April 2024 News
April 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
April 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2024 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
-
Gwern.net: authors are now hyperlinked; Google CSE site-search has been restored (magnifying-glass icon in theme togglebar,
/
keybinding); April Fools easter egg
Links
AI
-
RIP FHI (2005–192024); “Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute: The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk”
-
The (minimal) implications of chaos theory for reinforcement learning agents
-
“Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models”, et al 2024 (research challenges in scaled LLMs)
-
“Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity”, 2024
-
A history of et al 2017 inside Google : low-level optimization, trial-and-error, defying orthodoxy, and lots of compute & data
-
“Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data”, et al 2024 (model-collapse doesn’t happen if you continue training on real data)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
-
“They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War” (more on 1927)
-
The Rootclaim Debate format is unfit for purpose as it is unable to detect falsified quotes & graphs
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
-
“Trial of Lixisenatide in Early Parkinson’s Disease”, et al 2024
-
“Self-protection as an adaptive female strategy”, et al 2021
-
“Cat Ownership and Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Psychotic-Like Experiences: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, et al 2023 (don’t worry about the cat/Toxoplasmosis correlation: small, inconsistent age-wise, even without controls, and so almost surely trivial causally)
-
“Cicadian Rhythm: Insecticides, Infant Health, and Long-term Outcomes”, 2022
Technology
-
“Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design”, 2021 (the classified roots of civilian fusion power & the untapped potential for much more powerful H-bombs); “What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos”, Ashutosh Jogalekar
-
“A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’” (the in-car map navigation system decades ahead of its time)
-
“The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web”, Page et al 199826ya (surprisingly relevant, describing some capabilities no longer available like personalized PageRank or PR visualization by URL)
-
“The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher”, et al 2024 (with help from Louie Helm)
-
Scribe.rip replacement for Medium articles: freedium.cfd
Economics
-
“No one buys books: Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ”
-
“Cocytarchy: Lessons From the American Inferno” (prison gangs & the problem of being judgment-proof)
-
“When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain”, Kent & Martínez-2022
-
“The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution”, 2010
Philosophy
Fiction
-
“[Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols]”, Bill 2007
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
-
The Bridge (200618ya; review)
-
Knives Out (2019; a satisfying mystery overall; with only two flaws: first, it is tainted by already-painfully-dated superficial contemporary politics, which attempt to be even-handed but mostly show that the writers cannot pass an intellectual turing test (although given how well-constructed it is overall, I was still surprised to read up on it afterwards and find the director’s prior film was Star Wars: The Last Jedi); and second, one of the most praised (or at least remarked on) aspects was a misstep, in casting Daniel Craig as the eccentric detective: Craig is not a bad actor, but he is too associated with James Bond & England, so I simply could not accept the fake cornpone Southern accent, an accent so jarring that it degraded every scene Craig was in, to the point where characters lampshade it in-movie—making the usual contemporary media mistake of believing that pointing out a mistake in-universe somehow retroactively makes it not a mistake, rather than making the mistake even more egregious, by proving that they realized it was a mistake so far in advance that they could write it into the story but still didn’t fix it)
Animated:
Music
-
I Have Been A Good Bing, The Fooming Shoggoths
-
“Chime Design and Build”, Lee Hite
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: