

• “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)

• Yahoo is deleting the Yahoo Groups email groups & newsletters 2019-12-14 (>2.1b emails) (ArchiveTeam; HN; archiving example)

• “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)

• “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)

• “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)

• “Evaluating the Design of the R Language: Objects and Functions for Data Analysis”, Morandat et al 2012 (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)

• Updated Internet Archive service: ‘Save Page Now’ lets you archive pages & external links and save to a personal bookmarks

Economics:

• “End-To-End Arguments In System Design”, Saltzer et al 1984; “Observations on Errors, Corrections, & Trust of Dependent Systems”, James Hamilton (the end-to-end principle)

• “Anthropological invariants in travel behavior”, Marchetti1994

• “Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident”, Neidell2019 (the seen and the unseen)

• “When Delivery Is Free, Will Ownership Survive?”, Seth Miller (see also Posner & Weyl2016, “Status as a Service”, “Welcome to the ‘Airbnb for Everything’ Age”)

• “On the Resilience of the Dark Net Market Ecosystem to Law Enforcement Intervention”, Bradley2019 (uses seized SR2 server data; also includes best literature review of DNM research to date)

• “Optimal boarding method for airline passengers”, Steffen2008

• “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:

• “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)

• Roar (1981 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.”)

• The Beginning Was the End, Maerth1971 (“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:

• The Rotten Library archives (Rotten.com)

• Four Organs

Books

Nonfiction:

• 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)

• Web Typography, Rutter2017 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Manon opera (review)

• Turandot opera (review)