November 2024 News
November 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
November 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, October 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
Links
AI
-
“Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data”, et al 2024
-
“AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”, 2024; “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?”, 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:
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 & Mac2018 (losing hurts more than winning feels good)
-
“The Limits of Policy Feedback as a Party-Building Tool”, 2020
-
“Why the French Military Cryptanalysis Failed to Break Enigma”, 2024
-
“A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom”, 2011
Psychology/Biology
-
“Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Persons with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis”, et al 2024; “Tirzepatide for Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and Obesity”, et al 2024
-
“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
-
“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)
Economics
-
“The Relationship Between Team Diversity and Team Performance: Reconciling Promise and Reality Through a Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Registered Report”, et al 2024 (ethnic diversity is the least useful kind: r = 0.00 with team performance)
Philosophy
Fiction
-
“Fifty Million Monkeys”, Jones 194381ya (the best, earliest, SF story about LLMs? later; via)
-
“Survival without dignity”, L Rudolf L
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: