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:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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Recent Evolution:
- “The Genomics of Human Local Adaptation”, et al 2020 (review)
AI:
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Jukebox, OpenAI
(et al 2020 ; 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.
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“Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits: By studying the connections between neurons, we can find meaningful algorithms in the weights of neural networks”, et al 2020 (reverse-engineering small parts of CNN classifiers)
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RL:
- “Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data”, et al 2020/ “Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels”, et al 2020; “CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2020 (all more sample-efficient than Dreamer/MuZero; the semi-supervised revolution comes to RL)
- “Dream to Control (Dreamer): Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination”, et al 2020 ( 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 al 2020
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Matters Of Scale:
- “2019 trends in GPU price per FLOPS”, AI Impacts 2020
- “Blender: Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot”, et al 2020 ( blog; “The larger model achieves a better performance in fewer steps, consistent with other works…”)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
- “Impact of Valid Selection Procedures on Work-Force Productivity”, et al 1979 (how to directly convert context-less statistical prediction metrics like R 2 into decisions/payoffs)
- “The Stewart Retractions: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis”, 2020 (forensic statistics)
- “Fuck Nuance”, 2017
Politics/religion:
- “Smart, Qualified People Behind The Scenes Keeping America Safe: ‘We Don’t Exist’”
- 2017 Congressional baseball shooting
- 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack
- “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/place April Fools was “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”)
Psychology/biology:
- “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 al 2020
- “How mammals stay healthy in nature: the evolution of behaviours to avoid parasites and pathogens”, 2018 (why do cats/dogs eat grass? Possibly parasite resistance: et al 1996 /2001; et al 2008 /2008; et al 2019 )
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 1985 (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!)
- “How the Man Who Invented Xbox Baked a 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Sourdough: It took three experts, two museums, and one clay pot to bake a truly ancient loaf”
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:
- “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic: National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But—somehow, for some reason—Weird Al keeps rocking”
- “Galileo’s discovery of scaling laws”, 2002 (physics & Dante fanfics; commentary; see also Haldane’s “On Being the Right Size”)
Misc:
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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)
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“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)
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“The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi” (profile of Charles Ponzi)
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Best Of Matt Lakeman:
- “Against Dog Ownership” (cf. Cat Sense)
- “Everything You Need to Know About Napoleon Bonaparte”
- “Little Soldiers—Inside the Chinese Education System”
- “Peep Show—The Most Realistic Portrayal of Evil Ever Made”
- “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?)
- “A Deep Dive into K-pop”
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 {2013}) [chiptune]
- “Love Is In Bloom Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
- “Winter Wrap Up Remix” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
- “Art of the Dress Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
Misc:
- “Somebody That I Used to Know (80s Remix)” (Gotye feat. kimbra {2017}) [pop]
- “Never Be Alone” (TheFatRat {2015}) [trance]