AI

• “When Your AIs Deceive You: Challenges of Partial Observability in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback”, Lang et al 2024

Matters Of Scale:

• “Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data”, Treutlein et al 2024

• “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”, Porter & Machery2024; “How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?” (perhaps much of what is bad about AI slop is just it doing its job of catering to the lowest common denominator—the usual objective of RLHF etc—all too well); “Organic or Diffused: Can We Distinguish Human Art from AI-generated Images?”, Ha et al 2024 (people can’t, experts still can); “GPT-3 Semantic Derealization”

• “Neural Networks (MNIST inference) on the “3-cent” Microcontroller” (90% MNIST in 1 kiloword)

• Comment on data diminishing returns; the China question; What do you do after ‘winning’ an AI arms race?

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• How disease detectives’ quick work traced deadly E. coli outbreak to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders (cheap pervasive sequencing)

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Debugging and consolidating multiple synthetic chromosomes reveals combinatorial genetic interactions”, Zhao et al 2023 (interview)

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “A friendly, non-technical introduction to differential privacy”, Damien Desfontaines

Politics/Religion

• “Is Football A Matter Of Life And Death—Or Is It More Important Than That?”, Dolton & MacKerron2018 (losing hurts more than winning feels good)

• “The Limits of Policy Feedback as a Party-Building Tool”, Galvin & Thurston2020

• “Why the French Military Cryptanalysis Failed to Break Enigma”, Foucrier2024

• “Gladiatorial Combat: The Rules of Engagement”, Carter2006

• “A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom”, Yurchak2011

Psychology/Biology

• “Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Persons with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis”, Bliddal et al 2024; “Tirzepatide for Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and Obesity”, Packer et al 2024

• “The Charmer: Robert Gagno is a pinball savant, but he wants so much more than just to be the world’s best player”

• “The Anti-Autism Manifesto”: should psychiatry revive “schizoid personality disorder” instead of lumping into ‘autism’?

Technology

• Richard A. Cash, Who Saved Millions From Dehydration, Dies at 83

• Saul Bass’s 1969 AT&T redesign pitch (the Mother of All Demos—for branding); What it was like working for Paul Rand

• “Usenet: The Origin Story”, Bellovin2024

• “Unfathomable: Sunken treasure, death-defying adventure, sibling rivalry: How Charles and John Deane invented modern deep-sea diving and saved the British Empire”, James Nestor

• “He Was an Online Drug Lord. Now He’s a Crypto Entrepreneur.”; “Blake Benthall, Former Silk Road 2 operator ‘Defcon’, revisits the scene of the crime” (Benthall cooperated post-arrest & has launched a startup after his probation recently ended)

• Turntrout’s new website’s design (commentary)

Economics

• “The Relationship Between Team Diversity and Team Performance: Reconciling Promise and Reality Through a Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Registered Report⁠”, Wallrich et al 2024 (ethnic diversity is the least useful kind: r = 0.00 with team performance)

Philosophy

• “Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain? From superorganisms to superintelligences, how studying crabs could reveal that we are unintentionally building an artificial world brain”, Thomas Moynihan

Fiction

• “Fifty Million Monkeys”, Jones 1943_81ya (the best, earliest, SF story about LLMs? later; via)

• “Survival without dignity”, L Rudolf L

Miscellaneous