---
title: May 2023 News
description: May 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
created: 2023-01-08
status: in progress
confidence: log
css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs
backlink: False
...

May 2023's [Gwern.net](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2023/05) [newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "‘Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)’, Gwern 2013") is now out; previous, [April 2023](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2023/04) ([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

- ["You And Your Research"](https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming), Richard Hamming
- Idea: [DRL free-play](https://gwern.net/free-play)
- ["The Diamond Earrings"](https://gwern.net/fiction/the-diamond-earrings)
- 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](https://gwern.net/doc/design/2023-05-08-gwern-gwernnet-collapse-inlinecollapseexample.png)

# Links

## AI

- ["WaifuDiffusion 1.5 Beta 3: Release Notes"](https://saltacc.notion.site/saltacc/WD-1-5-Beta-3-Release-Notes-1e35a0ed1bb24c5b93ec79c45c217f63)

[Matters Of](https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/ "‘ML Scaling subreddit’, Gwern 2020") [Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law):

- ["LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11206), Zhou et al 2023; ["The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15717), Gudibande et al 2023 (reminder: RLHF etc. only exploit pre-existing model capabilities)
- ["Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15525#google), Liu et al 2023 (PaLM can few-shot tasks like classifying [Fitbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitbit) data)
- ["Large Language Models Can Be Used To Effectively Scale Spear Phishing Campaigns"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06972), Hazell 2023
- ["Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08582), 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"](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/19/1073394/the-fda-just-approved-krystal-drip-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"](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/09/first-uk-baby-with-dna-from-three-people-born-after-new-ivf-procedure)
- ["The First Crispr-Edited Salad Is Here"](https://www.wired.com/story/wired30-crispr-edited-salad-greens/ "‘The First Crispr-Edited Salad Is Here: A startup used gene editing to make mustard greens more appetizing to consumers. Next up: fruits’, Mullin 2023"): mustard greens edited to be less bitter uncooked
- ["Total biosynthesis of opiates by stepwise fermentation using engineered _Escherichia coli_"](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10390), Nakagawa et al 2016

## Statistics/Meta-Science

## Politics/Religion

## Psychology / Biology

- ["Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body"](https://gwern.net/doc/cryonics/2022-andrijevic.pdf), Andrijevic et al 2022; ["Vitrification and nanowarming enable long-term organ cryopreservation and life-sustaining kidney transplantation in a rat model"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38824-8), Han et al 2023; ["A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with _C. elegans dauer_ larva"](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010798), 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"](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20503245231172536), Barnett et al 2023

## Technology

- ["Universal Mechanical Polycomputation in Granular Matter"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17872), Parsa 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

[**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**: