August 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with an essay on sidenotes; links on human competence, efficient computing, and hardware overhangs; no reviews.
August 2020’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, July 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
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Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons (chemistry trivia)
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Notes on The Lizardman Constant
Media
Links
AI:
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Matters Of Scale:
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The Bitter Lesson: “Accuracy and Performance Comparison of Video Action Recognition Approaches”, et al 2020 (simple large 2D CNNs performed best when compared under controlled conditions); “A Metric Learning Reality Check”, et al 2020 (the doubling of metric learning performance since 2006 appears almost entirely due to larger neural nets + more compute used in training, not fancy loss functions/theory)
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“Self-supervised learning through the eyes of a child”, et al 2020 ( dataset; it’d be fun to see this used for rats or dogs)
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“The remarkable, yet not extraordinary, human brain as a scaled-up primate brain and its associated cost”, Herculano-2012
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“The Node Is Nonsense: There are better ways to measure progress than the old Moore’s law metric”, 2020
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“Measuring hardware overhang”, hippke (“with today’s algorithms, computers would have beat the world chess champion already in 199430ya on a contemporary desk computer”)
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Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“Objecting to experiments even while approving of the policies or treatments they compare”, et al 2020
Psychology/biology:
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“Epigenetic clocks: A review”, José 2020; “TRIIM: Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans”, et al 2019; “Reversal of Epigenetic Age with Diet and Lifestyle in a Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial”, et al 2020
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“The quest to slow ageing through drug discovery”, et al 2020
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“Atribacteria reproducing over millions of years in the Atlantic abyssal subseafloor”, et al 2020
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“Exploring the persome: The power of the item in understanding personality structure”, et al 2020 ( “everything is correlated”)
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How Competent Are Humans?
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“Better All the Time: How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond”; “Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?”
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“Does Management Matter? Evidence from India”, et al 2012; “The Impact of Consulting Services on Small and Medium Enterprises: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Mexico”, et al 2018
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“95%-ile isn’t that good”, Dan Luu (persistent incompetence in Overwatch players)
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“Worker Rush: Descent to Bronze”, 2011 (and in Starcraft players)
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“Playing to Win”, Sirlin 2006
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“The Scent of the Nile: Jean-Claude Ellena creates a new perfume”, Chandler 2005
Technology:
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Your Computer Is Faster Than You Think:
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“There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?”, et al 2020 (gains from end-to-end systems design; AI scaling can continue even if semiconductors do not, particularly with self-optimizing stacks; John Carmack notes, apropos of Seymour Cray, that “Hyperscale data centers and even national supercomputers are loosely coupled things today, but if challenges demanded it, there is a world with a zetta[flops] scale, tightly integrated, low latency matrix dissipating a gigawatt in a swimming pool of circulating fluorinert.”)
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“Scalability! But at what COST?”, et al 2015 (when laptops > clusters: the importance of good baselines)
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“You’re Doing It Wrong: Think you’ve mastered the art of server performance? Think again.”, Poul-Henning Kamp 201014ya (on using cache-oblivious B-heaps to optimize Varnish performance 10×)
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“Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100,000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2020
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“What it takes to run Stack Overflow”, Nick Craver
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see previously on latency/UI: “It’s the Latency, Stupid.”/“Computer latency: 1977–402017”/“Keyboard Latency”/“Terminal Latency”/“Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud”/et al 2019 /“Web Bloat”
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“Fälschungserschwerende Schrift (forgery-impeding typeface)”
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“Inukshuk: Caribou Drive Lanes on Southern Victoria Island, Nunavut, Canada”, 2005
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“The case of the barnacled crystal”, 1950 (on disappearing polymorphs)
Economics:
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“Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates”, 2019 (“The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, ‘This is even more fucked up than I imagined.’”)
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“The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions over the Life-Cycle with Implications for Regulation”, et al 2009
Fiction:
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“Singular: Possible futures of the singularity”, James Yu & GPT-3
Misc:
Music
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“Moonbow” (Kirin feat. Chata; Sprout Intention {C88}) [trance]
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“Harvester’s Dance” (Ganemes; Sister’s 3 {TK12}) [folk]