April 2020 News
April 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on music generation, data augmentation, terrorism, Matt Lakeman, and 1 documentary review.
April 2020’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2020 (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
Media
Links
Genetics:
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
“The Genomics of Human Local Adaptation”, et al2020 (review)
AI:
Jukebox, OpenAI
(et al2020; full sample dataset; Github) Followup to MuseNet showing remarkable synthesis of raw audio with joint music+voice-singing using a hierarchy of Sparse Transformers in a VQ-VAE trained on n = 1.2m with lyrics/
artist/ genre metadata. 
The technology combination of OA’s Jukebox music generating NN.
“Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits: By studying the connections between neurons, we can find meaningful algorithms in the weights of neural networks”, et al2020 (reverse-engineering small parts of CNN classifiers)
RL:
“Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data”, et al2020/
“Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels”, et al2020; “CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning”, et al2020 (all more sample-efficient than Dreamer/ MuZero; the semi-supervised revolution comes to RL)“Dream to Control (Dreamer): Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination”, et al2020 (blog; PlaNet followup; no real comparison with MuZero or Agent57 available & already outperformed by model-free methods?)
“Suphx: Mastering Mahjong with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al2020
Matters Of Scale:
“2019 trends in GPU price per FLOPS”, AI Impacts 2020
“Blender: Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot”, et al2020 (blog; “The larger model achieves a better performance in fewer steps, consistent with other works…”)
Statistics/
“Impact of Valid Selection Procedures on Work-Force Productivity”, et al1979 (how to directly convert context-less statistical prediction metrics like R2 into decisions/
payoffs) “The Stewart Retractions: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis”, 2020 (forensic statistics)
“F—k Nuance”, 2017
Politics/
“Smart, Qualified People Behind The Scenes Keeping America Safe: ‘We Don’t Exist’”
“The Story Of Thanksgiving Is A Science-Fiction Story”, Scott Alexander
“Let There Be Light!”, David 2001 (attempted psychiatry among the Hasidim of Brooklyn)
“When Pixels Collide” (the Reddit /
r/ April Fools was “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”)place
Psychology/
“Why do human beings keep getting diseases from bats?”, Trevor Klee (why so many bat-borne viruses? Perhaps adaptation to flight forcing a reduced adaptive immune system—pace 2004 on the dubious benefits of an adaptive immune system)
“Showing that you care: The evolution of health altruism”, 2008 (it is more important to seem good than to do good)
“Different Worlds”, Scott Alexander (“nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation”)
Schizoid personality disorder (note that Henry Darger is more like schizotypal personality disorder than schizoid)
“Are humans constantly but subconsciously smelling themselves?”, et al2020
“How mammals stay healthy in nature: the evolution of behaviors to avoid parasites and pathogens”, 2018 (why do cats/
dogs eat grass? Possibly parasite resistance: et al1996/ 2001; et al2008/ 2008; et al2019)
Technology:
“Cleaning up after WWII” (a photo anthology)
“A New Breed of Drug Dealer Has Turned Buying Drugs into a Treasure Hunt: Most Russian drug dealers don’t hand off drugs anymore—they stash them in geotagged hiding spots ready for pickup by online buyers” (update on Hydra/
RAMP DNMs) “Safecracker Meets Safecracker”, Richard Feynman 198540ya (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!)
Economics:
Philosophy:
“Constructing a Logic of Plausible Inference: A Guide to Cox’s Theorem”, van 2003 (WP)
“Anthropic Shadow: Observation Selection Effects and Human Extinction Risks”, Ćirković et al 2010
Fiction:
“Galileo’s discovery of scaling laws”, 2002 (physics & Dante fanfics; commentary; see also Haldane’s “On Being the Right Size”)
Misc:
Review of Atlas of Oblique Maps: A Collection of Landform Portrayals of Selected Areas of the World (warning: 282MB PDF; collection of gorgeous hand-drawn oblique projection created for the US Geological Survey)
“Everything on ‘Naked and Afraid’ Is Real—and I Lived It: When the Discovery Channel invited me to audition for its popular survival-challenge reality show, I knew it was going to be rough. What followed was one of the most intense experiences of my life.”, Blair Braverman (Naked and Afraid)
“The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi” (profile of Charles Ponzi)
Best Of Matt Lakeman:
“Hillbilly Elegy—The Culture of White American Poverty”; “The New Epidemic—My Experience of Losing a Friend to Heroin”
“An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron” (cf. Timing on thin lines)
“Disaster Artist—Insanity is No Shortcut to Inspiration” (Sestero’s book on Tommy Wiseau’s The Room)
“The Phantom’s Pain—A Metal Gear Solid V Narrative Analysis” (how can MGS:V be ‘the tragedy of Big Boss’ when you turn out to be playing his body double?)
Film/TV
Music
“Friday Night Phantasy” (Swing Holic Band; SWING HOLIC VOL.2 {M3-22}) [jazz]
“Deeper and Deeper” (Swing Holic Band; SWING HOLIC VOL.2 {M3-22}) [jazz]
“Starlight Spark” (鈴丸; STARLIGHT SPARK {C90}) [jazz]
“When I Wake Up” (TUNO桐音 feat. Luo Tianyi & Yuezheng Ling; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [pop]
“要有光” (TUNO桐音 feat. Luo Tianyi & Yuezheng Ling; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [trance]
“Back To You” (TUNO桐音; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [trance]
“True Lie” (にせもの feat. Namine Ritsu; postgazer {VM35}) [shoegaze]
“Shoegazer” (ぴぼ feat. Nizimine Kakoi; postgazer {VM35}) [shoegaze]
MLP:
“Second Hoof Medley” (Exiark; Echoes {2019}) [electronic]
“Zenith” (Frozen Night feat. Velvet R. Wings; Echoes {2019}) [orchestral]
“Who Knows” (4EverfreeBrony feat. Milkymomo, EileMonty & MEMJ0123; Echoes {2019}) [acoustic]
“Smile Song Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {201312ya}) [chiptune]
“Love Is In Bloom Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {201312ya}) [chiptune]
“Winter Wrap Up Remix” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {201312ya}) [chiptune]
“Art of the Dress Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {201312ya}) [chiptune]
Misc:
“Somebody That I Used to Know (80s Remix)” (Gotye feat. kimbra {2017}) [pop]
“Never Be Alone” (TheFatRat {2015}) [trance]