Everything Is Heritable:

• “Rare Genetic Variants Associated With Sudden Cardiac Death in Adults”, Khera et al 2019 (important use-case for population screening & embryo selection; previously: Bagnall et al 2016)

• “Genome-wide association study identifies 49 common genetic variants associated with handedness”, Partida et al 2019

• “Metagenomic analysis of a blood stain from the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743^–₅₀1793_233ya)”, de Dios et al 2019

Engineering:

• ‘“Embryos have been chosen to reduce disease risk using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic traits, and this has resulted in pregnancy,” Laurent Tellier, CEO of Genomic Prediction, told New Scientist.’

• “Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA”, Anzalone et al 2019 (prime editing competitor to CRISPR; media: Science, Wired)

• “A single combination gene therapy treats multiple age-related diseases”, Davidsohn et al 2019

“MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model”, Schrittwieser et al 2019 (tree search over remarkably simple learned latent-dynamics model reaches AlphaZero level; plus beating both of the previous model-free (R2D2) & model-based (SimPLe) ALE SOTAs; NNs are lazy and can do more if you just train them right. This should move your beliefs closer to ‘Bitter Lesson’/Schmidhuber-style paradigms of simplicity & scaling. It will be interesting to see if MuZero can perhaps provide the equivalent of Zero for more complex environments: if it can roll out imagined abstract Go & ALE games, it can also roll out StarCraft II games…)

Matters Of Scale:

• OpenAI releases GPT-2 1.5B trained model & detection tools (paper, with interesting appendices on generating ideological text; GPT-2-1.5b web interface)

• “When will computer hardware match the human brain?”, Moravec 1998

• “High Fidelity Video Prediction with Large Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks”, Villegas et al 2019 (videos; realistic 128px video generation by simply scaling up RNNs)

• “XLM-R: Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale”, Conneau et al 2019 (blog; 2.5 TB text for training translations into 100 languages)

“Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction”, Freeman et al 2019 (paper)

“Talking Head Anime from a Single Image”, Pramook Khungurn (one-shot creation of ‘Virtual Youtuber’-style CGI talking heads from a single source image, allowing eg. video⟺CGI-head transforms of live webcams; replaces hand-coded CGI models with a learned differentiable DL model…)

AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights” (sample dialogue with a GPT-2-1.5b finetuned on text adventures)

“bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology”, Sever et al 2019 (the growing success of bioRxiv)

Did psychologist David Rosenhan fabricate his famous 1973_53ya “Being Sane in Insane Places” mental hospital exposé? (Nature review; on the Rosenhan experiment; interesting to consider Spitzer 1975’s criticisms in light of this)

“Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination”: what did the famous ‘blind orchestra audition’ study show? (Gelman commentary)

“A century of research on conscientiousness at work”, Wilmot & Ones 2019

“Towards a ‘Treadmill Test’ for Cognition: Reliable Prediction of Intelligence From Whole-Brain Task Activation Patterns”, Sripada et al 2018 (r = 0.68)

“Mechanisms of Scent-tracking in Humans”, Porter et al 2006_20ya (video; see also “Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth”, McGann 2017)

Disappearing polymorphs (Ice-Nine in real life): “Disappearing Polymorphs Revisited”, Bučar et al 2015_11ya; “Disappearing Polymorphs”, Dunitz & Bernstein 1995_31ya; glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT) (Kohman 1950) examples (Lowe commentary; IAPAC archives on the Norvir incident)

“Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel” (the followers inspired by The Dice Man turn out to be more interesting than the author; see also Yes Man)

How a con man got Afghani princess Fatima into the White House, part 2 (on Stanley Clifford Weyman; Atlas Obscura)

“Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later”, Vitalik Buterin

“They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken” (HN; the 1% rule strikes again: if you don’t file that bug report or tell someone their website is broken, probably no one will—a truth I have learned time and again, for my stuff as well. For example, on TWDNE, or a few days after reading this, I learned a user had been trying to read pages through the section popups in Table of Contents! Perhaps it’s learned helplessness? To quote Paul Graham: “If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.”)

“How to annotate literally everything”, karlicoss (comparison of tools for webpages, PDFs, e-ink readers, & books)

“Computer-generated Floral Ornament Based on Magnetic Curves”, Anton Lopyrev (video; based on Wong et al 1998 & Xu & Mould 2008)

Tech trick: you can link to a specific page number N of any PDF by adding #page=N to the URL (eg. this link links to the text samples in the Megatron paper on page 13, rather than the first page)

“SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms”, Tsykunov et al 2019 (video)

“Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries”, Hoynes & Rothstein 2019

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (his prints, particularly Prisons, have been enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance; eg. historical chronology conspiracy theorists now debate whether his Roman prints show the real Rome of his time—possibly not constructed by humans—and since falsely aged by a vast conspiracy, and whether Prisons too might be a true depiction of reality)

“Issho Restaurant identity, by Dutchscot” (an elegant visual design inspired by Japanese kintsugi)

The Public Domain Review:

Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, Goldthwaite 1968_58ya (review)

Akhnaten (review)

Madama Butterfly (review)

Porco Rosso (rewatch; the kinship with The Wind Rises is even more apparent now, but Porco Rosso IMO works better because it doesn’t try to force an answer. Anno half-seriously criticized it for being a Miyazaki self-insert fic where he’s the hero and the center of a love triangle, to boot, but maybe that’s not so bad; the beauty of seaplanes, who travel between the sea and sky, at home in both, is enough to justify it.)

The Tatami Galaxy (rewatch)

Belladonna of Sadness (review)

Ushio and Tora (revival of a shonen classic; thematically shows its age but, having only been familiar with the ’90s comedy OVA, I didn’t realize how dark it would get)

“My Legacy For You” (Scraton; Eternal {2019}) [house]

“The End of Seasons” (Wandering Artist feat. Velvet R. Wings; Eternal {2019}) [orchestral]

“Bliss” (AJ Young & loophoof; Eternal {2019}) [dubstep]

“Second Prances (MrMehster Remix)” (Etherium & MrMehster feat. Nicole Carino; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]

“Luna’s Lullaby” (Yellow Tune feat. Truss; Eternal {2019}) [trance]

“Make It Special (Finale Mix)” (Foozogz; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]