September 2024 News
September 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
September 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, August 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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Idea: error-ensuring codes for synthetic media watermarking; hybrid LLMs: conditioning AR LLMs on diffused embeddings
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Why do cats bite spontaneously or during petting? Maybe you accidentally look like prey
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text2epositive.py
: experimental GPT-4 script for rewriting English statements from negation to affirmatives -
Gwern.net: revised index page & header (screenshot); enabled help page & popup window manager keybindings
Links
AI
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“Why concepts are (probably) vectors”, et al 2024
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
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“Is economics self-correcting? Replications in the American Economic Review”, Ankel-et al 2024 (no)
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“The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography”, 2024
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Picture imperfect: Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion (more Alzheimers research fraud problems)
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“An Unconventional Case Study of Neoadjuvant Oncolytic Virotherapy for Recurrent Breast Cancer”, et al 2024
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“Does Your iPod Really Play Favorites?”, Froelich et al 200915ya (no; you’re just fooled by the randomness of shuffles)
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Standard deviations are surprisingly hard to unbiasedly estimate
Politics/Religion
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“Conceptions & Misconceptions”, Hiatt 199628ya (to what extent did Australian Aborigines understand human sex & reproduction?)
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“The inefficacy of land titling programs: homesteading in Haiti, 1933–17195074ya”, 2024
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“Things You Can’t Countersignal” (why popular writing often can’t be good writing)
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“The Deserter: He didn’t want to fight in Putin’s war—he just wanted to survive. But to make it back to his family and live in peace, he would have to run.” (working the Russian system)
Psychology/Biology
Technology
Economics
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On the UBI paper; “The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India: Evidence from Community-Based Provision of Pharmacotherapy”, 2024
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“The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction”, et al 2023 (scaling up overparameterized models is useful in finance too)
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“The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture”, 2024
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“11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or ‘A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007’)”, Tim Ferriss
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“America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny” (why were there COVID coin shortages, of all things? because people receive coins when spending, but don’t spend them—only deposit them at then-closed banks, while coin manufacturing wasn’t allowed to keep up due to the losses involved)
Philosophy
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Sullivan 1794230ya on why the Sun & comets must be inhabited by aliens
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“Water Cannot Return”, Amichai (trans. Sager 201311ya)
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Megalopolis (200420ya; Francis Ford Coppola)
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: