--- title: Changelog description: Monthly chronological list of recent major writings/changes/additions to Gwern.net (see also the monthly newsletter). created: 2013-09-15 modified: 2024-02-02 status: in progress previous: /about next: /traffic confidence: log importance: 1 cssExtension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ...
> This page is a changelog for Gwern.net: a monthly reverse chronological list of recent major writings/changes/additions. > > Following my writing can be a little difficult because it is often so incremental. > So every month, in addition to my regular subreddit submissions, I write up reasonably-interesting changes and [send it out to the mailing list](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013") in addition to a compilation of links & reviews ([archives](/doc/newsletter/index "'Essays', N/A 2009")).
# 2024 {id=2024} ## January 2024 - [Dropcap Generation With AI](/dropcap); [idea: better SVG generative models via multi-modal LLMs](/idea#vector-generation) # 2023 {id=2023} ## December 2023 - N/A ## November 2023 - [Catitecture: towards better cat window boxes](/catitecture "‘Cat itecture: Better Cat Window Boxes’, Gwern 2023") ## October 2023 - ["‘CQK’ Is The First Unused TLA"](/tla) - ["Utext: Rich Unicode Documents"](/utext) - Idea: make an ['InvertOrNot.com'](/idea#invertornot "‘Research Ideas § InvertOrNot’, Gwern 2017") (a simple, useful, but missing web API) - Idea: [lobby webserial/comic sites](/idea#prefetch) to make more use of 'prefetch'/'preload' for faster reading - ["Little's Law in the Wild"](/note/statistic#littles-law-in-the-wild) - **Gwern.net**: dropcaps: extended to support bitmap graphics, and randomized selection (used in Halloween & Christmas-mode, and for the new 'dropcats' dropcap set we made for cat-related pages); improved Halloween & Christmas-mode with generated logos; scrolling now disables popups temporarily ## September 2023 - ["Suzanne Delage" Solved](/suzanne-delage "‘Interpreting ‘Suzanne Delage’ as Dracula’, Gwern 2009") ## August 2023 - Gwern.net: [indent/justification A/B test finished](/ab-test-indent "‘A/B Testing Indentation & Justification’, Gwern 2022") (usual too-small-to-measure); widescreen-desktop floating section [ToC/scrollspy](/doc/design/2023-08-07-gwern-gwernnet-desktop-floatingtoc.png) ## July 2023 - ["Absolute Unit NNs (AUNN): Regression-Based MLPs for Everything"](/aunn "‘Absolute Unit NNs: Regression-Based MLPs for Everything’, Gwern 2023"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [AUNN: Herculaneum papyri](/aunn-papyrus "‘Absolute Unit NNs: Regression-Based MLPs for Everything § Language-Conditioned AUNNs’, Gwern 2023"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [AUNN: brain uploading](/aunn-brain "‘Absolute Unit NNs: Regression-Based MLPs for Everything § Modular Brain AUNNs’, Gwern 2023"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## June 2023 - [On The Impossibility of Knowledge of Retrocognitive Knowledge](/retrocognition "‘The Impossibility of Knowledge of Retrocognitive Knowledge’, Gwern 2023"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Why cats knock stuff over](/cat-knocking "‘Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? § Knocking Stuff Over’, Gwern 2018"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Design proposal: subscripted date-ranges ('X years since')](/subscript#date-ranges) - **Gwern.net**: ['sort by magic'](/design#future-tag-features) of similar-links & tags using embeddings (with auto-tagging); +[interview formatting](/design-graveyard#interviews "‘Design Graveyard § Interviews’, Gwern 2010") support; margin note aggregation at beginning of sections; [`latex2unicode.py`](/static/build/latex2unicode.py) ## May 2023 - ["You And Your Research", Richard Hamming](/doc/science/1986-hamming "‘You And Your Research’, Hamming 2023"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Idea: [DRL free-play](/idea#exploration-via-free-play) - ["The Diamond Earrings"](/note/note#the-diamond-earrings) - Gwern.net: 'demo mode': show readers a label or feature _n_ times, and then stop (primary use: animate the theme toggle collapsing, and label collapsed blocks, so they learn what those are, and then hide those); +[inline-collapses](/doc/design/2023-05-08-gwern-gwernnet-collapse-inlinecollapseexample.png) ## April 2023 - [Finding Feynman's Maze Story](/maze "‘Feynman’s Maze-Running Story’, Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Design: [`srcset` post-mortem](/design-graveyard#srcset-mobile-optimization "‘Design Graveyard § srcset Mobile Optimization’, Gwern 2010"); [on tags](/design#tags "‘Design Of This Website § Tags’, Gwern 2010") - Gwern.net: [mobile 'scroll-spy' (floating section header)](/doc/design/2023-04-28-gwern-gwernnet-mobile-scrollspyheadertoc.png); [native Twitter annotation popups](/doc/design/2023-04-29-gwern-gwernnet-popups-nativetwitterannotations.png) ## March 2023 - [It From Byte: convergent emergent agency from non-agency](/scaling-hypothesis#it-from-byte "‘The Scaling Hypothesis § It From Byte’, Gwern 2020"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Design: [on the popup systems](/design-graveyard#popup-annotations "‘Design Graveyard § Popup Annotations’, Gwern 2010") [on the link-icons](/design-graveyard#link-icon-css-regexps "‘Design Graveyard § Link-Icon CSS Regexps’, Gwern 2010"); [on the local archives](/archiving#preemptive-local-archiving "‘Archiving URLs § Preemptive Local Archiving’, Gwern 2011"); [outbound link-tracking post-mortem](/design-graveyard#outbound-link-tracking) - [How '80s--'90s anime OVAs worked](/review/anime#how-ovas-worked "‘Anime Reviews § How OVAs Worked’, Gwern 2010") - [Some thoughts on Knuth and programming language design/software engineering/intelligence augmentation](/backstop#knuth) - [Trying out Japanese tanka poetry with GPT-3](/gpt-3#tanka-fujiwara-no-teika) (`davinci-002` feels almost as creative as `davinci` but more tractable, while not being creatively useless like ChatGPT-3) - Idea: [drone real-estate RDD](/idea#real-estate-drone-discontinuities); [schizophrenia treatment](/idea#schizophrenia-meaning-overload), - Gwern.net: [header-based redesign](/doc/design/2023-03-20-gwern-gwernnet-homepage-headeronlylayout.png) of desktop theme; [within-section backlinks](/design#in-context); backlinks can now display original context ## February 2023 - [Are there anti-psychedelics?](/question#anti-psychedelics "‘Open Questions § Anti-Psychedelics’, Gwern 2018"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Zen Sand Garden Puzzle Game](/idea#zen-sand-garden-puzzle-game) - Design: [why to fix URL redirects](/archiving#fixing-redirects) & [avoid Internet Archive links](/archiving#why-not-internet-archive "‘Archiving URLs § Why Not Internet Archive?’, Gwern 2011") - **DL Ideas**: [fingerprinting LLMs](/idea#llm-fingerprinting), [better GAN](/idea#random-sampling-changes) & [diffusion NN sampling/training](/idea#diffusion); [robotic dollhouses](/idea#robotics-scaling-the-doll-house) - [Problems with the Twitter Follow-Request UX](/note/note#twitter-follow-request-ux-problems "‘Miscellaneous § Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems’, Gwern 2009") ## January 2023 - **Gwern.net**: - [moved domains](/design-graveyard#long-urls); image/doc hierarchy merged - new Quote/Site/Annotation [_X_-of-the-Day](/doc/design/2023-05-11-gwern-gwernnet-quoteannotationsitexoftheday-darkmodeindexfooter.png) feature - [`newest` tag: last _n_ annotations](/doc/newest/index) # 2022 {id=2022} ## December 2022 - N/A ## November 2022 - Mirror: ISIS propaganda magazine [_Rumiyah_](/doc/crime/terrorism/rumiyah/index) - Gwern.net: print mode CSS: looks much better, pages should print reasonably now (eg. icons aren't screwed up, transclusions expand so nothing is lost, layout looks like regular pages more)
*Minor Gwern.net changes* since August 2022 not covered previously:
- transcluded link-bibliographies, similar-links, and backlinks: these are now transcluded at the bottom of the page so you can "just keep reading". The links at the top of pages/annotations will continue to popup in desktop mode (as expected), but in mobile in [popins](/doc/cs/css/2021-03-28-gwern-gwernnet-annotations-mobilepopins-darkmode.png), they instead jump down to the transcluded version (as opposed to creating a new popin for what might be a disappointment). This should feel pretty natural and friction-free. - similar-links/backlinks transclude by default at the end of annotations as well, similarly enabling 'just keep reading' and jumping-to-anchor behavior - 'partial' link annotations: links which don't have a true annotation but do have some metadata like tags or backlinks will not be marked as annotated links, but they will still pop up a bare-bones annotation showing what *is* known about that link. This avoids promising the reader too much; if you hover over a link, you know not to expect too much, and maybe what there is will be useful. - [backlinks](/design#backlink "‘Design Of This Website § Backlink’, Gwern 2010"): now display the context of the reverse citation in the original page (like their popup but displayed b default via transclusion) - collapses: uncollapse on hover in popups/tag-directories - popup speed optimizations - WP annotations: lots of small style/bug-fixes to various special-cases like big inline images or mismatched curly quotes (due to a truly ancient bug, turns out, so old that it's due to JavaScript changing how `for-in` works (!)) or thumbnails, removing [admonitions](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#basicformatting/admonitions) & 'list of X' sidebar infoboxes - similar-links embeds with more metadata like backlinks, and filters out several kinds of unhelpful links now; these should increase relevance; backlinks also filter out more - transclude templating system - a [justification+hyphenation A/B test](/ab-test-indent "‘A/B Testing Indentation & Justification’, Gwern 2022") has begun to measure if the book-like indentation has measurably harmful effects; if it does, guess we'll revert to the more Internet-standard approach of no-indentation+newline. - similar-links/backlinks: automatically put into multi-columns if an improved heuristic says to (lots of previous [multi-column lists](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#multiplecolumns) were incorrect and shouldn't've been in columns because the entries were too few and/or text too long) - JS works around flaws in backlinks analysis to guess the intended anchor - remove a lot of compile-only or unused classes/IDs from the HTML to simplify it - Windows: force Source Sans use so ToCs look a lot better (the default font stack, while well-intentioned, looked bad) - lots of renaming - obviously, tons of minor bug fixes, added link icons, added link-live domains, tests and checks (eg. a PHP script for dumping all defined HTML classes from the final compiled HTML was quite helpful in linting and finding a number of misspelled or outdated classes in content pages), in addition to the usual daily drumbeat of writing annotations & adding links...
## October 2022 - [Dynamic programming solutions to "52 Cards Win a Dollar" puzzle](/problem-14 "‘Problem 14 Dynamic Programming Solutions’, Branwen et al 2022"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Gwern.net: special occasions mode: [Halloween](/doc/cs/css/2022-10-31-gwern-gwernnet-darkmode-halloweenmode.png) (rubrication) ## September 2022 - [Sampling Sports Extremes: The Size of a Hypothetical Human All-Stars League](/order-statistic#sampling-sports-extremes-hypothetical-human-all-stars-league "‘Calculating The Gaussian Expected Maximum § Sampling Sports Extremes: Hypothetical Human All-Stars League’, Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## August 2022 - **Gwern.net**: - new dynamic [lazy transclusions](/design-graveyard#transcludes): [`transclude.js`](/static/js/transclude.js) - sidenotes/[margin notes](https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#sidenotes): margin notes now appear exclusively in the left column and sidenotes in the right column, to keep visual simplicity and emphasis the left-to-right summary→detail hierarchical reading ## July 2022 - N/A ## June 2022 - Gwern.net: 'partial' annotation popups (enhancement of live-links) ## May 2022 - Gwern.net: popup system rewrite (faster & rendering now independent of page length using [shadow DOM](/design-graveyard#shadow-dom)) ## April 2022 - [Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff?](/larping){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: switched full cross-page live popups back to scraped thumbnail+abstracts+ToCs for performance; unified annotation tags & legacy essay tag system; removed [auto-smallcaps](/design-graveyard#automatic-smallcaps), [Disqus](/design-graveyard#disqus-comments); experiment with commissioned art for [Batman story](/fiction/batman "‘The Gift of the Amygdali’, Gwern 2017") ## March 2022 - [It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World](/fiction/clippy) (with use of new "reader-mode" [eg.](/doc/design/2022-03-31-gwern-gwernnet-mobile-readermode-light.png)) - [Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading As A Game](/fake-journal-club "‘Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading’, Gwern 2022"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Questions**: [Why does microwave tea taste bad?](/question#microwave-tea); [Indo-Chinese numerical rhetoric](/question#numeric-rhetoric) - Gwern.net: new reader-mode (hides most of UI until hover/Alt-key or mode disabled, for text-centric reading; control: ) ## February 2022 - **Gwern.net**: backlinks & similar-links now recursively pop up; experimental [Ar5iv](https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv-now-offers-papers-in-html-format/ "Articles from arXiv.org as responsive HTML5 web pages") use; wrote GPT-3-using [`paragraphizer.py`](/static/build/paragraphizer.py) tool & used to add line-breaks to ~1k annotations; link icon system rewrite (faster, better+test-suite, >220 new link icons); live link popup system rewrite (similarly, >850 domains to popup); ## January 2022 - ["Danbooru2021: A Large-Scale Crowdsourced and Tagged Anime Illustration Dataset"](/danbooru2021 "Danbooru2021 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.9m+ images annotated with 162m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Peak historical human speed](/note/note#peak-human-speed "‘Miscellaneous § Peak Human Speed’, Gwern 2009"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Should we clean up before or after ourselves?](/note/note#cleanup-before-or-after "‘Miscellaneous § Cleanup: Before Or After?’, Gwern 2009"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} # 2021 {id=2021} ## December 2021 - **Gwern.net**: [GPT-3-powered](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings/use-cases) "similar links" feature added to popups/indexes ## November 2021 - [Internet Community Design as Multi-Level Selection](/backstop#internet-community-design){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Cats: [What is it like to be a cat tail?](/review/cat#cat-tail "‘Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? § tail’, Gwern 2018"); [earwax solved?](/earwax#valerian) ## October 2021 - compiled 40 subject-area tags ## September 2021 - [The Math of Hunting Lions](/note/lion) - **Gwern.net**: link bibliographies re-enabled; new server ## August 2021 - [The 'Screwfly Solution' Solution: Bi-Sexuality](/screwfly){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [On Fetish Economics](/question#fetish-economics "'Open Questions § Fetish Economics', Gwern 2018"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## July 2021 - [CO~2~ Coin: A Blockchain For Carbon Capture](/co2-coin "'CO₂ Coin: Decentralized Carbon Capture Blockchains', Gwern 2021"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: "link tags" added ## June 2021 - Refactored 60 pages - [**LinkAuto.hs**](/static/build/LinkAuto.hs): a Pandoc library for automatically turning user-defined regexp-matching strings into links ([discussion](https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss/c/jgb-Q0F2p1Y/m/1DogIEAtAQAJ)) ## May 2021 - **Proposals**: - ["Choose Your Own Adventure AI Dungeon"](/cyoa "‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games’, Gwern 2021"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Decision Transformers: Preference Learning As Simple As Possible"](/gpt-2-preference-learning#decision-transformers-preference-learning-as-simple-as-possible "‘GPT-2 Preference Learning for Music Generation § Decision Transformers: Preference Learning As Simple As Possible’, Gwern 2019"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## April 2021 - [Better Greek Variable Suggestions for paper writing](/variable "'Rare Greek Variables', Gwern 2021"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2021 - **Gwern.net**: mobile "popins" are finally enabled! ([example](/doc/cs/css/2021-03-28-gwern-gwernnet-annotations-mobilepopins-darkmode.png)); new Wikipedia popups (this 7^th^ implementation enables [*recursive* WP popups](/doc/design/2021-04-01-gwern-gwernnet-annotations-popups-recursivewikipediapopups.png)) ## February 2021 - **Gwern.net**: popups: can now be moved, stickied, and full-screened (another step towards our ambition of Windows-95-in-the-browser!) ## January 2021 - ["Danbooru2020: A Large-Scale Crowdsourced and Tagged Anime Illustration Dataset"](/danbooru2021#danbooru2020 "Danbooru2020 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.2m+ images annotated with 130m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [This Anime Does Not Exist.ai](https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ "'This Anime Does Not Exist.ai (TADNE)', Nearcyan et al 2021"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} [TADNE implementation](/face#extended-stylegan2-danbooru2019-aydao) - **Gwern.net**: +return-to-top floating button; *popups*: can now be disabled (use the 'gear' icon); final reimplementation (dynamic JS now; memoizing the recursive inlining, however clever & elegant, turns out to have painful edgecases & still not be efficient enough---web browsers *really* don't like loading hundreds of kilobytes of extra HTML) # 2020 {id=2020} ## December 2020 - **Gwern.net**: recursive link annotations (memoized for efficiency); cross-page/document popups ([demo](/doc/design/2020-12-25-gwern-gwernnet-recursivepopups.png)); syntax highlighting of source code popups ([demo](/static/js/rewrite.js)); directory indexes ## November 2020 - [On Development Hell](/review/anime#on-development-hell) - **Gwern.net**: dark-mode rewrite complete (fixes page load flash & laggy scrolling) [arabesque](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filet_arabesque.svg) navigation bar in footer with JS keyboard shortcuts; [IBM Plex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Plex) Mono font & custom [ALGOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60)-like syntax highlighting for code blocks; new [sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergina_Sun)/[moon](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese_crest_Tsuki_ni_Hoshi.svg) icons for horizontal rulers; images in Wikipedia popups; new internal link/citation convention for multiple citations ## October 2020 - more Gwern.net fixes of infelicities & outdated infrastructure: major ones: line-breaking on slashes, hyphenation & justified text on Chrome desktop browsers using Edward Kmett's [`hyphenation`](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hyphenation "'hyphenation: Configurable Knuth-Liang hyphenation', Kmett 2012") at compile-time^[Since removed in April 2021 when Chrome desktop support for hyphenation became sufficiently widespread.]; width-full mobile images; rewrote GoodReads conversion for much more readable [book review page](/review/book "'Book Reviews', Gwern 2013"); browsable directories; popup annotations now render more like body. Dark mode users should have noticed it's improved considerably; most of the other fixes either are more subtle (consistency, correct formatting, edge-cases, bold rather than italics), or rewriting old hacks to pay off technical debt. In general, it should just look nicer and more pleasant, and be a little easier for me to write. Minor ones:
- I wrote up [things we've tried & abandoned](/design-graveyard "'Design Graveyard', Gwern 2010"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - rewrote GoodReads conversion for much more readable [book review page](/review/book "'Book Reviews', Gwern 2013"); began compiling all movie/TV/opera reviews into [a single page](/review/movie "'Movie Reviews', Gwern 2014"); began copying all MAL anime/manga reviews & localizing into [a single page](/review/anime "'Anime Reviews', Gwern 2010"); all GR reviews have been moved to Gwern.net permanently - dark mode: - popup whiteness fixed - image handling fixed (images are inverted & colorspace-rotated based on automated heuristic + manual tagging); tweaks like highlighting to make inline code blocks readable - brightness decreased to enable a pure black background without the white foreground being blinding - new [test/demo page](/lorem "'Lorem Ipsum', Gwern 2020"): revealed a number of minor bugs, makes it much easier to test changes for correctness - popup annotations: - popup annotations now render more like body: they have link icons, paragraphs, properly indented lists, multi-column support etc - annotations (titles/authors/abstracts) are auto-smallcaps like the body, making them more consistent and reducing the annotation toil in adding smallcaps spans - automatic annotations get some rewrite rules like 'N=' → '_n_ =' - annotations can now be 'definitions' (popup annotations for non-link text) - popups can now be arbitrary IDs, not just sections or annotations (same as the reverse-footnote popups) - links pop up with a 'context', to support my new citation convention: every citation is either a fulltext hyperlink with annotation, or a link back to another use of that citation with more context/discussion. (This exploits the new automatic ID generation so a link like `[Foo et al 2020](/doc/ai/2020-foo.pdf)` gets an HTML ID like `#foo-et-al-2020`, making it extremely easy to link elsewhere like `for more details on the scaling laws, see the earlier discussion of scaling papers like [Kaplan et al 2020](#kaplan-et-al-2020)`.) - tooltips are shorted versions of link annotations, as a fallback for non-JS or mobile users - bolded abstracts (manual & automatically) - Arxiv abstracts now parsed as LaTeX first (fixing a lot of weirdness); wrong publication dates bug fixed & reported upstream (upstream refuses to fix, so forked) - PLOS/PubMed/Wikipedia abstracts formatting greatly improved (and fixed upstream) - MedRxiv support - `
- compiled all [movie](/review/movie "'Movie Reviews', Gwern 2014") & [anime reviews](/review/anime "'Anime Reviews', Gwern 2010") ## September 2020 - **Gwern.net**: dark mode image handling fixed (images are inverted based on automated heuristic + manual tagging); annotations can now be 'definitions' (popup annotations for non-link text); expanded tooltips as fallback for link annotations; bolded abstracts & revised list hierarchy to use bold; changed all dates to YYYY-MM-DD for consistency; added missing link icons for 7 domains, fixed spacing & overlapping, and harmonized opacity of all link icons; Pandoc now uses MathJax directly, enabling colored equations; internal links to a previous or later section now point up or down (respectively) as a navigation aid; experimental use of [instant.page](https://instant.page/ "'Instant.page: Make your site’s pages instant in 1 minute and improve your conversion rate noticeably.', Dieulot 2019") prefetching; [asterism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_\(typography\)) instead of horizontal ruler; simplified mobile appearance; many miscellaneous bug fixes ## August 2020 - [Sidenotes For Web Design](/sidenote "In typography/design, 'sidenotes' place footnotes/endnotes in the left/right margins for easier reading. I discuss HTML implementations and pros/cons."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons](/note/note#highly-potent-drugs-as-psychological-warfare-weapons "'Miscellaneous § Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons', Gwern 2009"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Notes on [The Lizardman Constant](/note/lizardman "'Lizardman Constant in Surveys', Gwern 2013"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## July 2020 - [GPT-3 implications & the scaling hypothesis](/scaling-hypothesis "'The Scaling Hypothesis', Gwern 2020"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - TWDNEv3.5: [GPT-3 text-snippets](/twdne#gpt-3 "'This Waifu Does Not Exist § GPT-3', Gwern 2019") upgrade ## June 2020 - [GPT-3 Creative Writing](/gpt-3 "Creative writing by OpenAI's GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["PALM: The PALM Anime Location Model And Dataset"](/crop#hands "PALM ('PALM Anime Locator Model') is a dataset of k=5,382 anime-style Danbooru2019 images annotated with the locations of n=14,394 hands, a YOLOv3 model trained using those annotations to detect hands in anime-style images, and a second dataset of n=96,534 hands cropped from the Danbooru2019 dataset using the PALM YOLO model and n=58,536 of them upscaled to ≥512px."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Tech Holy Wars are Coordination Problems"](/holy-war "Flamewars over platforms & upgrades are so bitter not because people are jerks but because the choice will influence entire ecosystems, benefiting one platform through network effects & avoiding 'bitrot' while subtly sabotaging the rest through 'bitcreep'."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## May 2020 - Ganbooru prototype: [256px BigGAN trained on Danbooru2019](/biggan#danbooru2019e621-256px-biggan "Release: 256px BigGAN trained on Danbooru2019+e621 for 607k iterations; promising prototype for GAN anime generation"); [Danbooru2019 Figures dataset](/crop#danbooru2019-figures "Danbooru2019 Figures dataset is a large-scale Character anime illustration dataset of _n_ = 855,880 images (248GB) cropped from Danbooru2019 using the AniSeg anime character detection model. The images are cropped to focus on a single character's entire visible body, extending 'portrait' crops to 'figure' crops. This is useful for tasks focusing on individual characters, such as character classification or for generative tasks.") released - Gwern.net: - The newsletter moved to [Substack](https://substack.com/) due to reaching the TinyLetter 5000-subscriber limit - [experimental `` optimization](https://groups.google.com/g/hakyll/c/aFH9LHKyDZ8/m/-zY0SHdUBAAJ) ([since removed](/design-graveyard#srcset-mobile-optimization "‘Design Graveyard § srcset Mobile Optimization’, Gwern 2010"){.backlink-not}) - `popups.js`: +support for reverse-footnote popups ## April 2020 - [Generating MIDI Music With GPT-2](/gpt-2-music#generating-midi-with-10k30k-context-windows "Generating MIDI by converting to ABC and expanding the GPT-2 context window - works, if only just"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2020 - [Order statistics: The Probability of a Double Maximum](/order-statistic#probability-of-bivariate-maximum "What is the probability of the best (out of _n_ competitors) at one thing being the best at another related thing? Should we expect the best basketball player to also be the tallest? No. In fact, the probability of a 'double maximum' asymptotically goes to 1/n, surprisingly."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: [dark mode theme switcher](/static/js/dark-mode.js "darkmode.js: Javascript library for controlling page appearance, toggling between regular white and 'dark mode'"); relocated from S3 to Nginx, please report any server bugs like inaccessible pages ## February 2020 - Gwern.net: - added features: - new [local link archive](/static/build/LinkArchive.hs) feature (uses [SingleFile](https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/)) - ["admonitions"](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#basicformatting/admonitions) & [multi-column lists](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#multiplecolumns) ([Markdeep](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)-inspired); - [auto-smallcaps](https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss/c/BDNfhctWJpg/m/bGk0wEtfBgAJ "'Auto-smallcaps filter', Gwern 2020") plugin - removed features: `` quote syntax highlighting due to maintenance/annotation burden; removed PNG preview popups due to low screenshot quality (the Web is why we can't have nice things) & many reader complaints ## January 2020 - ["Danbooru2019: A Large-Scale Crowdsourced and Tagged Anime Illustration Dataset"](/danbooru2021#danbooru2019 "Danbooru2019 is a large-scale anime image database with 3.69m+ images annotated with 108m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Preference Learning GPT-2 Music: Null Result](/gpt-2-preference-learning "Experiments with OpenAI's 'preference learning' approach, which trains a NN to predict global quality of datapoints, and then uses reinforcement learning to optimize that directly, rather than proxies. I am unable to improve quality, perhaps due to too-few ratings."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - This Waifu Does Not Exist[v3](/twdne#twdnev3 "'This Waifu Does Not Exist § TWDNEv3', Gwern 2019"): 100k [StyleGAN 2](/face#stylegan-2 "'Making Anime Faces With StyleGAN § StyleGAN 2', Gwern 2019") anime portrait samples - [Subreddit Simulator: GPT-2-1.5b upgrade](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta/comments/entfgx/update_upgrading_to_15b_gpt2_and_adding_22_new/ "Subreddit Simulator imitates Redditor discusses using GPT-2; we train GPT-2-1.5b on 10GB from ~100 subreddits & provide an upgrade.") - [14 Internet Search Case Studies](/search-case-studies "14 case studies of difficult-to-find resources or citations, and how I went about locating them, giving practical demonstrations of the various Internet search techniques described previously and showing how to think about searches.") # 2019 {id=2019} ## December 2019 - [GPT-2 Folk Music](/gpt-2-music "Generating Irish and folk music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [On Correlation & Causality in the Social Sciences](/causality#overview-the-current-situation) (see also my [Replication Crisis bibliography](/replication#further-reading)) - ["Hydrocephalus and Intelligence: The Hollow Men"](/hydrocephalus "Some claim the disease hydrocephalus reduces brain size by 95% but often with normal or even above-average intelligence, and thus brains aren't really necessary. Neither is true."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["The Most Abandoned Books on GoodReads"](/goodreads "Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportion gives an entirely different result than absolute counts."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: [Tufte-CSS](https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#sidenotes) margin notes support (glossing experiment---demonstrations in Folk-Music/Hydrocephalus/GoodReads/[Internet Search Tips](/search "A description of tips and tricks for effective Internet search of papers/books for research.")) ## November 2019 - [Rubrication Design Examples](/red "A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic motif of using red against black for emphasis."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [On Cats' Love of Earwax](/earwax "Collation of anecdotes and speculation about why cats like earwax, and human earwax especially."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: reverse citation links now available in popups via [Jose Luis Ricon's](https://nintil.com/) new [Semantic Scholar search engine](https://ricon.dev/ "Meta-Search: Find Systematic reviews and meta-analysis that cite a given paper!") (which prioritizes reviews/meta-analyses which cite a given paper) ## September 2019 - [Sperm selection as minor enhancement to embryo selection](/embryo-selection#sperm-phenotype-selection "Sperm can be selected on traits such as mobility, which are measures of quality. These may be correlated with genetics for adult traits, and one can select from billions of sperm. Estimating the gain, it is probably worthwhile but small.") - [On Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change in Scandinavia](/note/statistic#selective-emigration-and-personality-trait-change "'Statistical Notes § Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change', Gwern 2014") - **Gwern.net**: added Bitcoin support to [`Inflation.hs`](/static/build/Inflation.hs "'InflationAdjuster', Gwern 2019"); CSS optimizations to cut mobile load time by half; width-full image support ## August 2019 - [On the 'Mouse Utopia' experiment](/mouse-utopia "Did John Calhoun's 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for doubt."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Order Statistics: Sampling Gompertz Distribution Extremes](/order-statistic#sampling-gompertz-distribution-extremes "Random sampling of extreme order statistics (such as 1-in-10-billion) in R, with application to the Jeanne Calment lifespan anomaly") - Gwern.net: - [`popups.js`](/static/js/popups.js "'popups.js', Achmiz 2019"): a new JS library which reads link annotations and displays them in a popup (eg. WP displays title/summary, and papers display title/author/date/abstract); works on mobile; generalizes & obsoletes [`wikipedia-popups.js`](/static/js/old/wikipedia-popups.js "'wikipedia-popups.js', Achmiz 2019"): `popups.js` reads static annotations, removing the runtime spam, and importantly, annotations are now cached at compile-time, so additional sources can be included. It currently provides link annotations for Arxiv, bioRxiv, Pubmed Central, Crossref, Gwern.net, and hand-written annotations, in-popup YouTube video support, with a fallback to Chrome/Ghostscript-generated screenshot previews for all other URLs - added more custom-SVG/text link icons for link icons (custom: arXiv/[BioRxiv](/static/img/icon/chi-dna.svg) (unofficial), [Google Scholar](/static/img/icon/google-scholar.svg), [Pubmed](/static/img/icon/nlm-ncbi.svg), [Internet Archive](/static/img/icon/internet-archive.svg), [Guardian](/static/img/icon/the-guardian.svg), [NYT](/static/img/icon/new-york-times.svg), [New Yorker](/static/img/icon/the-new-yorker.svg), [Washington Post](/static/img/icon/washington-post.svg), [DeepMind](/static/img/icon/deepmind.svg), [OpenAI](/static/img/icon/openai.svg), [MIRI](/static/img/icon/miri.svg), [Erowid](/static/img/icon/erowid.svg)) ## July 2019 - ["Timing Technology: Lessons from the Media Lab"](/timing "Technological developments can be foreseen but the knowledge is largely useless because startups are inherently risky and require optimal timing. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, taking a reinforcement learning perspective."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: tooltip popups for Wikipedia article summaries ([`wikipedia-popups.js`](/static/js/old/wikipedia-popups.js "'wikipedia-popups.js', Achmiz 2019")) ## June 2019 - ["Dog Cloning For Special Forces: Breed All You Can Breed"](/clone "Decision analysis of whether cloning the most elite Special Forces dogs is a profitable improvement over standard selection procedures. Unless training is extremely cheap or heritability is extremely low, dog cloning is hypothetically profitable.")/[NBA recruiting using height polygenic scores](/clone#nba-screening-scenario "Analysis of selection of extreme height polygenic scores: nontrivial numbers of tall people can be found by genomic screening with a current PGS, and as PGSes approach their predictive upper bound (derived from whole-genome-based heritability estimates of height), selection is capable of selecting almost all tall people by taking the top PGS percentile."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["On Seeing Through 'On Seeing Through: A Unified Theory': A Unified Theory" ](/unseeing "Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [On Having Enough Socks](/socks "Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of explicit deliberative thought where no natural triggers or habits exist."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [BigGAN for anime faces: 256px results](/biggan#biggan-256px-danbooru2018-1k "I experiment with 128px ImageNet transfer learning (successful) with ~6 GPU-days, and from-scratch 256px anime portraits of 1000 characters on a 8×2080ti machine for a month (mixed results). My BigGAN results are good but compromised by practical problems with the released BigGAN code base."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (not quite yet) ## May 2019 - ["How Should We Critique Research?"](/research-criticism "Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless. What makes a good criticism is the chance of being a 'difference which makes a difference' to our ultimate actions."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["One Man's Modus Ponens..."](/modus "'One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens' is a saying in Western philosophy encapsulating a common response to a logical proof which generalizes the 'reductio ad absurdum' and consists of rejecting a premise based on an implied conclusion. I explain it in more detail, provide examples, and a Bayesian gloss."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [TWDNEv2](https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ "'ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net', Gwern 2019"): upgraded anime faces to ['portrait' samples](/face#anime-faces-portrait) (bigger crops of faces, showing ears/hats etc) & some 345M plot summaries; GPT-2 poetry: [upgraded to 345M](/gpt-2#gpt-2-345m) (plus new ["nucleus sampling"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09751#allen "'The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration', Holtzman et al 2019") generation) ## April 2019 - ["Everything Is Correlated"](/everything "Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as 'null hypothesis testing'."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: deprecated RSS (replaced by [the newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013")); added "dark mode" support for Safari/FF (inverts colors for night reading on browsers supporting new CSS media query) ## March 2019 - ["How To Generate Faces With StyleGAN"](/face "A tutorial explaining how to train and generate high-quality anime faces with StyleGAN neural networks, and tips/scripts for effective StyleGAN use."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Finetuning the GPT-2-117M Transformer for English Poetry Generation"](/gpt-2 "Retraining SOTA text-generation NNs on new corpuses, such as Project Gutenberg, for high quality English poetry generation"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Glue Robbers: Sequencing Nobelists Using Collectible Letters"](/embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequencing-nobelists-using-collectible-letters "Motivated by forensics/genealogy, DNA can now be recovered from historical artifacts like letters/stamps; this would enable GWASes of the greatest minds in human history") - rewrote ["The Gift of the Amygdali"](/fiction/batman "'The Gift of the Amygdali', Gwern 2017") - Gwern.net CSS changes: [Tufte-style sidenotes](/sidenote#tufte-css) (for displaying footnotes in margins on wide screens) via Said Achmiz's new JS library, [`sidenotes.js`](/static/js/sidenotes.js); [static compilation of MathJax's rendering](https://joa.sh/posts/2015-09-14-prerender-mathjax.html "Prerendering MathJax [for Hakyll blogs]") of MathML math via [`mathjax-node-page`](https://github.com/pkra/mathjax-node-page/) (enables math for JS-disabled users & eliminates the <5s rendering time on math-heavy pages like the [embryo selection page](/embryo-selection "'Embryo Selection For Intelligence', Gwern 2016")); added support for [dropcaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial) ([Goudy Initialen](https://www.1001fonts.com/goudy-initialen-font.html), [yinit](https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb12-1/tb31hara.pdf#page=8 "'Typesetting Old German: Fraktur, Schwabacher, Gotisch and Initials', Haralambous 1990"), [Deutsche Zierschrift](https://www.typografie.info/3/Schriften/fonts.html/deutsche-zierschrift-r250/); [Cheshire](https://wiki.obormot.net/Main/BonusFontsDemo?demo_font_one=Cheshire+Initials); [Kanzlei](https://wiki.obormot.net/Main/BonusFontsDemo?demo_font_one=Kanzlei+Initialen); [other examples](https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/otherfonts.html#initials "The LaTeX Font Catalogue - Other Fonts - Initials")) for thematic emphasis; disabled Disqus ads; second [ad A/B test](/banner "'Banner Ads Considered Harmful', Gwern 2017") ended, so disabled banner ad; prototype automatic inflation-adjustment of dollar amounts via [new Hakyll plugin](/static/build/Inflation.hs "'InflationAdjuster', Gwern 2019"); outdent headers & left shift H1 headers for scannability; more Tufte-style tables with different styling for small/simple tables vs complex width-full tables; better highlighting on ToC; `image-focus.js` now runs in slideshow mode; Wikipedia link annotations; resized & optimized images with [advpng](https://github.com/amadvance/advancecomp)/[mozjpeg](https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg) ## February 2019 - ["This Waifu Does Not Exist"](https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ "'ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net', Gwern 2019") [background & implementation](/twdne "I describe how I made a website displaying random anime faces generated by StyleGAN neural networks, and how it went viral."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Origin of 'Littlewood’s Law of Miracles'"](/littlewood-origin "Freeman Dyson probably invented what is called 'Littlewood’s Law of Miracles'"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net** CSS/HTML/JS changes: click-to-zoom images (using `image-focus.js`); headers are now self-links; [Tufte CSS](https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#epigraphs)-style epigraph support; Table of Contents: Wikipedia-style section numbering, margin & size tweaks, lightweight subset of [Source Sans Pro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Sans) (for Mac users); nicer diamond list icons; sleeker sidebar (especially nice on mobile); PDF/internal/section links are now annotated with icons; borders on tables, image figures, and blockquotes; [old-style numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures) in text & tabular numerals in tables; [justified text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justified) (but not in Chrome due to decade-old lack of hyphenation); narrowed maximum body-width in characters & made line-height responsive to body-width (hopefully addresses the perennial complaints that pages are always too wide/too narrow/lines too close); quote highlighting disabled by default; collapsible code-blocks; inline smallcaps support; optimized SVG logo & favicon; page-specific CSS overrides enabled; list paragraph bugs in Pandoc fixed; compressed JPEGs; changed code syntax-highlighting scheme to match overall esthetics better; miscellaneous responsive design/mobile improvements - `image-focus.js` ([JS](/static/js/image-focus.js)): release of new, correct, lightweight, dependency-free JS library written by Said Achmiz for implementing "click to zoom" on images (useful for large images/graphs) ## January 2019 - [Danbooru2018 released: a dataset of 3.33m anime images (2.5tb) with 92.7m descriptive tags](/danbooru2021#danbooru2018 "Danbooru2018 is a large-scale anime image database with 3.3m+ images annotated with 92.7m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - Gwern.net CSS/JS changes courtesy of [Said Achmiz](https://wiki.obormot.net/): implemented collapsible sections for hiding digressions/especially large sections, for more readable pages; more varied headers to convey the semantic hierarchy; added use of a lightweight subset of [Source Serif Pro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Serif), as a better [Baskerville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville) font with real [small caps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps); improved font selection on Macs; minimized MathJax library use, for faster loading - [Acne: a good Quantified Self topic for self-experimentation](/note/statistic#acne-a-good-quantified-self-topic "'Statistical Notes § Acne: a good Quantified Self topic', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn"](/note/note#the-tragedy-of-grand-admiral-thrawn "'Miscellaneous § The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn', Gwern 2009"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (why he had to be assassinated at the end of the [Thrawn trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrawn_trilogy)) - [Jailbreaking Frank P. Ramsey's papers](/note/frank-ramsey "'Frank P. Ramsey bibliography', Gwern 2019"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} # 2018 {id=2018} ## December 2018 - ["Internet Search Tips"](/search "'Internet Search Tips', Gwern 2018"){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: effective use of Google/Google Scholar/Libgen & other resources for papers/books/pages ([I'm also offering bounties for papers/books I haven't been able to get](/fulltext "Research Bounties On Fulltexts: A list of papers/books/materials I have failed to obtain, and financial bounties for anyone who can provide copies to me or the Internet.")) - ["Multi-Stage Selection Bean Machine Demo"](/doc/statistics/order/beanmachine-multistage/index.html "An interactive JS visualization of Galton quincunxes demonstrating the compounding power/ratchet effect of iterative selection rather than a single selection step."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media"](/littlewood "Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored. At scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning"](/backstop "Speculation on links between Coase's theory of the firm, the socialist calculation debate, group selection, and meta reinforcement learning as two-layer optimization problems."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## November 2018 - [_Cat Sense_, Bradshaw 2013: Are We Good Owners?](/review/cat "'Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners?', Gwern 2018"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (on cat psychology, genetics, domestication, & dysgenics) - Embryo selection: [FAQ](/embryo-selection#faq-frequently-asked-questions), [multi-stage selection](/embryo-selection#multi-stage-selection), [chromosome/gamete selection](/embryo-selection#gamete-selection), [optimal search of batches](/embryo-selection#optimal-stoppingsearch "'Embryo Selection For Intelligence § Optimal Stopping/Search', Gwern 2016"), & [robustness to error in utility weights](/embryo-selection#robustness-of-utility-weights) - ["Oh Deer: Could Deer Evolve to Avoid Car Accidents?"](/note/statistic#oh-deer-could-deer-evolve-to-avoid-car-accidents "'Statistical Notes § Oh Deer: Could Deer Evolve to Avoid Car Accidents?', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["Urban Area Cost-of-Living as Big Tech Moats & Employee Golden Handcuffs"](/note/note#urban-area-cost-of-living-as-big-tech-moats-employee-golden-handcuffs) (speculations on Bay Area real estate & SV's future) - [My hardware/software setup](/me#uses-this "Gwern Uses This") ## October 2018 - ["_My Little Pony_: Immanetizing The Equestrian"](/review/mlp "A review of the cartoon series 'My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic', focusing on fandom, plot, development, and meaning of bronydom."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (MLP revisited & considered 8 years later) - ["Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding"](/review/bakewell "A review of Russell 1986's _Like Engend'ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England_, describing development of selective breeding and discussing models of the psychology and sociology of innovation."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Overview of major current approaches for complex-trait genetic engineering](/embryo-selection#overview-of-major-approaches) - [A list of open questions](/question "Some questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find standard answers to be unsatisfying"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [What is the morning-writing effect?](/morning-writing "Writing in the Morning: Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## September 2018 - [SMPY bibliography](/smpy "An annotated bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## June 2018 - [Cordwainer Smith's](!W "Cordwainer Smith") ["'Scanners Live in Vain' as realistic SF"](/scanners "Discussion of Cordwainer Smith SF story, arguing that the pain-of-space is based on forgotten psychological issues in air travel, and concerns about worse ones in space travel, which were partially vindicated by the existence of interesting psychological changes in astronauts."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["A Market For Fat: The Transfer Machine"](/note/note#a-market-for-fat-the-transfer-machine "What if there were a machine which could transfer kilograms of body fat between people? What would be the social, economic, and medical consequences?") - [Genetics and _My Little Pony_](/mlp-genetics "A discussion of possible inheritance patterns of pony race in 'My Little Pony'"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## May 2018 - ["Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's _Dune_"](/dune-genetics "Discussion of oddities in the fictional breeding program in _Dune_ which may be explained by an agricultural focus."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [ZMA sleep self-experiment](/zeo/zma "A randomized blinded self-experiment of the effects of ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6) on my sleep; results suggest small benefit to sleep quality but are underpowered and damaged by Zeo measurement error/data issues."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (inconclusive but suggestive of benefits) - [Bacopa quasi-experiment](/bacopa "A small 2014-2015 non-blinded self-experiment using Bacopa monnieri to investigate effect on memory/sleep/self-ratings in an ABABA design; no particular effects were found."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (no correlates) ## April 2018 - ["Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement"](/complement "A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Small ways in which ordinary life has been getting better since the late '80s/early '90s](/improvement "A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2018 - moved newsletter from MailChimp to TinyLetter due to exorbitant MailChimp fees ## February 2018 - [Danbooru2017: a new dataset of 2.94m anime images (1.9tb) with 77.5m descriptive tags](/danbooru2021#danbooru2017 "Danbooru2017 is a large-scale anime image database with 2.9m+ images annotated with 77.5m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation.") - ["The Gift of the Amygdali"](/fiction/batman "'Batman' short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates: pain/guilt/fear/anxiety.") - ["Dynasties and Embryo Selection"](/embryo-selection#embryo-selection-and-dynasties "A toy model of dynastic succession as order statistics in a liability-threshold model suggests that full-strength multiple embryo selection could make a meaningful difference in ensuring perpetuation of powerful families.") - tweaked Gwern.net SVG logo courtesy of Kezarin Brando ## January 2018 - ["How many computers are in your computer?"](/computers){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [The most common error in technological forecasting: conjunctive vs disjunctive reasoning](/forking-path "'Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} # 2017 {id=2017} ## November 2017 - ["Banner Ads Considered Harmful"](/banner "9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## October 2017 - [On the history of the tank/neural-net urban legend](/tank "AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## September 2017 - **Gwern.net** updates: Google AdSense banner ads removed (due to initial analysis of A/B test results); URL scheme changed to replace spaces by hyphens & delete commas/apostrophes (due to persistent user error); footer moved to sidebar; re-tagging pages; font/CSS tweaked for faster loads & wider margins; hosted documents reorganized & expanded with personal archives; began buying & scanning all cited books to provide fulltexts; added sitemap generation to expose fulltexts to search engines ## July 2017 - ["How Would You Prove You Are a Time-traveler From the Past?"](/note/note#how-would-you-prove-you-are-a-time-traveler-from-the-past "'Miscellaneous § How Would You Prove You Are a Time-traveler From the Past?', Gwern 2009"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## June 2017 - ["Proportion of Important Thinkers by Global Region Over Time in Charles Murray's _Human Accomplishment_: bootstrap & Bayesian time-series approaches"](/note/statistic#proportion-of-important-thinkers-by-global-region-over-time-in-charles-murrays-human-accomplishment){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## April 2017 - [mineral water taste test](/water "Blind randomized taste-test of mineral/distilled/tap waters using Bayesian best-arm finding; no large differences in preference"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2017 - **Gwern.net**: HTTPS now mandatory; HTML sections rewritten using HTML5 semantic markup for hopefully better compatibility with screen readers & offline browsers like Pocket/ReadItLater; "importance" metadata added to all pages to rank them; "belief" metadata renamed more intuitively as "confidence"; finish adding 301 Redirects for all broken links & common typos; renamed & all darknet market pages for current terminology; rewrote Patreon profile ## February 2017 - ["'Story Of Your Life' Is Not A Time-Travel Story"](/story-of-your-life "Famous Ted Chiang SF short story 'Story Of Your Life' is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version, being about time-travel/precognition; I explain it is instead an exploration of the psychology of timeless physics interpretations."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## January 2017 - [The Kelly Coin-Flipping Problem: Exact Solutions via Decision Trees](/coin-flip "Decision-theoretic analysis of how to optimally play Haghani & Dewey 2016's double-or-nothing coin-flipping game with an edge and ceiling better than using the Kelly Criterion. Computing and following an exact decision tree increases earnings by $6.6 over a modified KC."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Efficiently calculating the average maximum sample from a sample of Gaussians](/order-statistic "'Calculating The Gaussian Expected Maximum', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} # 2016 {id=2016} ## December 2016 - [Why Tool AIs Want To Be Agent AIs](/tool-ai "Tool AIs limited purely to inferential tasks will be less intelligent, efficient, and economically valuable than independent reinforcement-learning AIs learning actions over computation/data/training/architecture/hyperparameters/external-resource use."){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [WiFi bandwidth benchmarking](/wifi "'Internet WiFi improvement', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [why aren't there powerful general languages?](/language "'On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [statistical model criticism with machine learning](/note/statistic#model-criticism-via-machine-learning) - compiled [my epigrams](/epigram "'Epigrams', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - **Gwern.net**: CSS, logo, and index page redesigns; redirects for broken incoming URLs; scripts & YAML updates for upstream Pandoc/Hakyll changes ## November 2016 - [laptop data loss postmortem](/note/note#november-2016-data-loss-postmortem "'Miscellaneous § November 2016 data loss postmortem', Gwern 2009") - [detecting fake Markov chain bots](/note/statistic#detecting-fake-human-markov-chain-bots) - switched Gwern.net to HTTPS ## October 2016 - [genetic correlation Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## September 2016 - [frequency of catnip response in cats: a meta-analysis](/catnip "'Catnip immunity and alternatives', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (and launched a survey to expand the dataset) ## August 2016 - [morning caffeine self-experiment](/zeo/caffeine#first-morning-caffeine-experiment){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [embryo selection on multiple traits which are genetically correlated](/embryo-selection#multiple-selection-on-genetically-correlated-traits){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Great Scott! Personal Name Collisions and the Birthday Paradox](/note/statistic#great-scott-personal-name-collisions-and-the-birthday-paradox){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## July 2016 - [Computational Complexity vs the Singularity](/complexity "Complexity no Bar to AI: Critics of AI risk suggest diminishing returns to computing means AI will be weak; I argue argument breaks if any premises rejected"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## June 2016 - [_Genius Revisited_: Critiquing the Value of High IQ Elementary Schools](/hunter "'Genius Revisited Revisited', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Inferring mean ethnic IQs from very high IQ samples like SMPY/TIP](/note/statistic#inferring-mean-iqs-from-smpytip-elite-samples "'Statistical Notes § Inferring mean IQs from', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Newton's comet apocalypse system](/newton "'Newton’s System of the World and Comets', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## May 2016 - Wikipedia article on [Genome-wide complex trait analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genome-wide_complex_trait_analysis&oldid=871165308){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (GCTA) - [Candy Japan new packaging decision analysis](/candy-japan "Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of effect of fancier packaging on subscription cancellations"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2016 - [Adding metadata to an RNN for mimicking individual author style](/rnn-metadata "'RNN Metadata for Mimicking Author Style', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## February 2016 - [Embryo selection for intelligence cost-benefit analysis](/embryo-selection "A cost-benefit analysis of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence with 2015-2016 state-of-the-art"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Armstrong's control problem: Reinforce.js demo](/doc/reinforcement-learning/armstrong-controlproblem/index.html){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## January 2016 - [vitamin D for longevity](/longevity#vitamin-d){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - ["The Power of Twins: Revisiting Student's Scottish Milk Experiment Example"](/milk "'The Power of Twins: The Scottish Milk Experiment', Gwern 2016"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} # 2015 {id=2015} ## December 2015 - [metformin for life-extension: cost-benefit analysis](/longevity#metformin){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [shell scripts for easy cryptographic timestamping](/timestamping "'Easy Cryptographic Timestamping of Files', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## October 2015 - [When Does The Mail Come? A subjective Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times](/mail-delivery "'When Should I Check The Mail?', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Dysgenics power analysis: how much genetic data would it take to falsify such claims?](/note/statistic#dysgenics-power-analysis "'Statistical Notes § Dysgenics power analysis', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## September 2015 - [modafinil user survey](/modafinil-survey "'Modafinil community survey', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (ran 2015-09-26--2015-10-26) - [`resorter` tool for statistically re-ranking a set of ratings](/resorter "'Resorting Media Ratings', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Bitter Melon experimental & cost-benefit analysis](/melon "'Bitter Melon for blood glucose', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [noisy polls: modeling potentially falsified poll data](/note/statistic#dealing-with-all-or-nothing-unreliability-of-data "'Statistical Notes § Dealing with all-or-nothing unreliability of data', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - [Value of Information for suicide](/note/statistic#value-of-information-clinical-prediction-instruments-for-suicide) (example cost-benefit analysis of weakly predicting suicide) ## July 2015 - [Dark Net Market archives, 2011--2015](/dnm-archive "Mirrors of Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets & forums 2013-2015, and other material"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - A/B tests: finished [metadata test](/ab-test#moving-sidebar-metadata-into-page); [proposal towards](/ab-test#deep-reinforcement-learning) recurrent neural network for reinforcement learning of CSS - [Air conditioner upgrade](/note/statistic#air-conditioner-replacement) cost-benefit analysis - Gwern.net: - [switched to Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern) for donations - optimized website loading (removed CSE, A/B testing, non-validating XML, outbound link-tracking; simplified Disqus; minified JS, and fully async/deferred JS loading) ## June 2015 - rewrote Gwern.net CSS to be mobile-friendly; should now be readable in an iPhone 6 browser - wrote [two summer poems](/fiction/poem#summer), on earthworms and the rain ## May 2015 - [DNM arrests compilation](/dnm-arrest "'DNM-related arrests, 2011–2015', Gwern 2012"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} finished & summaries calculated - analysis of [Effective Altruists' donations as reported in the LW survey](/ea-donation "'LWer Effective Altruism donations, 2013-2014', Gwern 2015"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} ## March 2015 - [LLLT self-experiment finished](/nootropic/nootropics#experiment-1): no effect (so earlier correlative results were grossly overestimated; I'm starting to expect this from anything non-randomized...) - an [ICE subpoena on my Reddit account](/doc/darknet-market/2015-03-30-gwern-redditsubpoena.html) caused me a good deal of trouble - playing with inferring Bayesian networks for my [Zeo](/note/statistic#zeo-sleep-data) & [body weight](/note/statistic#daily-weight-data-graph) data (powerful generalization of SEMs, but requires a lot of data before networks stabilize) ## February 2015 - [DNM arrests](/dnm-arrest "A listing of all known arrests and prosecutions connected to the Tor-Bitcoin drug darknet markets"){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: split out of Silk Road page & began bringing up-to-date with all known incidents across all markets - [electric vs stove kettle boiling-time analysis](/kettle "'Tea Reviews § Electric vs stove kettle: fight!', Gwern 2011"): collected some simple data on my kettles & demonstrated some statistics tools on the dataset like a Bayesian measurement-error model ## January 2015 - ["Silk Goxed: How DPR used MtGox for hedging & lost big"](/doc/darknet-market/silk-road/1/2015-01-24-gwern-silkgoxed.html){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - A/B tests: no positive results from sidebar test; set up [in-page metadata format](/ab-test#moving-sidebar-metadata-into-page) # 2014 {id=2014} ## December 2014 Nothing finished. ## November 2014 - [A/B indentation test](/ab-test#indented-paragraphs){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: no real result, defaulted to 2em ## October 2014 QS: - [Redshift self-experiment](/zeo/redshift "'Redshift sleep experiment', Gwern 2012"): screen-reddening software shifts bedtime forward by 20 minutes - [LLLT re-analysis](/nootropic/nootropics#sleep){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: no change in sleep as hypothesized by another LLLT user - [analysis](/2014-spirulina "'2014 Spirulina randomized self-experiment', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} of sceaduwe's spirulina/allergies self-experiment (no reduction in allergies) ## September 2014 QS: - [Noopept experiment](/nootropic/nootropics#noopept-followup-experiment){.include-annotation .backlink-not} (no benefits) - [Treadmill spaced repetition experiment](/treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-repetition-performance-randomized-experiment "'Treadmill desk observations § Treadmill effect on Spaced repetition performance: randomized experiment', Gwern 2012"){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: expanded analysis to cover treadmill's impact on successive reviews with SEM (no additional damage to recall beyond that implied by the original damage) Stats: - anthology on how ["everything is correlated"](/everything "'Everything Is Correlated', Gwern 2014"){.include-annotation .backlink-not} - probability/gerontology problem: can one visit 566 centenarians before any die? [No.](/note/statistic#the-traveling-gerontologist-problem){.include-annotation .backlink-not} Technology: - ["Effective Use of arbtt"](https://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/effective-use.html): My window tracker/time-logger of choice is [arbtt](https://arbtt.nomeata.de/) which records X window info for later classification and analysis; but one of the challenges is you don't know how to set up arbtt or improve your environment or write classifications rules. So I wrote a tutorial. - [Time-lock crypto](/self-decrypting "'Time-lock encryption', Gwern 2011"){.include-annotation .backlink-not}: wrote a Bash implementation of serial hashing time-lock crypto, link to all known implementations of hash time-lock crypto ## August 2014 - Nootropics: [initial results on LLLT](/nootropic/nootropics#lllt), correlates with large increases; began followup randomized experiment - purchased a [North Paw compass belt](/note/note#north-paw) ## July 2014 QS/self-experiments: - lithium orotate experiment finished: [no effects positive or negative](/nootropic/nootropics#lithium-experiment) - magnesium citrate experiment finished: [initial benefits but apparent cumulative overdose led to net negative effect](/nootropic/nootropics#citrate "'Nootropics § Magnesium Self-Experiments', Gwern 2010") and [mixed effects on sleep](/zeo/zeo#magnesium-citrate "‘Zeo sleep self-experiments § Magnesium citrate’, Gwern 2010") - sleep correlations: - [alcohol](/zeo/zeo#alcohol "'Zeo sleep self-experiments § Alcohol', Gwern 2010"): no harm - [optimal bedtime](/zeo/zeo#bed-time-for-better-sleep): a little earlier than usual - [optimal wakeup time](/zeo/zeo#rise-time-for-productivity): a little earlier than usual Statistics: - [do causal networks explain why correlation ≠ causation is so often true?](/causality "'Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation', Gwern 2014") - a little example of estimating [scores from censored data](/note/statistic#estimating-censored-test-scores) Debunking: - [Bicycle face](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bicycle_face#Serious_sourcing_issues) - ["Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dionysius_Lardner#Did_he_actually_say_that.3F) - [did _Fifty Shades of Gray_ have only 4k readers as the original Twilight fanfiction?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tGWMRoYbuJLzCnCE4/fifty-shades-of-self-fulfilling-prophecy) Misc: - humorous [little essay on _The Matrix_](/note/note#tv-the-matrix) - [long hair as a costly signal of fitness & tradeoff](/note/note#tradeoffs-and-costly-signaling-in-appearances) - [how I gather & organize my information in Evernote & elsewhere](/about#information-organizing) Site: - [June-July 2014 traffic figures](/traffic#january-2014july-2014) - finished [floating footnotes test](/ab-test#floating-footnotes): no apparent harm, as hoped - began [paragraph indentation test](/ab-test#indented-paragraphs) (responding to anonymous complaint) ## June 2014 - finished & analyzed [caffeine-pill wakeup pilot trial](/zeo/caffeine "'Caffeine wakeup experiment', Gwern 2013"), began blinded self-experiment - [BeeLine Reader A/B test finished](/ab-test#beeline-reader-text-highlighting): no version performed statistically-significantly better - compiled & expanded [selection of my poems](/fiction/poem "'Poems', Gwern 2011") ## May 2014 - [Treadmill/spaced repetition experiment](/treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-repetition-performance-randomized-experiment "'Treadmill desk observations § Treadmill effect on Spaced repetition performance: randomized experiment', Gwern 2012") - [short interview with Mike Powers](/silk-road#mike-power-questions) on current darknet markets ## April 2014 - [Epigrams on technology](/epigram#technology) - an anonymous user sent in [a fanfiction about Satoshi Nakamoto](/blackmail#fanfiction), which was too good to simply delete - I have posted the past issues of the newsletter online: - [December 2013](/newsletter/2013/12 "'December 2013 News', Gwern 2014") - [January 2014](/newsletter/2014/01 "'January 2014 News', Gwern 2014") - [February 2014](/newsletter/2014/02 "'February 2014 News', Gwern 2014") - [March 2014](/newsletter/2014/03 "'March 2014 News', Gwern 2014") ## March 2014 Bitcoin: - [Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto emails](/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto "'Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails', Nakamoto & Dai 2014") - [McCaleb email interview on MtGox](/doc/bitcoin/2014-mccaleb "'2014 Jed McCaleb MtGox interview', McCaleb 2014") - [Evolution attempted blackmail](/blackmail#march) Tech: - [Spatial locality for better file compression](/sort "'The ‘sort --key’ Trick', Gwern 2014") - BeeLine Reader A/B test ## February 2014 - _Radiance_: finished. - [Public release of the Mnemosyne spaced repetition dataset](https://groups.google.com/g/mnemosyne-proj-users/c/tPHlkTFVX_4/m/oF61BF44iQkJ) (18GB of 121.2m flashcard reviews, collected ~2004--2014) - [nootropics survey analysis](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/16/nootropics-survey-results-and-analysis/#comment-41413) - verse: obituary [for my dog](/fiction/poem#winter); a poem apropos the [end of _Genshiken Nidaime_](/fiction/genshiken "'Poems on the theme of Genshiken', Gwern 2011") - A/B testing: [header capitalization](/ab-test#section-header-capitalization) finished (result: upcase title & all section headers); began [table of contents placement](/ab-test#toc-formatting) ## January 2014 Darknet markets: - I have begun systematically spidering all operational English darknet markets General: - Haskell Summer of Code: [2013 review](/haskell/summer-of-code#section-7) Statistical: - [font/number size & table of contents background AB test](/ab-test#font-size-toc-background) finished, with consideration of value of interactions _Radiance_: - [diff of](/doc/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance#diff "‘Radiance: A Novel § Diff’, Scholz et al 2013") "Radiance" and part I of _Radiance_ Site: - rewrote configuration for Hakyll 4 - converted site's Darcs repository to Git & hosted on GitHub # 2013 {id=2013} ## December 2013 Darknet markets: - compiled an updated [table of all known darknet markets with lifetimes](/dnm-survival "'Darknet Market mortality risks', Gwern 2013") - wrote up [an essay](/blackmail "'Blackmail fail', Gwern 2013") on 3 attempts to blackmail/extort/scam Statistical: - [analyzed a self-experiment](/lllt "'2013 LLLT self-experiment', Gwern 2013") about [low level laser therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_laser_therapy) improving reaction time - [power simulation](/ab-test#covariate-impact-on-power "'A/B testing long-form readability on Gwern.net § Covariate impact on power', Gwern 2012") of the penalty from omitting key covariates in A/B testing - [critique of Chinese moxibustion study](/note/statistic#moxibustion-mouse-study) _Radiance_: - transcribed [novella "Radiance"](/doc/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance#radiance-1 "'Radiance: A Novel § “Radiance”', Scholz et al 2013") - transcribed & annotated the autobiographical essay ["Old Legends"](/doc/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance#old-legends "'Radiance: A Novel § “Old Legends”', Scholz et al 2013") by Gregory Benford on his physics career, SF & science, the "Star Wars" program, Edward Teller, etc - tracked down and scanned a copy of ["The _Astounding_ Investigation: The Manhattan Project's Confrontation with Science Fiction"](/doc/radiance/1984-berger.pdf "'The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project's Confrontation With Science Fiction, published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact', Berger 1984") (Berger 1984, _Analog_) Personal: - [reviewed _Umineko_](/review/umineko "'Umineko: The Opium Of The Magics', Gwern 2018") Site: - signed up for MailChimp & started a [monthly mailing list for Gwern.net updates](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013") - my Gratipay is up to [$7.35]($2013) a week. I thank all donators. ## November 2013 Another busy month: - DNB meta-analysis: corrected multiple mistakes based on Redick's review - [Lunar cycle effect on sleep](/lunar "'Lunar circadian rhythms', Gwern 2013"): split out, acquired 2 other Zeo users' data, expanded into a multi-level model & power analysis (Cajochen still has not responded) - Modafinil: [price table update](/modafinil#modafinil-table) - Silk Road: - [estimating DPR's net fortune](/silk-road#estimating-dprs-fortune-minus-expenses-exchange-rate) based on the FBI numbers - Darknet market [survival analysis](/dnm-survival "'Darknet Market mortality risks', Gwern 2013") - [publicly betting](/silk-road#the-bet-bmr-or-sheep-to-die-in-a-year-by-oct-2014) Sheep & BMR to shut down soon (which was vindicated even quicker than expected) - Mike Power email [interview](/silk-road#mike-power-questions) - BBC Radio 5 interview (not yet broadcast) - doxed the owner of Sheep Marketplace (see https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9spTATw6 & /doc/darknet-market/sheep-marketplace/2013-11-03-sheepmarketplace-doxxing.maff) - Bitcoin: - short essay on [Zerocoin prospects](/prediction-market#zerocoin) - bets: update on [bet with qwertyoruiop](/prediction-market#personal-bets) ₿<[$50]($2013)---conceded defeat, learned a lesson about panicking, and paid up; altogether admirable - _Radiance_: finished transcription & added all notations - AB testing: [blockquote finished](/ab-test#blockquote-formatting), status quo performed best - Site: - [anonymous feedback analysis](/about#anonymous-feedback) - deleted Flattr, trying out Gratipay for donations ## October 2013 My focus for October was coping with the fallout from the bust of Silk Road---dealing with the revelations, copying the SR forums, tracking down leads, talking to various people, recording the ensuing arrests, tracking the darknet markets popping up in its wake... I still have much material to work through, but some things I managed to do included: - [_Drugs 2.0_: "Your Crack's in the Post"](/doc/darknet-market/silk-road/1/2013-power) (book chapter) - rescuing the [vendor public profiles](https://archive.org/details/2013_06_07_SilkRoad_Vendors) and using some in my page - betting all and sundry that BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep Marketplace will be [busted or shut down within a year](https://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1pko9y/the_bet_bmr_and_sheep_to_die_in_a_year/) (no takers) - researching the ["digitalink" bust](https://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1pfptu/maryland_man_charged_in_silk_road_drug/cd289fr) I decided to post my most extensive self-experiment yet, on [LSD microdosing](/lsd-microdosing "'LSD microdosing RCT', Gwern 2012"). While there was a lot of criticism, I still regard it as worthwhile and setting a new benchmark for any future research in that area. My [anti-linkrot](/archiving "'Archiving URLs', Gwern 2011") system benefited from comments on Hacker News telling me how to use [archive.today](https://archive.is/); this may help me out quite a bit in the future. A/B testing has been active since Hacker News traffic furnished large sample sizes: - [foreground/background test](/ab-test#text-background-color): pure black/white was best - [font size 100--120%](/ab-test#list-symbol-and-font-size): default 100% was best - [blockquote formatting](/ab-test#blockquote-formatting) testing zebra striping: started but not yet finished ## September 2013 - compiled a small meta-analysis of [creatine's effect on intelligence](/creatine "'Creatine Cognition Meta-analysis', Gwern 2013") - combined previous progress reports all into a single page (this page) & added it to the sidebar. Should help out everyone who keep asking for an RSS feed of major changes rather than every change. - started a new A/B test on [foreground/background colors](/ab-test#text-background-color) - expanded the [Google Alerts over time](/google-alerts "'Alerts Over Time', Gwern 2013") analysis with fresh emails from the past half-year, for its Hacker News submission - started a [bigger Noopept self-experiment](/nootropic/nootropics#followup-experiment) - did some spaced repetition research using [the Mnemosyne logs](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mnemosyne-proj-users/8yZz9BbqKl4/BxAIjo_2WscJ): found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance---with a clear circadian rhythm ## August 2013 - A/B testing: [the line-height test](/ab-test#line-height) found no difference, so I did a quick one where I tested an empty test to check the [A/B testing tool I'm using](/ab-test#null-test); I successfully failed to reject the null. The next test is whether underlining hyperlinks annoys people or not. - [Book reviews](/review/book "'Book Reviews', Gwern 2013"): I wrote a Haskell program to parse my GoodReads ratings & reviews into flat Pandoc Markdown; it works somewhat well, it seems to be eating blockquotes & neutering hyperlinks, I'm not sure why. Was also an opportunity to clean up some reviews: inline some of them, spellcheck, expand references & links, which was a lot of work. But it's nice to have my reviews gathered somewhere with a readable interface. kiba thinks the work may pay for itself in affiliate revenue with Amazon, but I'm skeptical. - [Scholz's _Radiance_](/doc/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance "'Radiance: A Novel', Scholz et al 2013"): Added a hundred pages or so. Annotating some of it is quite difficult; Scholz's familiarity with Wagner's operas is a challenge, since I've only ever read his Ring Cycle. - I've started two new self-experiments: - [Magnesium citrate](/nootropic/nootropics#citrate "'Nootropics § Magnesium Self-Experiments', Gwern 2010") on mood/productivity - Treadmill desk usage on [spaced repetition scores](/treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-repetition-performance-randomized-experiment "'Treadmill desk observations § Treadmill effect on Spaced repetition performance: randomized experiment', Gwern 2012") - [Touhou music growth rate](/touhou#growth-over-time): made a little more progress on Touhou music, with an analysis # of releases vs time: seems like we may've reached peak Touhou in 2009. - [Silk Road mirrors](/silk-road#archives-of-sr-pages): I've started hosting public copies of subsets of the darknet markets; these are backups for particular incidents or timeseries - [Spaced repetition statistics](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mnemosyne-proj-users/8yZz9BbqKl4/BxAIjo_2WscJ): I've been analyzing my Mnemosyne data and the giant public database for time of day effects. While my results aren't conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time to study your flashcards seem to be noon. A little surprising, you'd think that late at night, before bedtime, would be the best time. - My [forgotten cleaning methods like Sand](/sand "'Cultural drift: cleaning methods', Gwern 2013") polls aren't done because I got a much lower rate of responses to the polls than I was hoping for and only got enough responses in the final poll the other day. ## July 2013 Interesting things I wrote during July: - [Google Alerts](/google-alerts "'Alerts Over Time', Gwern 2013"): Statistical analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful. - [2013 Lewis meditation quasi-experiment](/lewis-meditation "'2013 Lewis meditation results', Gwern 2013"): A Quantified Selfer and a few other guys did some meditation while doing an arithmetic game; turned out to be a perfect application for multilevel modeling - [Sleep and lunar phases](/zeo/zeo#phases-of-the-moon "'Zeo sleep self-experiments § Phases Of The Moon', Gwern 2010"): A recent paper claimed that there's a phase-of-the-moon effect on circadian rhythms; since I have so much sleep data on myself, I thought I'd see if there's any effect... - [Sand](/sand "'Cultural drift: cleaning methods', Gwern 2013"): continues to progress; I closed the LW poll and set up 3 new polls on Gwern.net to test problems with the original poll. - [Betting](/prediction-market#personal-bets) Made a list of things I've bet on or at least tried to bet on with people (as opposed to prediction market use). Disappointingly short. - [Scholz's _Radiance_](/doc/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance "'Radiance: A Novel', Scholz et al 2013"): I've started transcribing and annotating one of my favorite tech/lit novels. It's mostly done. - [Cicadas for dinner](/note/note#cicadas): I finally got around to eating the cicadas I caught during the most recent Maryland emergence; so of course I had to write up this outré dining. Right now, I'm listening through my Reitaisai 10 downloads (more Touhou music work); and working with this coach who is interested in predicting triple-jump performance by college athletes, and has collected a bunch of data about triple-jumpers. ## June 2013 Hm, what did I get done this June... It was a little boring, honestly; jury duty was a mental distraction where I couldn't plan to do anything but I ultimately wound up going in once and not being picked up for the jury! So I spent a lot of time simply digging up fulltext papers for citations, so at least there's now something like another 100 papers available online for melatonin/nicotine/modafinil etc... - I was thinking of trying to meta-analyze the correlation of lithium in drinking-water with suicides/murders/mental-illness, but after I got copies of [all the citations I knew of](/nootropic/nootropics#lithium), I'm not sure the data is homogenous to do that, which is disappointing, and the meta-analysis papers/textbooks I've checked don't seem to be very encouraging about the utility of doing it with epidemiology stuff. - And reorganizing & fixing broken links & updating various pages (I figured out how to make a [fun forest plot](/doc/cs/r/gwern-forest-activevspassive.png) showing the active/passive split in dual _n_-back studies) - My long-running font A/B test finished but with the most boring possible results of [close to zero difference between the 4 fonts](/ab-test#fonts) - I researched an old family friend in his 90s who has never been willing to talk about his government work during the Cold War and found some stuff using released Census records, but that's not really of interest to other people, and I decided to not make it public. Likewise when I added ~40 book reviews from my old notes to my Goodreads account. - I managed to trace an arrested drug dealer back to his Silk Road account, which was somewhat interesting: [Reddit discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1gxiv7/srrelated_bitcoin_seizure/caoxlmg/) - Is one familiar with Fukuyama & 'the end of history'? I think he's right but no one seems to agree with me, so I wrote a [short essay defending him](/narrowing-circle#the-fukuyama-thesis "'The Narrowing Circle § The Fukuyama thesis', Gwern 2012") Like most political essays, it's probably worse than I realize. - From my perspective, probably the most interesting thing I wrote all month was [some criticism of early SF](/scanners "'‘Scanners Live in Vain’ as realistic SF', Gwern 2013"), pointing out the obsolete science behind some stuff written off as fantasy. ## May 2013 - I've made a little more progress on the Touhou project - Added 2 new studies to the DNB meta-analysis and also a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: [it doesn't](/dnb-meta-analysis#paymentextrinsic-motivation)) - updated my [analysis of SDr's sleep data](/zeo/zeo#sdr-lucid-dreaming-exploratory-data-analysis) - oh wait, I did do a new project: applied survival analysis to [modeling fiction reviews](/hpmor#survival-analysis) And in my Google analysis (which I credit to last month and not May, even if it went viral in early May), I added in [random survival forests](/google-shutdown#random-survival-forests), fixing that gap in evaluating prediction methods, which was a little burden of guilt off my mind. While I was at it, I reproduced that [recent paper analyzing Bitcoin exchange shutdown](/silk-road#bitcoin-exchange-risk) or theft risk. The dude's since given me his source code. (What can I say? Survival analysis is a great hammer, and it cost me enough tears and sweat to learn how to use the R library that I plan to use it everywhere I can.) - I started a little Noopept self-experiment using the Noopept someone gave me, but unfortunately they gave me too little for the results to be very meaningful (see [the power analysis](/nootropic/nootropics#experiment-2)); but maybe they will have a trend and I can try a bigger experiment later. - [TruBrain](https://www.trubrain.com/) sent me a month's supply of their all-in-one nootropic, but I haven't tried it yet because it would interfere with the Noopept. I also purchased magnesium l-threonate, which is a disappointment so far, and some nicotine patches, which I haven't used yet. A small sample order from a new modafinil website selling the usual Indian Modalert is in progress but hasn't arrived yet. (It ultimately did not arrive as the delivery required a signature.) - I have a weird little [literature/historical/survey article](/sand "'Cultural drift: cleaning methods', Gwern 2013") in progress; we'll see where that goes - I posted an analysis I wrote a few months ago in private of whether a particular vendor on Silk Road is a federal mole ([probably not](/silk-road#a-mole)) Actually, I guess it was overall a pretty productive month. Probably helped that jury duty has so far turned out to be a bust: I've been on call since 21 May but have yet to actually go into the courthouse to do anything. # 2012--2013 {id=2012-2013} > [Original](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7ZB37f25up8E7Z8Dn/recent-updates-to-gwern-net-2012-2013) ---
> But where shall wisdom be found? \ > And where is the place of understanding? \ > Man knoweth not the price thereof; \ > neither is it found in the land of the living \ > ...for the price of wisdom is above rubies. > > [Job](!W "Book of Job") 28:12 ([KJV translation](!W "King James Version"))
Here is material I've worked on in the 477 days since my last update. In roughly chronological & topical order, here are the major additions to Gwern.net: - I interviewed translator [Michael House](/doc/anime/eva/2011-house "‘Interviewing translator Michael House’, House 2011") about his work in Japan as a translator - finished data collection for my [hafu anime statistics page](/hafu "'Hafu Gender Ratios in Anime', Gwern 2011") and begun analysis. (I've achieved good coverage of characters, found an astonishingly consistent absence of Korean characters, and confirmed the blond-haired/blue-eyed stereotype; but my original thesis doesn't seem to work and the data is too unevenly distributed to identify time trends.) - judged the [2011](/haskell/summer-of-code#section-5) & [2012](/haskell/summer-of-code#section-6) results for the Haskell Summer of Codes and the accuracy of my predictions - did [a meta-analysis](/dnb-faq#meta-analysis) on whether dual _n_-back increases IQ, and examining possible biases and various claims about what makes the training work or not work - did [another meta-analysis](/iodine#meta-analysis) on whether iodine increases IQ, etc - modafinil: - checked for [subjective effects of blinded modafinil](/nootropic/nootropics#modalert-blind-day-trial) - updated my [modafinil price-chart](/modafinil#suppliers-prices) twice, and expanded with brand data and a new armodafinil table - researched modafinil-related [prosecutions & convictions](/modafinil#legal-risk) in the USA - and any connection with [schizophrenia](/modafinil#schizophrenia) - tried [kratom](/nootropic/nootropics#kratom) - did a [nicotine gum/n-back experiment](/nootropic/nootropics#nicotine-experiment) - did [2 potassium experiments](/zeo/potassium "'Potassium sleep experiments', Gwern 2012"); neither improved my mood/productivity, and one damaged my sleep - my Silk Road page has been expanded with a [BBC interview](/silk-road#bbc-questions), putting SR in a [historical cypherpunk context](/silk-road#silk-road-as-cyphernomicons-black-markets), an updated account of [all arrests & law enforcement actions](/silk-road#safe), and [application of basic statistics to ordering](/silk-road#lsd-case-study) - ran 2 sleep experiments on the timing of taking a vitamin D supplement: I found that [taking vitamin D before bed](/zeo/vitamin-d "'Vitamin D sleep experiments', Gwern 2012") substantially damaged my sleep, while [taking vitamin D after waking up](/zeo/vitamin-d#vitamin-d-at-morn-helps) did not hurt & somewhat helped. (A later re-analysis revealed this result to be due to a flaw in the analysis; a better-done analysis revealed no particular improvement or damage to sleep.) - checked whether a walking desk (treadmill) [damaged typing speed or accuracy](/treadmill#spaced-repetition) - I have run 3 Wikipedia experiments establishing that: [Talk page edits are ignored](/inclusionism#sins-of-omission-experiment-1) by editors; [random link deletions (and their restoration) are also ignored](/inclusionism#sins-of-omission-experiment-2) by editors; and [external link suggestions on Talk pages](/inclusionism#ignoti-sed-non-occulti) are also ignored by readers. (I take the former 2 as indicative of the decline in edit activity and rise of deletionist beliefs on Wikipedia.) - tried some economic/historical analysis: ["Reasons of State: Why Didn't Denmark Sell Greenland to the USA?"](/greenland "'Reasons of State: Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?', Gwern 2011") - [Defending sunk costs](/sunk-cost "'Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?', Gwern 2012") essay ([LW discussion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QvuD7R5L5ABw9tDdD/is-sunk-cost-fallacy-a-fallacy)) - ["Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It"](/slowing-moores-law "'Slowing Moore’s Law: How It Could Happen', Gwern 2012") - ["The Hyperbolic Time Chamber as Brain Emulation Analogy"](/hyperbolic-time-chamber "'The Hyperbolic Time Chamber & Brain Emulation', Gwern 2012") - tried estimating the bandwidth of a [Death Note](/death-note-anonymity#communicating-with-a-death-note) - [compiled predictions](/hpmor "'‘HP: Methods of Rationality’ review statistics', Gwern 2012") for *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* - looked into [Conscientiousness and online education](/conscientiousness "'Conscientiousness & Online Education', Gwern 2012"); studies so far are useless from a meta-analytic standpoint - tripled length of [appendix](/replication "'The Replication Crisis: Flaws in Mainstream Science', Gwern 2010") dealing with the reliability of mainstream science (methodological flaws, replication rates, etc) - finished meta-ethics essay, ["The Narrowing Circle"](/narrowing-circle) - explained the philosophy saying ["one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens"](/modus "'One Man’s Modus Ponens', Gwern 2012") - speculation about a [restoration of the British monarchy](/note/note#alternate-futures-the-second-english-restoration) - clean up & exploratory data analysis of [SDr's lucid dreaming data](/zeo/zeo#sdr-lucid-dreaming-exploratory-data-analysis) - [Who wrote the *Death Note* script?](/death-note-script) ([LW discussion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/99DctaXedCFPfG2vb/case-study-the-death-note-script-and-bayes)) - [2012 US election predictions: statistical comparison](/2012-election "'2012 election predictions', Gwern 2012") - [Comment anchoring experiment](/anchoring "'LW anchoring experiment', Gwern 2012") ([LW discussion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfvX99AKx7pR7NE3v/lw-anchoring-experiment-maybe)) - [Turing-completeness in surprising places](/note/note#surprising-turing-complete-languages) (inventory of particularly "weird machines"; relevant to computer and AI security) Transcribed or translated: - [Nash's letters on cryptography](/doc/cs/cryptography/nash/1955-nash "'John Nash on cryptography', Nash 2012") - Douglas Hofstadter's [superrationality](/doc/existential-risk/1985-hofstadter "'Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival', Hofstadter 2012") columns (from *Metamagical Themas*, 1985) - ["The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules"](/doc/sociology/1987-rossi), Rossi 1987 (lessons from the large RCTs evaluating social & welfare interventions) - ["The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search"](/doc/statistics/bayes/1994-falk), Falk et al 1994 - [Gene Wolfe on writing](/doc/culture/2007-wolfe "'Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works', Wolfe 2012") - ["Shiny balls of Mud: William Gibson Looks at Japanese Pursuits of Perfection"](/doc/japan/art/2002-gibson) (2002) - ["Otaku Talk", Okada et al 2004](/doc/anime/eva/little-boy/2004-okada "'Otaku Talk', Okada et al 2012") - ["Earth in My Window", Murakami 2005](/doc/anime/eva/little-boy/2005-murakami "'Earth in My Window', Murakami & Hoaglund 2012") - ["On The Battlefield of 'Superflat'"](/doc/anime/eva/little-boy/2005-sawaragi) - ["Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive", Sarrazin 2010](/doc/anime/2010-sarrazin "'Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive', Sarrazin 2011") - [1996 *NewType* interview with Hideaki Anno](/doc/anime/eva/1996-newtype-anno-interview "'June 1996 NewType Interview with Hideaki Anno', Anno & Inoue 2012") (translated by me, with the help of an EGFer) - [1997 *Animeland* interview with Hideaki Anno](/doc/anime/eva/1997-anno-english "'May 1997 AnimeLand Interview with Hideaki Anno (English)', Anno 2012") (bought, transcribed, and translated by me with the help of other LWers) - [1997 *Utena* interviews](/doc/anime/1997-utena "'Utena 2011 Boxset Booklet Commentary', Ikuhara et al 2013") More technical: - added [edit history statistics/visualization](/doc/gwern.net-gitstats/index.html) for Gwern.net using [GitStats](https://gitstats.sourceforge.net/) - site traffic updates: [July--December 2011](/traffic#july-2011december-2011), [January 2012--July 2012](/traffic#january-2012july-2012), [July 2012--Jan 2013](/traffic#july-2012january-2013) - There's also been a lot of [backend](/about#colophon) changes: switching to Amazon S3+Cloudflare, adding error pages, metadata like tags, A/B testing, but no need to go into detail. Personal: - posted summaries of [my personality & attitudes](/me#profile) & my [RSS feed collection](/doc/personal/rss-subscriptions.opml) # 2011 {id=2011} > [Original](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lk9NHCNPp3h44uhxA/recent-updates-to-gwern-net-2011)
> I'd like to poison your mind \ > With wrong ideas that appeal to you \ > Though I am not unkind... > > ["Whistling in the Dark"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyhGtKAkNTo), [_Flood_](!W "Flood (They Might Be Giants album)"), [They Might Be Giants](!W)
Per my past practice of linking stuff I think LWers will find interesting, here is what I've been up to lately: #. ["Politicians are Ethical"](/note/note#politicians-are-not-unethical): applying base-rate neglect #. [Modafinil](/modafinil#discount-rate-applications-swapping-time-for-time): a dual-pronged argument for low-balling estimates of modafinil harm by pointing to both temporal and quality discounting of health in old age. (If you missed it the first time around, I still think my mini-tutorial on [drug ordering with Bayes's theorem](/modafinil#ordering-with-learning) is worth reading.) #. ["The Narrowing Circle"](/narrowing-circle): argument that the usual belief of 'moral progress' and the 'expanding circle' assume many of their conclusions by pointing to the beliefs and classes of entities discarded along the way. (As many LWers share those assumptions and will be unsympathetic, the interesting parts may be the appendices on perpetuities and *waqfs*, inasmuch as those bear directly on cryonics.) #. Both Modafinil and [Spaced repetition](/spaced-repetition "'Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning', Gwern 2009") have been expanded with scores more links to studies & PDFs. ([Nicotine](/nicotine) and [Melatonin](/melatonin) are next.) #. ["Worldbuilding: The Lights in the Sky are Sacs"](/note/note#worldbuilding-the-lights-in-the-sky-are-sacs) is a silly bit of SF/alternate history speculation involving floating hydrogen-sac organisms. #. ["Wikipedia and Knol"](/wikipedia-and-knol "'Wikipedia & Knol: Why Knol Already Failed', Gwern 2009") has been completed, as the 7 predictions I made on the matter have been judged thanks to Google's recent announcements; [I blew one](/wikipedia-and-knol#chronicle-of-a-death-foretold). #. Stuff which is incomplete or which is just a pile of notes: - ["Existential risks and mathematical error"](/math-error "'The Existential Risk of Math Errors', Gwern 2012") - ["The morality of sperm donation"](/ethical-sperm-donation) (sketch of argument smart utilitarians should donate sperm) - notes on [intermittent fasting](/intermittent-fasting) #. I stuck a link in the footer of every page to a Google spreadsheet form, borrowing the idea from [Luke Muehlhauser](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zFj67rtrQ7HEaZ45F/tell-me-what-you-think-of-me) - I've only gotten 1 feedback so far, IIRC, but that was before I put it in the footer and updated all the pages a few hours ago. (As of 2015, there are hundreds of responses and I consider the feedback form to have paid its way; see my later writeup detailing the benefits.)