AI

• “Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency”, Zou et al 2023

• “Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning”, Kaufmann et al 2023

• “Creativity Has Left the Chat: The Price of Debiasing Language Models”, Mohammedi2024 (documenting the severe mode collapse & loss of diversity in possible completions in RLHF-tuned LLMs—how much does this impede any attempt at search or planning using LLMs…?); “Consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts of conditional image generative models”, Astolfi et al 2024; “Epistemic calibration and searching the space of truth”, Linus Lee (the boringness of Midjourney/DALL·E 3 vs DALL·E 2)

• “In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation”, Laskin et al 2022; “Supervised Pretraining Can Learn In-Context Reinforcement Learning”, Lee et al 2023 (Decision Transformers are Bayesian meta-learners which do posterior sampling)

• “Equitable Legal Remedies and the Existential Threat to Generative AI”, Joh2023 (argues US federal copyright courts have the power to order AI models outright erased & have done similar things before)

• “Othello is solved”, Takizawa2023

• “Robot developed by Ben Katz & Jared Di Carlo can solve Rubik’s Cube in record-breaking 0.38s” (the power of high-speed robotics & computer vision; unmodified, using a Lego robot instead: 1.8s; for comparison, the human all-time world record is 3.13s, or 2–8× slower.)

Matters Of Scale:

• on Chinese AI: Where did all the Chinese Internet tokens go?; race-to-the-bottom price wars among Chinese LLMs; “China Is Losing the Chip War. Xi Jinping picked a fight over semiconductor technology—one he can’t win”; “For Chinese Students, the New Tactic Against AI Checks: More AI”/“Research misconduct in China: towards an institutional analysis”, Zhang & Wang2024 (the fish rots from the head); “We simply need to turn the quantity of published articles into quality” —Zhang Hongjiang

• Anthropic releases Claude-3.5-sonnet, Opus to follow

• Ilya Sutskever launches ‘Safe Superintelligence’, a new startup to race for AGI by scaling LLMs

• “Google’s DeepMind-Brain merger: giant regroups for AI battle: founder Demis Hassabis trades independence for more influence over future”

• “AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions”, Park et al 2023; “Hoodwinked: Deception and Cooperation in a Text-Based Game for Language Models”, O’Gara2023; “Deception abilities emerged in large language models”, Hagendorff2024 (LLMs given goals & inner-monologue increasingly can manipulate); “Reward hacking behavior can generalize across tasks”, Nishimura-Gasparian et al 2024; “Sycophancy to Subterfuge: Investigating Reward-Tampering in Large Language Models”, Denison et al 2024

• “A Theory for Emergence of Complex Skills in Language Models”, Arora & Goyal2023; “A Solvable Model of Neural Scaling Laws”, Maloney et al 2022

• “Takeoff speeds presentation”, Tom Davidson 2023-09

• “Trading off compute in training and inference: We explore several techniques that induce a tradeoff between spending more resources on training or on inference and characterize the properties of this tradeoff. We outline some implications for AI governance”, EpochAI

• “For months they toyed with ways to add more layers & still get accurate results. After a lot of trial & error, the researchers hit on system they dubbed ‘deep residual networks’” (the origins of algorithmic progress: cheap compute!)

• “Robust agents learn causal world models”, Richens & Everitt2024; “A Mechanistic Analysis of a Transformer Trained on a Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Task”, Brinkmann et al 2024 (Transformers can do internal planning in the forward pass)

• “How AlphaFold Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It”

• “No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides. New model that predicts global weather can run on a single desktop computer.”

• “Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-Context Learning in Large Language Models”, Zhao et al 2024

• “Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential Transducers for Generative Recommendations”, Zhai et al 2024 (more power-law scaling of recommenders)

• “A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book”, Tanzer et al 2023

• “Market Concentration Implications of Foundation Models”, Vipra & Korinek2023 (are foundation models natural monopolies due to the enormous upfront capital costs?)

• “Kasparov versus the World” (extreme diminishing returns to human coordination: 50k+ chess players + several IM/GMs couldn’t beat him!)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “MIT researchers ordered and combined parts of the 1918_106ya pandemic influenza virus. Did they expose a security flaw?”

• Orchid launches WGS for embryo sequencing for PGD

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Will we continue scientific research?”, Alexander Grothendieck1972 (on the future & morality of science)

• “Scientists Who Fund Themselves”, Cohen1998

• Requests For Comment/Jagged_85: Evidence (If you ever feel confident about what you ‘know’ about the Islamic medieval period because you “just love reading Wikipedia”, you may want to know that in 2010_14ya, a crazy person spent 3 years falsifying hundreds of claims of Islamic invention, everything from “p-n junctions” to “capitalism”. He was banned in 2012_12ya, but it’s unclear how many falsehoods were left, whether he was using any other socks or anon IPs, why, what he has spent the past 12 years doing, or how far his claims have been carried by citogenesis or fellow Islamic ideologues. cf. Historia Augusta)

Politics/Religion

• “Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting”, Tappin et al 2023 (microtargeting doesn’t work well: steep diminishing returns to personalization)

• “The Beliefs of the Blob”, Fettweis2023 (how the US military-industrial complex sees the world & threats like China); Profile of the US State Department’s INR (a dissident intelligence agency whose predictions often differ from the rest of the Blob)

• “Intergenerational Mobility in American History: Accounting for Race and Measurement Error”, Ward2023

• “The unexpected origins of a modern finance tool: Discounting calculations are ubiquitous today—thanks partly to the English clergy who spread them amid turmoil in the 1600s, an MIT scholar shows” (Deringer2024; formal NPV estimates as mechanism for negotiation)

• “Samsara”, Scott Alexander

• Rex Nemorensis

Psychology/Biology

• “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought”, Fedorenko et al 2024 (still no complex cognition that requires thought, similar to Protzko & Colom2021 failing to find any unique brain region critical to fluid intelligence. More evidence that while language is neither necessary nor sufficient for cognitive abilities, what it may be is critical for development: it is scaffolding. Language is efficient communication of knowledge which enables faster development. Anything learned with language can be learned without language, and once learned, language can be kicked away, like a ladder—but learning without language is slower, and will result in less per lifetime, and then what has been learned cannot be easily shared or preserved, so no accumulating ratchet either.)

• “Goodbye, Ozempic: A new class of drugs is transforming obesity care. They are not all the same”; “‘Skinny jabs’: weight-loss drugs set for new boom as generic versions [of liraglutide] emerge; Alternatives to costly Wegovy and Saxenda will make such treatments more widely available worldwide”

• “Social Status and Unethical Behavior: Two Replications of the Field Studies in Piff et al 2012”, Jung et al 2023 (failure to replicate claims the rich are more unethical)

• “A Cause-of-Death Decomposition of Young Adult Excess Mortality”, Remund et al 2018

• “Ig Nobel Prize Winner Higashiyama Atsuki and the ‘Between-Legs Effect’ Mystery”

• “The Cells That Eat, Regurgitate and Eat Your Tattoos Again” (Baranska et al 2018; permanent tattoo ink is fixed in place by waves of macrophages eating ink, storing, dying, and being replaced by more)

• “True Porn Clerk Stories”, Ali Davis2002

• Adragon De Mello (how to bring up genius)

Technology

• The OceanGate disaster: how a charismatic high-tech startup CEO defied repeated correct predictions of disaster & created normalization of deviance by pushing to ship, inadequate testing, lying, firing dissenters, & gagging whistleblowers with NDAs (killing 5)

• The Oslo Report

• “The Turing-Complete User” design philosophy

• World-Wide Labyrinth Locator

• “The Valve.Computer: A modern 8 bit design, built using 1950s thermionic valves”

• “Repairing my mug with Kintsugi”, Fredrik Flornes Ellertsen2024

• The Western Approaches Tactical Unit (media)

• Molecule of the Month

Economics

• “Microsoft Refused to Fix Flaw Years Before SolarWinds Hack” (normalization of deviance in large AI-related organizations: MS covered up the flaw that enabled Russia to extensively hack MS & the US federal government, pushed by Satya Nadella to sell cloud services)

• “The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not [Fully] Accounted For”, Exley & Nielsen2024

• “From Fire Hazards to Family Trees: The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps”; “All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States”, Immerwahr2024

• The perverse economics of the anime production system

Philosophy

Fiction

• “Can Poetry Matter? Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more”, Dana Gioia1991

• “The Golden Boy”, Gaiman 1993_31ya (rebuttal to “Watchmaker”)

• “Extreme D&D DIY: adventures in hypergeometry, procedural generation, and software development (part 1)”, Said Achmiz2024 (modeling inter-dimensional invasion properly with higher-dimensional geometry for a D&D campaign)

• Claire Jordan (“whitehound”/“Borolin”):

  • “A true original: John Nettleship and the roots of Severus Snape”

  • “Fanon versus canon: how much of what we think we know about the Harry Potter universe owes more to fanfiction than to the books themselves?”

  • “The inheritance of magic: possible mechanisms for the genetic transfer of magic in the Harry Potter universe”

  A blast from the old web: Claire Jordan is an elderly Scottish woman who has written extensively on fanfiction & related topics in British SF/F fandom after her degree in folklore & peripatetic UK career (running a Celtic/Wiccan shop, programming, evolution apologetics etc), since 1985_39ya (and at this domain since at least 2005_19ya). Among other things, she knew the man J. K Rowling had a crush on and based Severus Snape on, Scottish teacher/musician/activist John Nettleship. This gives her interesting insights into how the Harry Potter universe has evolved as fans create fanon, movies overwrite memories or insert assumptions of what the text must have meant, and J. K. Rowling keeps retconning or tweaking canon.

Miscellaneous