Everything Is Heritable:

• “Rare Genetic Variants Associated With Sudden Cardiac Death in Adults”⁠, Kheraet al2019 (important use-case for population screening & embryo selection; previously: Bagnallet al2016⁠)

• “Genome-wide association study identifies 49 common genetic variants associated with handedness”⁠, Partidaet al2019

• “Metagenomic analysis of a blood stain from the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743^–₅₀1793_232ya)”⁠, de Dioset al2019

Engineering:

• ‘“Embryos have been chosen to reduce disease risk using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic traits, and this has resulted in pregnancy,” Laurent Tellier, CEO of Genomic Prediction, told New Scientist.’⁠

• “Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA”⁠, Anzaloneet al2019 (prime editing competitor to CRISPR⁠; media: Science⁠, Wired⁠)

• “A single combination gene therapy treats multiple age-related diseases”⁠, Davidsohnet al2019

“MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model”⁠, Schrittwieseret al2019 (tree search over remarkably simple learned latent⁠-dynamics model reaches AlphaZero⁠ level; plus beating both of the previous model-free (R2D2⁠) & model-based (SimPLe⁠) ALE SOTAs; NNs are lazy and can do more if you just train them right. This should move your beliefs closer to ‘Bitter Lesson’/Schmidhuber-style paradigms of simplicity & scaling. It will be interesting to see if MuZero can perhaps provide the equivalent of Zero for more complex environments: if it can roll out imagined abstract Go & ALE games, it can also roll out StarCraft II games…)

Matters Of Scale:

• OpenAI releases GPT-2 1.5B trained model & detection tools⁠ (paper⁠, with interesting appendices on generating ideological text; GPT-2-1.5b web interface)

• “When will computer hardware match the human brain?”, Moravec⁠ 1998

• “High Fidelity Video Prediction with Large Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks”⁠, Villegaset al2019 (videos⁠; realistic 128px video generation by simply scaling up RNNs⁠)

• “XLM-R: Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale”⁠, Conneauet al2019 (blog⁠; 2.5 TB text for training translations into 100 languages)

“Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction”⁠, Freemanet al2019 (paper⁠)

“Talking Head Anime from a Single Image”, Pramook Khungurn (one-shot creation of ‘Virtual Youtuber’⁠-style CGI talking heads from a single source image, allowing eg. ⁠video⟺CGI-head transforms⁠ of ⁠live webcams⁠; replaces hand-coded CGI models with a learned differentiable⁠ DL model…)

AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights”⁠ (sample dialogue with a GPT-2-1.5b finetuned on text adventures)

“bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology”⁠, Severet al2019 (the growing success of bioRxiv)

Did psychologist David Rosenhan fabricate his famous 1973_52ya “Being Sane in Insane Places” mental hospital exposé?⁠ (Nature⁠ review; on the Rosenhan experiment⁠; interesting to consider Spitzer1975’s criticisms⁠ in light of this)

“Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination”: what did the famous ‘blind orchestra audition’ study show? (Gelman commentary⁠)

“A century of research on conscientiousness at work”⁠, Wilmot & Ones2019

“Towards a ‘Treadmill Test’ for Cognition: Reliable Prediction of Intelligence From Whole-Brain Task Activation Patterns”⁠, Sripadaet al2018 (r = 0.68)

“Mechanisms of Scent-tracking in Humans”⁠, Porteret al2006 (⁠video⁠; see also “Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth”⁠, McGann2017)

Disappearing polymorphs⁠ (Ice-Nine in real life): “Disappearing Polymorphs Revisited”⁠, Bučaret al2015; “Disappearing Polymorphs”⁠, Dunitz & Bernstein1995; glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT)⁠ (Kohman1950⁠) examples (Lowe commentary⁠; IAPAC archives on the Norvir incident⁠)

“Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel”⁠ (the followers inspired by The Dice Man⁠ turn out to be more interesting than the author; see also Yes Man⁠)

How a con man got Afghani princess Fatima into the White House⁠, ⁠part 2⁠ (on Stanley Clifford Weyman⁠; Atlas Obscura⁠)

“Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later”⁠, Vitalik Buterin

“They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken” (⁠HN⁠; the 1% rule⁠ strikes again: if you don’t file that bug report or tell someone their website is broken, probably no one will—a truth I have learned time and again, for my stuff as well. For example, on ⁠TWDNE⁠, or a few days after reading this, I learned a user had been trying to read pages through the section popups in Table of Contents! Perhaps it’s learned helplessness⁠? To quote ⁠Paul Graham⁠: “If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.”)

⁠“How to annotate literally everything”⁠, karlicoss (comparison of tools for webpages, PDFs, e-ink readers, & books)

“Computer-generated Floral Ornament Based on Magnetic Curves”⁠, Anton Lopyrev (⁠video⁠; based on Wonget al1998⁠ & Xu & Mould2008⁠)

Tech trick: you can ⁠link to a specific page number N of any PDF by adding #page=N to the URL⁠ (eg. ⁠this link⁠ links to the text samples in the Megatron⁠ paper on page 13, rather than the first page)

“SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms”⁠, Tsykunovet al2019 (⁠video⁠)

“Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries”⁠, Hoynes & Rothstein2019

Giovanni Battista Piranesi⁠ (his prints, particularly Prisons, have been enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance; eg. historical chronology conspiracy theorists now debate whether his Roman prints show the real Rome of his time—possibly not constructed by humans—and since falsely aged by a vast conspiracy, and whether Prisons too might be a true depiction of reality)

Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, Goldthwaite1968 (review⁠)

Akhnaten⁠ (⁠review⁠)

Madama Butterfly⁠ (review⁠)

Porco Rosso⁠ (rewatch; the kinship with The Wind Rises⁠ is even more apparent now, but Porco Rosso IMO works better because it doesn’t try to force an answer. Anno half-seriously criticized it⁠ for being a Miyazaki self-insert fic where he’s the hero and the center of a love triangle, to boot, but maybe that’s not so bad; the beauty of seaplanes, who travel between the sea and sky, at home in both, is enough to justify it.)

The Tatami Galaxy⁠ (rewatch)

Belladonna of Sadness⁠ (⁠review⁠)

Ushio and Tora⁠ (revival of a shonen classic; thematically shows its age but, having only been familiar with the ’90s comedy OVA, I didn’t realize how dark it would get)

⁠“My Legacy For You”⁠ (Scraton; ⁠Eternal⁠ {2019}) [house]

⁠“The End of Seasons”⁠ (Wandering Artist feat. Velvet R. Wings; Eternal {2019}) [orchestral]

⁠“Bliss”⁠ (AJ Young & loophoof; Eternal {2019}) [dubstep]

⁠“Second Prances (MrMehster Remix)”⁠ (Etherium & MrMehster feat. Nicole Carino; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]

⁠“Luna’s Lullaby”⁠ (Yellow Tune feat. Truss; Eternal {2019}) [trance]

⁠“Make It Special (Finale Mix)”⁠ (Foozogz; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]