AI

• “WaifuDiffusion 1.5 Beta 3: Release Notes”

Matters Of Scale:

• “LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment”, Zhou et al 2023; “The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs”, Gudibande et al 2023 (reminder: RLHF etc. only exploit pre-existing model capabilities)

• “Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners”, Liu et al 2023 (PaLM can few-shot tasks like classifying Fitbit data)

• “Large Language Models Can Be Used To Effectively Scale Spear Phishing Campaigns”, Hazell 2023

• “Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences”, Korbak et al 2023 (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”

• “First UK baby with DNA from three people born after new IVF procedure: Mitochondrial donation treatment aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases”

• “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”, Nakagawa et al 2016

Statistics/Meta-Science

Politics/Religion

Psychology / Biology

• “Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body”, Andrijevic et al 2022; “Vitrification and nanowarming enable long-term organ cryopreservation and life-sustaining kidney transplantation in a rat model”, Han et al 2023; “A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with C. elegans dauer larva”, Shatilovich et al 2023 (reviving live worms after 46,000 years of hibernation)

• “Case report: Prolonged amelioration of mild red-green color vision deficiency following psilocybin mushroom use”, Barnett et al 2023

Technology

• “Universal Mechanical Polycomputation in Granular Matter”, Parsa et al 2023 (unusual models of computation: evolving vibrating grids of objects which calculate multiple logic gates simultaneously)

Economics

Philosophy

Fiction

Miscellaneous