Links

AI:

• Matters Of Scale:

  • The Bitter Lesson: “Accuracy and Performance Comparison of Video Action Recognition Approaches”⁠, Hutchinson et al 2020 (simple large 2D CNNs performed best when compared under controlled conditions); “A Metric Learning Reality Check”⁠, Musgrave et al 2020 (the doubling of metric learning performance since 2006 appears almost entirely due to larger neural nets + more compute used in training, not fancy loss functions/theory)
  • “Self-supervised learning through the eyes of a child”⁠, Orhan et al 2020 (dataset⁠; it’d be fun to see this used for rats or dogs)
  • “The remarkable, yet not extraordinary, human brain as a scaled-up primate brain and its associated cost”⁠, Herculano-Houzel 2012
  • “The Node Is Nonsense: There are better ways to measure progress than the old Moore’s law metric”⁠, Moore 2020
  • “Measuring hardware overhang”⁠, hippke (“with today’s algorithms, computers would have beat the world chess champion already in 1994 on a contemporary desk computer”)

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Sibling validation of polygenic risk scores and complex trait prediction”⁠, Lello et al 2020
  • “Polygenic Scores for Cognitive Abilities and their Association with Different Aspects of General Intelligence—a Deep Phenotyping Approach”⁠, Genç et al 2020
  • “Genetic testing of dogs predicts problem behaviors in clinical and nonclinical samples”⁠, Zapata et al 2020 (previously: MacLean et al 2019)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Objecting to experiments even while approving of the policies or treatments they compare”⁠, Heck et al 2020

Psychology/biology:

• “Epigenetic clocks: A review”⁠, José Luis 2020; “TRIIM: Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans”⁠, Fahy et al 2019; “Reversal of Epigenetic Age with Diet and Lifestyle in a Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial”⁠, Fitzgerald et al 2020

• “The quest to slow ageing through drug discovery”⁠, Partridge et al 2020

• “Atribacteria reproducing over millions of years in the Atlantic abyssal subseafloor”⁠, Vuillemin et al 2020

• “Exploring the persome: The power of the item in understanding personality structure”⁠, Revelle et al 2020 (“everything is correlated”)

• How Competent Are Humans?

  • “Better All the Time: How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond"⁠; “Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?”
  • “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India”⁠, Bloom et al 2012; “The Impact of Consulting Services on Small and Medium Enterprises: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Mexico”⁠, Bruhn et al 2018
  • “95%-ile isn’t that good”⁠, Dan Luu (persistent incompetence in Overwatch players)
  • “Worker Rush: Descent to Bronze”⁠, Gheed 2011 (and in Starcraft players)
  • “Playing to Win”⁠, Sirlin 2006

• “The Scent of the Nile: Jean-Claude Ellena creates a new perfume”⁠, Chandler Burr 2005

Technology:

• Your Computer Is Faster Than You Think:

  • “There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?”⁠, Leiserson et al 2020 (gains from end-to-end systems design; AI scaling can continue even if semiconductors do not, particularly with self-optimizing stacks⁠; John Carmack notes, apropos of Seymour Cray⁠, that “Hyperscale data centers and even national supercomputers are loosely coupled things today, but if challenges demanded it, there is a world with a zetta[flops] scale, tightly integrated, low latency matrix dissipating a gigawatt in a swimming pool of circulating fluorinert⁠.”)
  • “Scalability! But at what COST?”⁠, McSherry et al 2015 (when laptops > clusters: the importance of good baselines)
  • “You’re Doing It Wrong: Think you’ve mastered the art of server performance? Think again.”⁠, Poul-Henning Kamp 2010 (on using cache-oblivious B-heaps to optimize Varnish performance 10×)
  • “Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100,000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Petrenko et al 2020
  • “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory”⁠, Drepper 2007
  • “What it takes to run Stack Overflow”⁠, Nick Craver
  • see previously on latency/UI: “It’s the Latency, Stupid.”⁠/ “Computer latency: 1977–2017”⁠/ “Keyboard Latency”⁠/ “Terminal Latency”⁠/ “Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud”⁠/ Kleppmann et al 2019⁠/ “Web Bloat”

• “Fälschungserschwerende Schrift (forgery-impeding typeface)”

• “Inukshuk: Caribou Drive Lanes on Southern Victoria Island, Nunavut, Canada”⁠, Brink 2005

• “The case of the barnacled crystal”⁠, Kohman 1950 (on disappearing polymorphs)

Economics:

• “Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates”⁠, Huising 2019 (“The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, ‘This is even more fucked up than I imagined.’”)
• “The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions over the Life-Cycle with Implications for Regulation”⁠, Agarwal et al 2009

Fiction:

• “An Autobiographical Essay”⁠, Jorge Luis Borges 1971
• “Singular: Possible futures of the singularity”⁠, James Yu & GPT-3

Misc:

• List of games the Buddha would not play

Music

Touhou:

• “Moonbow” (Kirin feat. Chata; Sprout Intention {C88}) [trance]
• “Harvester’s Dance” (Ganemes; Sister’s 3 {TK12}) [folk]