AI

• “InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation”, Liu et al 2023/“UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANs”, Xu et al 2023 (SD-XL quality in a single step—GAN speed!); “Adversarial Diffusion Distillation”, Sauer et al 2023

Matters Of Scale:

• “Deep RL at Scale: Sorting Waste in Office Buildings with a Fleet of Mobile Manipulators”, Herzog et al 2023

• “Scaling Law for Recommendation Models: Towards General-purpose User Representations”, Shin et al 2021; “Understanding Scaling Laws for Recommendation Models”, Ardalani et al 2022

• New Tesla behavior-cloning FSD fails 20 minutes into livestream demo: sitting at a light, spontaneously tries to drive Musk into oncoming traffic

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Is Target-Based Drug Discovery Efficient? Discovery and ‘Off-Target’ Mechanisms of All Drugs”, Sadri2023

• “Solved: The Ciphers In Book III Of Trithemius’s Steganographia”, Reeds 1998_26ya (multiple-discovery: “S stands for secret; you can keep it forever / Provided there’s no one abroad who is clever.”)

• Against caring about subtle poisons

Politics/Religion

• Richard Rhodes—Making of the Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes

• “Despite popular intuition, positive world beliefs poorly reflect several objective indicators of privilege, including wealth, health, sex, and neighborhood safety”, Kerry et al 2023

• “Sharing Information About Nonlinear”, Ben Pace (Emerson Spartz has threatened to sue Pace & Lightcone over criticisms)

Psychology/Biology

• “A revolution in obesity treatment”, Lingvey & Agarwal2023 (comparison of recent weight loss successes)

• Mood disorders & eminence:

  • “Mood Disorders and Patterns of Creativity in British Writers and Artists”, Jamison1989

  • “Verbal Creativity, Depression and Alcoholism: An Investigation of 100 American and British Writers”, Post1996

  • “Excellent school performance at age 16 and risk of adult bipolar disorder: national cohort study”, MacCabe et al 2010

  • How Adidas downplayed or covered up Kanye West’s misconduct

  • “Ridley Scott’s Napoleon Complex”

  • “Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self”

  • Mood disorders & Elon Musk

  • https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-01-18/diddy-diageo-and-the-decline-of-a-celebrity-business-empire

  • “The Downfall of Diddy Inc.: After months in court, Sean Combs withdrew his racially charged lawsuit against Diageo. A look inside that battle reveals the failed attempt of a fading hip-hop mogul—who’s been buffeted by charges of sexual assault—to salvage a crumbling business empire”

• “What Are Dreams For? Converging lines of research suggest that we might be misunderstanding something we do every night of our lives”

• “They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.”

• Rotating locomotion in living systems

Technology

• “Engineering Success and Disaster: American Railroad Bridges, 1840^–₆₀1900_124ya”, Aldrich1999

• “The Making of Prince of Persia: Jordan Mechner and the subtle art of video game narrative”, Aksel W. W. Eide

• “Why Evernote Failed to Realize Its Potential” 2019 (Evernote was recently bought by private equity, staff gutted, price doubled, & users like myself forced into the highly-inferior new web interface; what went wrong?)

• Zzzzzz

Economics

• “Hydra: Lessons from the World’s Largest Darknet Market”, Goonetilleke et al 2023

Philosophy

Fiction

Miscellaneous

• “All objects and some questions”, Lineweaver & Patel2023