---
title: December 2024 News
description: December 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
created: 2024-01-01
status: in progress
confidence: log
css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs
backlink: False
...

December 2024's [Gwern.net](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2024/12) [newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013") is now out; previous, [November 2024](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2024/11) ([archives](https://gwern.net/doc/newsletter/index)).
This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my [Changelog](https://gwern.net/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern).

# Writings

- Ideas: [Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity](https://gwern.net/creative-benchmark); [Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search](https://gwern.net/tree-embedding)
- **Constrained Writing**: [Second Life Sentences](https://gwern.net/second-life-sentence); [Better Trajectoid Words](https://gwern.net/blog/2024/trajectoid-words); [Un-Biblical Sentences](https://gwern.net/non-biblical-sentences)
- ["A Christmas Protestation"](https://gwern.net/fiction/christmas)
- **Gwern.net**:

    - help page
    - [ordinal 'progress indicator'](/design-graveyard#ordinal-word-counts) clock-like metadata icons (for any 0--100% data, eg. collapses showing part of the collapsed content)
    - keybindings & clickable icons: help cheatsheet, search, minimizing, dark-mode cycling, reader-mode cycling, return-to-homepage; popup minimization; access keys; 2 metadata icons

# Links

## AI

[Matters Of](https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/ "'ML Scaling subreddit', Gwern 2020") [Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law):

- ["Frontier Models are Capable of In-Context Scheming"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04984#apollo), Meinke et al 2024
- ["The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline: R3GAN"](https://openreview.net/forum?id=OrtN9hPP7V "‘The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! R3GAN: A Modern GAN Baseline’, Huang et al 2024"), Huang et al 2024
- [AI timeline & risk interviews 2011–2013](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/mFDCbtzb2st4j5BJQ "‘Alexander Kruel’s AI Risk Interview Series (2011–2013)’, Kruel 2011"), by Alexander Kruel (with [Shane Legg](!W), [Jürgen Schmidhuber](!W), [Matt Mahoney](!W), [Timothy Gowers](!W) etc.)

## Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

- ["'Life in a Germ-Free World': Isolating Life from the Laboratory Animal to the Bubble Boy"](https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/microbiome/germ-free/2012-kirk.pdf#page=7), Kirk 2012; ["Looking Out from the Isolator: David’s Perception of the World"](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/vision/1985-murphy.pdf), Murphy & Vogel 1985 (the cognitive distortions of growing up a ['bubble boy'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vetter) due to lack of direct exposure to things like "the other side of a building"---contra [François Chollet](https://x.com/fchollet/status/1875671546590851356 "A smart child understands far more about the world than what has been explained to them and what they've had direct exposure to. They don't have an adult perspective on things, but they understand, in their own way."))

## Statistics/Meta-Science

- ["Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method"](https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/probability/2023-summerscales.pdf), Summerscales 2023
- [Seriation (archaeology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seriation_(archaeology))/[Ordination (ecology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordination_(statistics)) (generalizing sorting; [R](https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v025i03); [If you're not sure how to sort a list or grid—seriate it!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u2ww8yKp9xAB6qzcr/if-you-re-not-sure-how-to-sort-a-list-or-grid-seriate-it))

## Politics/Religion

- ["The Secret Pentagon War Game That ​Offers a Stark​ Warning for Our Times: The devastating outcome of the 1983 game reveals that nuclear escalation inevitably spirals out of control"](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/magazine/nuclear-strategy-proud-prophet.html)
- [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton)

## Psychology/Biology

- ["Subjective and objective experiences of childhood adversity: a meta-analysis of their agreement and relationships with psychopathology"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10617978/), Francis et al 2023
- [Harlan Ellison's](!W) [_Last Dangerous Visions_](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Dangerous-Visions-Harlan-Ellison/dp/B0CWPLX12S "‘<em>The Last Dangerous Visions</em> § Ellison Exegesis’, Straczynski 2024") published at last, with new revelations: ["Once you know he was bipolar, a lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense."](https://lamag.com/books/harlan-ellison-last-words-dangerous-visions-sci-fi-writer-posthumous-comeback "‘Harlan Ellison’s Last Words: The Ambitious Plan for Sci-Fi Writer’s Posthumous Comeback—Longtime friend and <em>Babylon 5</em> creator J. Michael Straczynski endeavors to reshape the legacy of the late sci-fi writer’, Appleford 2024")
- ["Intestines of non-uniform stiffness mold the corners of wombat feces"](https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2020-yang-6.pdf), Yang et al 2021
- ["How to transport a polar bear, and other idiosyncrasies in providing emergency medical services in the Arctic"](https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2417), Harring et al 2024

## Technology

- ["Operation Pluto", WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto): 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_harbours)
- [Boyer-Moore majority vote algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_majority_vote_algorithm) (a surprisingly simple algorithm for counting the majority of a list)
- ["Stimulation Clicker"](https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/), Neal Agarwal (best clicker game I've seen in years)
- ["Group Theory in the Bedroom: An insomniac's guide to the curious mathematics of mattress flipping"](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/group-theory-in-the-bedroom), Brian Hayes 2005 (no memory-less optimal algorithm for rotating a mattress to even out wear & tear)
- [Navy shower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_shower)

## Economics

## Philosophy

- ["Why is the Speed of Light So Fast? (Part 2)"](https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of-light-so-fast-part-2/) (on the fragility of atoms & complex structures)

## Fiction

## Miscellaneous

# Books

**Nonfiction**:

- _The Little Prince_/_Wind, Sand, And Stars_, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

**Fiction**:

- [_Sourdough_](https://www.amazon.com/Sourdough-Novel-Robin-Sloan/dp/0374203105), [Robin Sloan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sloan) (2017)
- _Range of Ghosts_ (2012; Eternal Sky #1), [Elizabeth Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_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'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengri), 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**:

- [_Golden Kamuy 2_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Kamuy_season_2)
- [_Lupin the 3<sup>rd</sup> Part 1_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupin_the_3rd_Part_I)

# Music

[**Touhou**](https://www.reddit.com/r/TOUHOUMUSIC/search/?q=author%3Agwern&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all):

[**Vocaloid**](https://www.reddit.com/r/Vocaloid/search/?q=author%3Agwern&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all):

**MLP**:

**Doujin**:

**Misc**: