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March 2021 News

March 2021 Gwern.net newsletter; 2 major new site features: ‘popins’ and recursive Wikipedia popups.

March 2021’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, February 2021 (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

  • Gwern.net: mobile “popins” are finally enabled! (example); new Wikipedia popups (this 7th implementation enables recursive WP popups)

Film/TV

Live-action:

  • North by Northwest (Hitchcock 195965ya; for such an extremely respected movie, it felt oddly formless and like it was bouncing through genres as more of a comedic B-movie romp than a serious auteur’s effort—since James Bond started in 195371ya, with a TV adaptation in 195470ya, NbN comes off as almost a satire. I mean, really, monkeying around in Presidential noses!)


  1. While interesting, these are ‘attacks’ only in the most generous interpretation possible (since it does know the difference), and the fact that CLIP can read text in images to note the semantic similarity, is to its credit. As the CLIP authors note, some queries benefit from ensembling, more context than a single word class name such as prefixing “A photograph of a”, and class names can be highly ambiguous: in ImageNet, the class name “crane” could refer to the bird or construction equipment; and the Oxford-IIIT Pet dataset labels one class “boxer”. (CLIP is still vulnerable to regular adversarial examples, of course.)↩︎

  2. It couldn’t’ve been nicotine because people had been vaping for a decade and a half without widespread near-instantaneous lung-related fatalities! It had to be a new adulterant, and as soon as the first few black-market THC links surfaced, that meant the problem had to be THC-products-only because how would the same adulterant simultaneously get into the different supply chains? And yet, every article, health official, and activist did their paternalist best to suggest otherwise to pin the blame on regular vaping, no matter how many tests turned up clean, and it was the nicotine vaping products which got summarily banned… One must assume many of those laws are still on the books, inasmuch as the shipping bans keep expanding.↩︎