AI

• “Monte-Carlo Planning in Large POMDPs”, Silver & Veness 2010

• “PonyDiffusion V5, our new model capable of generating anthro, feral and humans in wide range of styles with strong natural language support and extremely simple prompting”

• “podcast.ai”: Play.ht TTS demo sample of a ‘Joe Rogan/Steve Jobs podcast’

Matters Of Scale:

• “Scaling MLPs: A Tale of Inductive Bias”, Bachmann et al 2023 (MLP image classification scales smoothly w/regularization+data)

• “Inside the AI Factory”: the upskilling of data labeling work driven by scaling—ever more challenging tasks ($50/expert-rating; Socratic dialogue: $300; darkly-humorous goldfish limericks: $15)

• “Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter on the state of AI today § What about AI terrifies you?”

• The China chip ban is working

• “Andromeda Cluster”: a 2,512 H100s GPU-cluster as a service for startups associated w/Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross

• Carl Shulman interview: “Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment”, part 2

• “SpikeGPT: Generative Pre-trained Language Model with Spiking Neural Networks”, Zhu et al 2023 (surrogate-gradient backprop on RWKV-like is somewhat worse but runtime is efficient)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Phenotypic effects of genetic variants associated with autism”, Rolland et al 2023 (more evidence the supposed genetic correlation of intelligence & autism spectrum is spurious & due to impure measurements)

• “A familial natural short sleep mutation promotes healthy aging and extends lifespan in Drosophila”, Pandey et al 2023

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “National and Global Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops”, Hansen & Wingender 2023

• “Reprogramming by drug-like molecules leads to regeneration of cochlear hair cell-like cells in adult mice”, Quan et al 2023

• “DNA repair and anti-cancer mechanisms in the longest-living mammal: the bowhead whale”, Gladyshev et al 2023 (whales do not suppress tumors with anti-cancer gene copies, but especially efficient DNA repair)

• “Temperature-dependent RNA editing in octopus extensively recodes the neural proteome”, Birk et al 2023

Statistics/Meta-Science

Politics/Religion

• “Cosmic Luck: NASA’s Apollo 11 Moon Quarantine Broke Down—A review of archives suggests that efforts to protect Earth from contamination by any organism brought back from the lunar surface were mostly for show”

• The Press in 1800s France

• “The Political Is Personal: The Costs of Daily Politics”, Ford et al 2023

Psychology/Biology

• “Objective and subjective experiences of child maltreatment and their relationships with psychopathology”, Danese & Widom 2020/“Associations Between Objective and Subjective Experiences of Childhood Maltreatment and the Course of Emotional Disorders in Adulthood”, Danese & Widom 2023 (nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual differences); “Childhood Maltreatment and Mental Health Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Quasi-Experimental Studies”, Baldwin et al 2023 (the correlation between childhood maltreatment/psychiatric problems is highly confounded)

• “How to Find a Missing Person with Dementia”

• “A Simple Exercise to Strengthen the Lower Esophageal Sphincter and Eliminate Gastroesophageal Reflux: An Autobiographical Case Report”, Karrfalt 2022

• “Validation of a Functional Pyelocalyceal Renal Model for the Evaluation of Renal Calculi Passage While Riding a Roller Coaster”, Mitchell & Wartinger 2016

• “In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913_113ya)”

Technology

• “The Joy Of Duplexes: In which integration brings simplification”, Coda Hale (how to use a cryptographically-hard permutation function to build the rest of cryptography up to public keys)

• The Kellogg Doolittle Residence: “Inside a Breathtaking Desert Mansion That Looks Like A Fossil”, Architectural Digest (if Dune were a house)

• “Process Engineering at a Furry Convention” (end-to-end optimization of registration for throughput)

• “Vaporwave and Unicode Analysis”

• “Controversy Continues Over Whether Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold” (Mpemba effect)

Economics

• “How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood”

Philosophy

• “How They Fool Ya’”, 3Blue1Brown (on mathematical patterns that mislead)

Fiction

Miscellaneous