AI

• “Deep Differentiable Logic Gate Networks”, Petersen et al 2022

• “Looped Transformers as Programmable Computers”, Giannou et al 2023

• Visualizing the entirety of a NanoGPT Transformer

Matters Of Scale:

• “Language Modeling Is Compression”, Delétang et al 2023

• “Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models”, Bai et al 2023 (everything is sequence prediction)

• “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the AI Revolution” (a history of Nvidia & its pivot to DL, and its executives’ views on why AI risk does not exist)

• “Autonomous chemical research with large language models”, Boiko et al 2023 (“…driven by GPT-4 that autonomously designs, plans and performs complex experiments by incorporating large language models empowered by tools such as internet and documentation search, code execution and experimental automation.”); “Evaluating Language-Model Agents on Realistic Autonomous Tasks”, Kinniment et al 2023

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “A drug target for erectile dysfunction to help improve fertility, sexual activity, and wellbeing: Mendelian Randomization study”, Woolf et al 2023

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Treatment of Certain Patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

• “Polygenic Embryo Screening: High Approval Despite Substantial Concerns from the U.S. Public”, Furrer et al 2023

• “Complete human day 14 post-implantation embryo models from naive ES cells”, Oldak et al 2023

• “Game of clones: Science is immortalizing Argentina’s top polo horses”

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “A National Evil”: how iodization was discovered & goiter defeated in Switzerland

• “I don’t doubt that Teller was serious about the 10,000 MT bomb. Until the next enthusiasm took over.”

• “Stern and Gerlach: How a Bad Cigar Helped Reorient Atomic Physics”, Friedrich & Herschbach 2003_23ya (media; how a double accident helped prove early quantum mechanics)

• “The survival time of chocolates in hospital wards: covert observational study”, Gajendragadkar et al 2013

Politics/Religion

• “Aum Shinrikyo: Insights Into How Terrorists Develop Biological and Chemical Weapons”, Danzig et al 2011_15ya (tacit knowledge & Aum’s highly successful chemical warfare vs failed biowarfare programmes)

• “States are trashing troves of masks and pandemic gear as huge, costly stockpiles linger and expire” (why no one wants to invest in PPE manufacturing capability, and there will be shortages in the next pandemic)

• “Math Team: and other horrible things you do to get into Stanford”, Benedict Hsieh

Psychology/Biology

• “Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging”, Singh et al 2023

• “Cat owners are resorting to China’s underground marketplace to buy antivirals for a feline coronavirus” (on GS-441524 for curing FIP)

• “Self-Experimentation: A Call for Change”, Neuringer 1981_45ya; Andrew Gelman revisits Seth Roberts’s life, Quantified Self, & the Shangri-La Diet

• “Diminished State Space Theory of Human Aging”, Eppinger et al 2023 (what sort of bad decisions do old people make, and why?)

• “Feline faces: Unraveling the social function of domestic cat facial signals”, Scott & Florkiewicz 2023

• “Tournaments and Slavery in a Desert Ant”, Hölldobler 1976

• “Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia”, Bonta et al 2017

• the Cookiecutter shark

Technology

• “Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository”, Potvin & Levenberg 2016; “Software Engineering at Google”, Henderson 2017; “Big Ball Of Mud”

• “A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32”, Admiral Cloudberg

• “How We Turned the Tide in the Roach Wars: Forty years ago, scientists did the impossible. Why doesn’t anyone remember?”

• “Counting YouTube videos via random prefix sampling”, Zhou et al 2011_15ya; “How big is YouTube?” (~13.4b videos, ~4b in 2023, doubling every 2-3 years)

• Gregory Benford created the first computer virus in 1966

• Why good design doesn’t evolve in the marketplace

Economics

• “Are CEOs born leaders? Lessons from traits of a million individuals”, Adams et al 2018; “Founder personality and entrepreneurial outcomes: A large-scale field study of technology startups”, Freiberg & Matz 2023 (using tweets to predict startup success)

• “Generate” the Future of Work through AI: Empirical Evidence from Online Labor Markets, Liu et al 2023; “AI and Jobs: Has the Inflection Point Arrived? Evidence from an Online Labor Platform”, Qiao et al 2023

• “Gibbon was right: The decline and fall of the Roman economy”, Jongman 2007

Philosophy

• “If I Sleep for an Hour, 30 People Will Die”; “The Master Forgers Who Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II”

Fiction

Miscellaneous

• “America Doesn’t Know Tofu: China has spent millennia exploring the culinary possibilities of soybean curds. The West has barely scratched the surface”, George Stiffman