--- title: March 2023 News description: March 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO created: 2023-01-08 status: in progress confidence: log css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ... March 2023's [Gwern.net](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2023/03) [newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013") is now out; previous, [February 2023](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2023/02) ([archives](https://gwern.net/doc/newsletter/index)). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my [Changelog](https://gwern.net/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern). # Writings - Design: [on the popup systems](https://gwern.net/design-graveyard#popup-annotations "‘Design Graveyard § Popup Annotations’, Gwern 2010") [on the link-icons](https://gwern.net/design-graveyard#link-icon-css-regexps "‘Design Graveyard § Link-Icon CSS Regexps’, Gwern 2010"); [on the local archives](https://gwern.net/archiving#preemptive-local-archiving "‘Archiving URLs § Preemptive Local Archiving’, Gwern 2011"); [outbound link-tracking post-mortem](https://gwern.net/design-graveyard#outbound-link-tracking) - [It From Byte: convergent emergent agency from non-agency](https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#it-from-byte) - [How '80s--'90s anime OVAs worked](https://gwern.net/ova "‘Anime Reviews § How OVAs Worked’, Gwern 2010") - [Some thoughts on Knuth and programming language design/software engineering/intelligence augmentation](https://gwern.net/backstop#knuth) - [Trying out Japanese tanka poetry with GPT-3](https://gwern.net/gpt-3#tanka-fujiwara-no-teika) (`davinci-002` feels almost as creative as `davinci` but more tractable, while not being creatively useless like ChatGPT-3) - Idea: [drone real-estate RDD](https://gwern.net/idea#real-estate-drone-discontinuities); [schizophrenia treatment](https://gwern.net/idea#schizophrenia-meaning-overload), - **Gwern.net**: [header-based redesign](https://gwern.net/doc/design/2023-03-20-gwern-gwernnet-homepage-headeronlylayout.png) of desktop theme; [within-section backlinks](https://gwern.net/design#in-context); backlinks can now display original context # Links ## AI - ["Anybooru: Synthetic Anime Image Dataset"](https://huggingface.co/datasets/lint/anybooru), 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](https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/ "'ML Scaling subreddit', Gwern 2020") [Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law): - [GPT-4](https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/) (May 2020 is finally over) - ["Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ About AI"](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/on-with-kara-swisher-sam-altman-on-the-ai-revolution.html "‘Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ About AI: The OpenAI co-founder thinks tools like GPT-4 will be revolutionary. But he’s wary of downsides’, Swisher 2023") (long interview on GPT-4, arms races, regulation) - ["Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots"](https://ishikawa-vision.org/fusion/), Ishikawa lab ("All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control.") - ["Learning Humanoid Locomotion with Transformers"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.03381), Radosavovic et al 2023 - ["GigaGAN: Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05511#adobe "‘Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis’, Kang et al 2023"), 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"](https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/genome-synthesis/virus-proof/2023-nyerges.pdf), Nyerges et al 2023 (a more virus-proof _E. coli_) - ["Generation of functional oocytes from male mice in vitro"](https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/gametogenesis/2023-murakami.pdf), 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?"](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/02/salt-sugar-water-zinc-how-scientists-learned-to-treat-the-20th-century-s-biggest-killer-of-children), Matt Reynolds - ["Effects of World War II on education in science"](https://gwern.net/doc/science/physics/1975-bowden.pdf), Lord Bowden 1975 ## Politics/Religion - [How the UAE paid a Swiss firm to destroy an oil-trading firm using negative PR](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/the-dirty-secrets-of-a-smear-campaign "‘The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign: Rumors destroyed Hazim Nada’s company. Then hackers handed him terabytes of files exposing a covert campaign against him---and the culprit wasn’t a rival but an entire country’, Kirkpatrick 2023") (in part by editing Wikipedia articles about it) - ["The Welfare Effects of Social Media"](https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/technology/2020-allcott.pdf), 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."](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/how-the-biggest-fraud-in-german-history-unravelled) ## Psychology/Biology - ["Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals", cheap experimentation, habit-formation etc.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-stopping-valueless-papers/) ## 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](https://tanoshimi.xyz/2016/11/29/yes-sadpanda-is-one-of-my-sources/) ## Miscellaneous - ["America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late?"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/01/america-forgot-how-to-make-pie-crust/), McArdle 2021; ["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?"](https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/the-real-american-pie/) # Books **Nonfiction**: **Fiction**: # Film/TV **Live-action**: **Animated**: - [_Cyberpunk: Edgerunners_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk:_Edgerunners) # Music [**Touhou**](https://www.reddit.com/r/TOUHOUMUSIC/search/?q=author%3Agwern&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all): [**Vocaloid**](https://www.reddit.com/r/Vocaloid/search/?q=author%3Agwern&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all): **MLP**: **Doujin**: **Misc**: