AI

• “Anybooru: Synthetic Anime Image Dataset”, lint 2023: using real sets of Danbooru2021 tags to generate fake anime images from Andite’s Anything-v4.5 model (4 per tag-set, showing non-memorization/flexibility in a fair comparison)

Matters Of Scale:

• GPT-4 (May 2020 is finally over)

• “Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ About AI” (long interview on GPT-4, arms races, regulation)

• “Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots”, Ishikawa lab (“All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control.”)

• “Learning Humanoid Locomotion with Transformers”, Radosavovic et al 2023

• “GigaGAN: Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis”, Kang et al 2023 (>=512px image generation 1b-param GAN, matching Stable Diffusion’s FID—as I predicted, GANs work fine when scaled)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “A swapped genetic code prevents viral infections and gene transfer”, Nyerges et al 2023 (a more virus-proof E. coli)

• “Generation of functional oocytes from male mice in vitro”, Murakami et al 2023

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20^th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children: It’s saved millions of lives, and can be prepared at home in minutes. So why did it take so long to discover?”, Matt Reynolds

• “Effects of World War II on education in science”, Lord Bowden1975

Politics/Religion

• How the UAE paid a Swiss firm to destroy an oil-trading firm using negative PR (in part by editing Wikipedia articles about it)

• “The Welfare Effects of Social Media”, Allcott et al 2020

• “How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unraveled: The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence.”

Psychology/Biology

• “Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals”, cheap experimentation, habit-formation etc

Technology

Economics

Philosophy

Fiction

• Why was NGE Episode 26 almost titled “The Only Neat Thing To Do”? How a forgotten Western SF story became a Japanese cult classic

Miscellaneous

• “America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late?”, McArdle2021; “The Real American Pie: Mince pie was once inextricable from our national identity. Blamed for bad health, murderous dreams, the downfall of Prohibition, and the decline of the white race, it nonetheless persisted as an American staple through the 1940s. So what happened?”