May 2023 News
May 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
May 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, April 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
“You And Your Research”, Richard Hamming
Idea: DRL free-play
Gwern.net: ‘demo mode’: show readers a label or feature n times, and then stop (primary use: animate the theme toggle collapsing, and label collapsed blocks, so they learn what those are, and then hide those); +inline-collapses
Links
AI
“LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment”, et al2023; “The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs”, et al2023 (reminder: RLHF etc only exploit pre-existing model capabilities)
“Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners”, et al2023 (PaLM can few-shot tasks like classifying Fitbit data)
“Large Language Models Can Be Used To Effectively Scale Spear Phishing Campaigns”, 2023
“Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences”, et al2023 (prefixed toxic labels improve preference-learning training, Decision-Transformer-style—if metadata isn’t solving your problem, maybe you just aren’t using enough)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
“The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps ‘butterfly’ children”
“The First Crispr-Edited Salad Is Here”: mustard greens edited to be less bitter uncooked
“Total biosynthesis of opiates by stepwise fermentation using engineered Escherichia coli”, et al2016
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology / Biology
“Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body”, et al2022; “Vitrification and nanowarming enable long-term organ cryopreservation and life-sustaining kidney transplantation in a rat model”, et al2023; “A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with C. elegans dauer larva”, et al2023 (reviving live worms after 46,000 years of hibernation)
Technology
“Universal Mechanical Polycomputation in Granular Matter”, et al2023 (unusual models of computation: evolving vibrating grids of objects which calculate multiple logic gates simultaneously)
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: