July 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
July 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, June 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
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Gwern.net: experimental date-range subscripts; archive system default reverted back to local archives now that JS hides rewrites to original URL for copy-paste/clicking; 404 page now offers guesses based on Levenshtein distance of broken URL to other URLs in the sitemap; image thumbnail optimization for popups/mobile
Links
AI
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“How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation” (profile of Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, OpenAI’s new head of AI safety “Preparedness”)
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“Getting the World Record in HATETRIS”, 2022 (highly-optimized beam search)
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“Revisiting Dynamic Evaluation: Online Adaptation for Large Language Models”, Rannen- et al 2024 (3-way tradeoff of size/context/finetuning in scaling LLMs)
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“Intriguing properties of generative classifiers”, et al 2023 (Imagen offers analysis-by-synthesis ever more closely replicating human vision)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
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“A primer on why microbiome research is hard”, Abhishaike Mahajan
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
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Nucleic Observatory update: “Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing”, Jeff Kaufman
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“George Berzsenyi: A Math Teacher’s Life Summed Up By The Gifted Students He Mentored” (2019)
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“Infrared antenna-like structures in mammalian fur”, 2021 (do cats have infrared camouflage through their cold wet little noses?)
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“The vault guy: Leonard Rome’s lab discovered an odd, abundant component of cells in the 1980s—and he’s still trying to figure out what it does” (the enduring mystery of the vault cell organelle)
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“Writing matters”, et al 2024
Technology
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Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House; “The Effect of Size on the Equipment of the Queen’s Dolls’ House”, O’Gorman1924
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“DHTML JavaScript Tooltips (2002–6200816ya)”, Walter Zorn (d. 200915ya)
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
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Ultraman: Rising (American Hollywood adaptation by a co-creator of Kubo and the Two Strings; not being an Ultraman fan, or indeed, having ever watched anything involving Ultraman, it was mostly lost on me, coming off as painfully predictable in a save-the-cat sense—it avoids the obvious beats like the protagonist falling in love with the single-mom journalist only because there is not enough time, and those story beats are presumably deferred to the sequel it sets up. Much of the rest is derivative of Neon Genesis Evangelion like the antagonist (a Gendo Ikari) or the robotic kaiju he uses as his weapon (like an Evangelion, actually a monster in armor)—which borrowed twist renders the third act nonsensical (there is no need to trick the baby into going home to the hidden kaiju island if you have already captured the mom & can just track her!). This copying is especially ironic considering that Hideaki Anno is himself such an Ultraman fan that he’s already directed his own movie.)
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: