December 2024 News
December 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
December 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, November 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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Ideas: Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity; Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search
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Constrained Writing: Second Life Sentences; Better Trajectoid Words; Un-Biblical Sentences
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Gwern.net:
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help page
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ordinal ‘progress indicator’ clock-like metadata icons (for any 0–100% data)
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keybindings & clickable icons: help cheatsheet, search, minimizing, dark-mode cycling, reader-mode cycling, return-to-homepage; popup minimization; access keys; 2 metadata icons
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Links
AI
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“The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline: R3GAN”, et al 2024
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AI timeline & risk interviews 2011–2201312ya, by Alexander Kruel (with Shane Legg, Juergen Schmidhuber, Matt Mahoney, Timothy Gowers etc)
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“20 Years of Bitext”, Peter Brown & Bob Mercer 201312ya (on early NMT, n-grams, finding & cleaning large linguistic corpora)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
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“‘Life in a Germ-Free World’: Isolating Life from the Laboratory Animal to the Bubble Boy”, Kirk 201213ya; “Looking Out from the Isolator: David’s Perception of the World”, Murphy & Vogel 198540ya (the cognitive distortions of growing up a ‘bubble boy’ due to lack of direct exposure to things like “the other side of a building”—contra François Chollet)
Statistics/Meta-Science
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“Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method”, 2023
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Seriation (archaeology)/Ordination (ecology) (generalizing sorting; R)
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
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“GLP-1 programs the neurovascular landscape”, et al 2024
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“The Effects of Diagnosing a Young Adult with a Mental Illness: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Doctors”, et al 2023
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Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions published at last, with new revelations: “Once you know he was bipolar, a lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense.”
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“Intestines of non-uniform stiffness mold the corners of wombat feces”, et al 2021
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“Seasonal Hair Growth in the Adult Domestic Cat (Felis catus)”, Hendriks et al 199728ya (a cat will shed its weight in fur every ~31 years)
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“Hoover damn! A brief look at sexual injury by vacuum cleaners”
Technology
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“Operation Pluto”, WWII: in 4 days, the UK laid a fully-operational oil pipeline across the English channel, which pumped 0.8b liters of oil to support the invasion of Europe; see also: the Mulberry harbours
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“The Little Can That Could”, Daniel 198738ya (‘good design is invisible’: how American & British engineers reinvented the German jerrycan poorly because they didn’t understand its requirements nor solutions)
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Boyer-Moore majority vote algorithm (a surprisingly simple algorithm for counting the majority of a list)
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“Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions”, Nicholas 2025 (writing & compiling to a VM for regexp-based loop-free programming)
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“Stimulation Clicker”, Neal Agarwal (best clicker game I’ve seen in years)
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“Group Theory in the Bedroom: An insomniac’s guide to the curious mathematics of mattress flipping”, Brian Hayes 200520ya (no memory-less optimal algorithm for rotating a mattress to even out wear & tear)
Economics
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“The Lifetime Costs of Bad Health”, De et al 2024
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“The Effect of Financial Resources on Fertility: Evidence from Administrative Data on Lottery Winners”, et al 2022 (fertility is not about wealth)
Philosophy
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“Why is the Speed of Light So Fast? (Part 2)” (on the fragility of atoms & complex structures)
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
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Sourdough, Robin Sloan (2017)
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Range of Ghosts (201213ya; Eternal Sky Elizabeth Bear
Interesting worldbuilding and an epic fantasy which winds up falling flat and being less than the sum of its parts, perhaps because the pacing was off, perhaps because the prose style rubbed me wrong somehow, perhaps because it suffers from too much setting up of its trilogy and being too long, and the occasional battles or travel increasingly indistinct. I read it over 2 plane flights, and by the end, I was as exhausted with it as the protagonist’s pony, and not inclined to continue.
This is too bad because Bear writes well about horses, and the central conceit of the Eternal Sky world is intriguing: it is a funhouse mirror of Central Asia seen through a fantasy lense, where familiar places like the Assassins or Tibet or Song China or the Mongolian Empire or distant Japan/Russia are reimagined as epic fantasy empires, where, further, the rulers of a region do not just decide the state religion but the actual metaphysics & magic of that region, so ‘the sky changes’ as one travels (eg. in one region, the Khanate is visible as moons in the ‘eternal blue sky’, one per heir, and those improperly buried rise again as blood-ghosts; in another, Islamic, region, one sees but a single moon and there are no blood-ghosts, etc). The worldbuilding is a bit undermined by Bear’s insistence on Maimonides-style rationalization of all practices (every superstition or traditional belief must actually be some clever Chesterton’s-fence-style adaptation or trick) and obligatory strong female warriors (to the point where you wonder why Bear bothers having any male protagonists), but the concepts are still strong enough I feel a bit sorry I won’t see them developed in the sequels.
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: