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
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“You And Your Research”, Richard Hamming
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Idea: DRL free-play
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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
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“LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment”, et al 2023; “The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs”, et al 2023 (reminder: RLHF etc only exploit pre-existing model capabilities)
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“Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners”, et al 2023 ( PaLM can few-shot tasks like classifying Fitbit data)
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“Large Language Models Can Be Used To Effectively Scale Spear Phishing Campaigns”, 2023
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“Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences”, 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:
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“The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps ‘butterfly’ children”
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“The First Crispr-Edited Salad Is Here”: mustard greens edited to be less bitter uncooked
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“Total biosynthesis of opiates by stepwise fermentation using engineered Escherichia coli”, et al 2016
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology / Biology
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“Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body”, et al 2022; “Vitrification and nanowarming enable long-term organ cryopreservation and life-sustaining kidney transplantation in a rat model”, et al 2023; “A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with C. elegans dauer larva”, et al 2023 (reviving live worms after 46,000 years of hibernation)
Technology
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“Universal Mechanical Polycomputation in Granular Matter”, et al 2023 (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: