AI

• “Even Superhuman Go AIs Have Surprising Failures Modes”, Gleave et al 2023

• On freelancer/gig workers using AI: 4 case studies

Matters Of Scale:

• “‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China”; “ChinAI #56: The Sour Past of ‘China Chips’”, Jeffrey Ding (previous failures of the CCP to create self-sufficient world-class semiconductor industry); “China’s Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say”/“China Says Chatbots Must Toe the Party Line: The Communist Party outlined draft rules that would set guardrails on the rapidly growing industry of services like ChatGPT”; “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess: Regulating AI Will Not Set America Back in the Technology Race”, Toner et al 2023; Scale has been lobbying about the China AI threat for years at >$1m/year for military R&D; “The AGI Race Between the US and China Doesn’t Exist”, Eva Behrens

• “Anthropic, creator of Claude 2, is trying to be a safety-first AI company” (safety philosophy on scaling models to research)

• “Scaling laws for language encoding models in fMRI”, Antonello et al 2023

• “Stability AI launches SDXL 0.9: A Leap Forward in AI Image Generation”; “SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis”, Podell et al 2023 (proves crop conditioning works)

• “Teaching Arithmetic to Small Transformers”, Lee et al 2023 (tokenization, emergence, inner-monologue)

• “Pretraining task diversity and the emergence of non-Bayesian in-context learning for regression”, Raventós et al 2023 (blessings of scale induce emergence of meta-learning: “We empirically demonstrate a task diversity threshold for the emergence of ICL.”); “How Many Pretraining Tasks Are Needed for In-Context Learning of Linear Regression?”, Wu et al 2023

• “Solving math word problems with process-based & outcome-based feedback”, Uesato et al 2022

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “The Vanishing Family: They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation—which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds”

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Evolution of a minimal cell”, Moger-Reischer et al 2023

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Best Practices: Formal Proofs, the Fine Print and Side Effects”, Murray & van Oorschot 2018

Politics/Religion

• “We could have universal COVID vaccines soon—if we urgently reform the process. Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way.”, Patrick Collison; “Peltzman Revisited: Quantifying 21^st-Century Opportunity Costs of FDA Regulation”, Mulligan 2022

Psychology/Biology

• Weight loss:

  • Retatrutide: “Triple-Hormone-Receptor Agonist Retatrutide for Obesity—A Phase 2 Trial”, Jastreboff et al 2023; “Retatrutide, a GIP, GLP-1 and glucagon receptor agonist, for people with type 2 diabetes: a randomized, double-blind, placebo and active-controlled, parallel-group, phase 2 trial conducted in the USA”, Rosenstock et al 2023

  • Tirzepatide: “Tirzepatide once weekly for the treatment of obesity in people with type 2 diabetes (SURMOUNT-2): a double-blind, randomized, multicenter, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial”, Garvey et al 2023 (12% weight loss)

• “A leaky integrate-and-fire computational model based on the connectome of the entire adult Drosophila brain reveals insights into sensorimotor processing”, Shiu et al 2023

• “Sleep Deprivation [Wake Therapy] Sometimes Relieves Depression. A New Study May Show Why”

• “Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney” (theory of mind, tulpas, inner-monologue)

• “How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World: The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them”; “A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending” (what drives gifted people to the top of their professions? monomania & childhood emotional trauma, it seems)

• “Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia”, Nedergaard & Lupyan 2023

• “Escaping High School: A guide for 14-year-olds and 14-year-olds at heart” (advice for bright but slacking teenagers)

Technology

• “From design patterns to category theory”, Mark Seemann

• “A DNA origami rotary ratchet motor”, Pumm et al 2022

• Nanocar Race

• Open loop planning: a sequence of blind inputs that beats Pokémon FireRed 99% of the time (video)

Economics

Philosophy

• “Why it hurts: with freedom comes the biological need for pain”, Farnsworth & Elwood 2023

Fiction

Miscellaneous