August 2024 News
August 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
August 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, July 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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Proposal: a search engine for numbers
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It’s still a good time to write online, but Why To Not Write A Book; and how I write
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East Asian cat/earwax survey (“yes”)
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Gwern.net:
date-guesser.py
: a LLM script to try to extract dates from arbitrary text input;daterange-checker.py
; towards a useful RSS feed
Links
AI
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“Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030?”, EpochAI (yes)
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“Is Xi Jinping an AI doomer? China’s elite is split over artificial intelligence” (maybe Xi just isn’t that into AI)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
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“Analysis of 3.6 million individuals yields minimal evidence of pairwise genetic interactions for height”, et al 2024 (height: still just additive)
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
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“The Mouse as a Microscope” (creating & breeding the mouse model organism)
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
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“The evolution of perennially enlarged breasts in women: a critical review and a novel hypothesis”, Pawłowski & Żelaźniewicz 2021 (there are still no good explanations for why women have large breasts)
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“Hormonal doping and androgenization of athletes: a secret program of the German Democratic Republic government”, Frank & Berendonk 199727ya; “The Chinese Sports Machine’s Single Goal: The Most Golds, at Any Cost”
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“WTH is Cerebrolysin, actually? Some claim it’s a panacea for brain diseases, but does this pig brain concoction live up to the hype?” (see also Cerebrolysin researcher fraud)
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“A brief history of cross-species organ transplantation”, Cooper 201212ya (a patient in 196361ya survived with a chimpanzee kidney for 9 months, dying of apparently a minor flaw—a record ~7 months better than the best pig kidney transplant as of 2024)
Technology
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: