April 2023 News
April 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
April 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2023 (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
Links
AI
-
“When and Why Vision-Language Models Behave like Bags-Of-Words, and What to Do About It?”, et al 2023 (why CLIP-based image generators like SD/DALL-E-2 struggle so much with composition compared to Parti etc)
-
“Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2023 (zero-shot sim2real training of 51cm/3.5kg humanoid robots)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
-
“Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field”, et al 2023 ( homeopathy as the control group for medicine: d ~ 0.3)
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
-
“A Dynamical Model of General Intelligence: The Positive Manifold of Intelligence by Mutualism”, Maas et al 200618ya; “A Dynamic Systems Model of Cognitive and Language Growth”, van 1991
-
“A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions”, et al 2022
-
“Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result: Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it” (‘The Chocolate Glacé Is Out Of Control’)
-
“The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive performance—a randomized controlled study”, et al 2023 (null)
Technology
Economics
-
“Energy Saving May Kill: Evidence from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident”, 2023 (poverty kills, especially energy poverty)
Philosophy
-
“The Gostak and the Doshes”, Miles J. Breuer (1930; on distimming & scissors); The Gostak: an interactive fiction text game in a made-up language (and world), with semantics learned from syntax
Fiction
Miscellaneous
-
“An Oral History of ‘Steamed Hams’, the Funniest Simpsons Scene Ever”; “Steaming a Good Ham: How to write a meme in Shakespearean English”, Talia Felix; a selection of “Steamed Hams” videos:
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
-
Suzume (2022; Makoto Shinkai. Now my favorite Shinkai movie. Where most Shinkai movies leave me feeling alienated by the sentiment and emotional manipulation and fetishization of the highschool romance-drama, as well as increasingly stale magical-realism or ‘Shinkai sky’, Suzume swerves left from expectations, and its portrayal of a nontraditional family of aunt & niece is his most genuine work. Nor does it fail to deliver a lot of action & adventure, and enjoyable animation—in particular, watching the cats, I felt sure that whoever was responsible for that must love cats. (Although I am still a little puzzled how the stable time loop is supposed to work: how does the chair get damaged, if Suzume gives it to her younger self in a time loop?) It is regrettable that despite well-earned initial success, that Suzume doesn’t seem to be sticking. I blame the name in part for that: it is one of the worst and least memorable anime movie names ever. Even a literal translation like “Suzume’s Locking Up” would have been better than just “Suzume”. when someone asked me two years later “had I had seen Suzume?”, I drew a blank—that Ghibli movie or TV thing no Westerner ever watches…?—“no, that movie a few years ago” [walking motion with fingers]—“oh, the chair movie, yeah, it was great!”)
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: