AI

• “Visual Anagrams: Generating Multi-View Optical Illusions with Diffusion Models”, Geng et al 2023

Matters Of Scale:

• Altman was fired from Y Combinator presidency by Paul Graham over ‘self-serving approach’; Altman tried to fire an OA board member & acquire a majority; OA execs told Sutskever real reason wasn’t a paper, like claimed, but to ‘uplevel’ company ‘independence’ from Effective Altruism; on Altman’s board manipulation and Microsoft’s perspective; then Sam Altman & Greg Brockman were fired from OpenAI

• Google announces a demo run of training an LLM across 50,944 TPU-v5e chips (in 199 TPU-v5e pods)

• “OpenAI training supercomputers in Arizona…[planned]…75,000 GPUs”

• “Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission”, Bhoopchand et al 2023

• “Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models”, Muennighoff et al 2023 (less-sample-efficient/small models can train multiple epoches with Chinchilla-variant scaling laws)

• “Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation”, Shah et al 2023; “Role play with large language models”, Shanahan et al 2023

• “Zero-Shot Goal-Directed Dialogue via RL on Imagined Conversations”, Hong et al 2023 (offline RL: IQL for training LLMs to plan by simulating humans)

• “I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models”, Zhang et al 2023 {Alibaba} (open-sourced 1280x720px video generation diffusion model better than Phenaki)

• DALL·E 3

• “Growth and Form in a Toy Model of Superposition”, Liam Carroll & Edmund Lau on Chen et al 2023: Bayesian phase transitions during NN training

• “A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft: Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it” (GPT-4)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Actionable Genotypes and Their Association with Life Span in Iceland”, Jensson et al 2023 (deCODE found 2,306 people with key cancer variants; they were not informed due to ‘ethics’, & live 3 years less than controls)

• “UK Biobank releases half a million whole-genome sequences for biomedical research: The release more than doubles the size of an earlier data set and will help reveal new links between DNA, health, and disease, geneticists say”

Recent Evolution:

• “A non-adaptive explanation for macroevolutionary patterns in the evolution of complex multicellularity”, Bingham & Ratcliff2023 (implication: multicellularity is probably not intrinsically hard and so not a Great Filter)

Engineering:

• UK approves first human CRISPR gene therapies

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable”, Protzko et al 2023 (large samples + pre-registration); “Eleven years of student replication projects provide evidence on the correlates of replicability in psychology”, Boyce et al 2023

• How did a schizophrenia drug as effective but dangerous as clozapine get FDA-approved?

• “A Novel Classroom Exercise for Teaching the Philosophy of Science”, Hardcastle & Slater2014

• “The Price of Gravity: Private Patronage and the Transformation of Gravitational Physics after World War II”, Kaiser & Rickles2018 (the quest to destroy man’s oldest foe: gravity)

Politics/Religion

• “The normalization of deviance in healthcare delivery”, Banja2010; “Seven signs of ethical collapse” in successful innovative corporations

• “The psychology of zero-sum beliefs”, Davidai & Tepper2023

• “Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet”, Steinsson2023 (text analysis shows how WP became increasingly narrow & orthodox, excluding more sources and gradually expelling minority editors)

• Rudolf Vrba

• Deanonymizing Professor Ben Lerner’s paid Wikipedia manipulation

Psychology/Biology

• FDA approves tirzepatide for weight loss (not just diabetes); “Semaglutide and Cardiovascular Outcomes in Obesity without Diabetes”, Lincoff et al 2023

• “Open-label placebo treatment does not enhance cognitive abilities in healthy volunteers”, Hartmann et al 2023

• “Vultures as an overlooked model in cognitive ecology”, van Overveld et al 2021 (vultures are big-brained & engage in complex behavior like coordinated hunting & mutualistic behavior)

• “On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems”, Baluška & Michael Levin2016 (single-cell computation & decision-making); “Can a Cell Make Decisions?” (on Dexter et al 2019 finally replicating Jennings1906); “Seeing the Beautiful Intelligence of Microbes” (antibiotics seem to be critical to quorum-sensing/biofilms—is that why they work so well as poisons?); “The secret social lives of viruses”, “Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life” (viral quorum-sensing for decisions about infections & cooperation) ; “Cheating leads to the evolution of multipartite viruses”, Leeks et al 2023;

• “Where do our atoms come from?”, Finn Moorhouse

• “The effect of a hiding box on stress levels and body weight in Dutch shelter cats: a randomized controlled trial”, van der Leij et al 2019

• “A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking”, Frumin et al 2015

Technology

• “Through rigorous attention to technical detail and thorough authenticity, this minor scene from an anime movie Patlabor 2 gave viewers the most accurate portrayal of modern aerial combat ever seen”

• “The First Online Writer: Lessons from Justin Hall on rendering your unfiltered consciousness into hypertext” (context collapse & the fate of early homepages)

• Frink scientific programming language

• Monospace kerning: Duospace, Contextual Repositioning, Smart Kerning, Texture Healing

• Grain entrapment

Economics

• “A Digital Pornutopia, Part 2: The Internet is for Porn”, Jimmy Maher (how Internet porn became commercialized)

Philosophy

• “The influence of philosophical training on the evaluation of philosophical cases: a controlled longitudinal study”, Maćkiewicz et al 2023

Fiction

Miscellaneous

• Trope: apocalyptic logs (the world is always ending; it just hasn’t for you—yet)