Favourite things of 2023
This year I decided to get into haute cinema but failed. I actually got into gelato and leadership. I tried semaglutide, tretinoin, and finasteride: the chem-cyborg life.
This year I quit hating my PhD.
Work
- ActAdd, testing and writeup
- Big review of AI alignment work
- Big psych paper (forthcoming)
- Leading ESPR.
- ESPR culture doc
- What do fancy firms and scouts do?
- IfP
- Lots of private clients
Breakthroughs
- I was disappointed in last year’s malaria vaccine (RTS,S) but R21 might be the real deal: best guess is ~80% protection (nonrobust, sample had very few deaths). way more scalable too. One of humanity’s oldest and most pitiless enemies is on his way out.
- Casgevy is the first Crispr therapy approved for use in humans. It approximately cures two common blood diseases.
- Lots of binary super black holes out there, strumming on the fabric
- Rigorous simulation of a new kind of computer which would not be limited by the usual physical constraint
- Fully tetraplegic man walks again thanks to a digital spine implant
- https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Gnome
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-023-01349-8
- https://labs.heygen.com/guest/video-translate
- First human pangenome
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/after-nearly-a-century-a-new-limit-for-patterns-in-graphs-20230502/
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/surprise-computer-science-proof-stuns-mathematicians-20230321/
- The first sample of a deep space object ever brought to Earth. The great theft begins!
- Biocomputers. Deeply morally suspect though.
- Space warfare for the first time in world history
- I feel we heard less about this terrible development than we should have, because it’s our ally using the fucking things.
- Directly sequencing a protein, amino acid by amino acid, instead of sequencing its DNA
- RSV vaccine
- https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(23)00360-4.pdf
- https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-just-been-discovered-467000-years-old
- Conclusive evidence that Mars is geologically active (specificaly, has a mantle plume)
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798
- https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15442.pdf
- “planning in imagination” (offline simulation) allows robot to learn to walk in 1 hour with no resets
- https://twitter.com/Gradio/status/1716336604447703434
- Recent years: https://twitter.com/pfau/status/1669296474386038786
- https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/12-everything-great-you-missed-since-november
- https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/16-a-fraction-of-great-things-you
- https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/18-a-slice-of-great-things-you-missed
- https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
- Questionable: https://twitter.com/AMartinezArias/status/1669083302987198464
- Questionable: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v1
- Questionable: gene therapy for Alzheimer’s
Papers
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06510-w
- Extremely readable editorials from seasoned people.. Perhaps a little too blase.
- https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10329
- https://nikett.github.io/gpt-as-participant/
- The corporate thirst for training data has some lovely side effects
- I was extremely impressed by this piece on Badiou. It actually explains contemporary continental philosophy in a way I can understand: a rearguard against science or scientism.
- https://philpapers.org/archive/BRINMP
- http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21647/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15154
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.03658.pdf
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05660
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16300
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14314
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01350
- https://karthikecon.github.io/karthiksrinivasan.org/paying_attention.pdf
- https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02304.pdf
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12921
- Design for the first quantum bus
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916221148147
- https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/91/10/819/2911822/All-objects-and-some-questions
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300926120
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-019-01261-9
- https://t.co/vuxhReBKcc
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/risa.14204?campaign=wolearlyview
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4546267
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09045
- Fishy
- https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13104-022-06080-6
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10312
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16779
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01404
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WxqyXbyQiEjiAsoJr/the-seeker-s-game-vignettes-from-the-bay#comments
- https://www.wdeneys.org/data/Smart%20intuitor%20postprint.pdf
- Vision LMs are as insecure as text LMs or more
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06979
- https://t.co/fmH0vLTjGt
- Inverse vaccines (in mice)
- GradIEEEnt half decent
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40141-z
- https://osf.io/d8c4g/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9879926/
- https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article/52/8/afad159/7256139?login=true
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12136-023-00566-z
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02390
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04607
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00614
- https://sites.google.com/view/medusa-llm
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15605
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245918771329
- https://twitter.com/UKPLab/status/1699348822609060158
- https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2023/12/STEVENSON.pdf
Books
- Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin
- The Private Life of Chairman Mao
- The Economist Book of Obituaries
- How Late It Was, How Late
- Absent in the Spring
- The Terror
- House of Cards : Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth
- Grand Futures
- Every Man for Himself and God Against All
- How Music Got Free
- The Epiphany of Gliese 581
Worst book: Babel
Shorts & poems
- https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/redemption
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56955/from-drift
- https://gist.github.com/ivan/5095670735ba941a6090a69fce4183df?permalink_comment_id=4663300
Essays and sites
- I cannot stop thinking about this.. Why are the most powerful entities in the world so boring?
- https://dynomight.net/gpt-2/
- https://t.co/V0jrwO2Sel
- https://muireall.space/repugnant/
- https://solquy.substack.com/p/12623-doing-chaotic-good-better
- https://reason.com/2023/01/14/a-modern-history-of-groomer-politics/
- https://kaarelh.github.io/alpha.html
- https://finmoorhouse.com/writing/future-people/#appendix-on-sharing-breath-with-historical-figures
- https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/reading-list
- https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/carl-shulman-2#details
- https://fantasticanachronism.com/2023/02/06/on-the-pleb-filter/
- https://www.wired.com/story/new-drug-switched-off-appetite-mounjaro/
- https://quillette.com/2023/11/25/the-perverts-guide-to-philosophy/
- https://compphil.github.io/truth/
- https://n.cohomology.group/
- https://langdev.stackexchange.com/questions/2440/what-language-design-features-made-lisp-useful-for-artificial-intelligence-resea
- https://ftlsid.com/home
- https://bestjelly.substack.com/p/invasive-questions-and-dealing-with
- https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with
- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/bronze-age-pervert-dissertation-leo-strauss
- https://theviolethour.substack.com/p/therapy-for-edgelords
- https://vgel.me/misc/tools-not-needed-draft
- https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/04/decline-literary-bloke
- re-master novels and heteropessimism
- https://critinq.wordpress.com/2023/09/19/how-we-know-what-we-know/
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-dad
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BWLAzZEA5K7HPr2CL/probabilities-prioritization-and-bayesian-mindset#3__Mechanisms__Metaculus__and_World_Models
- Probably the greatest extant blogroll in the post-blog age
- https://archive.is/iZKNr
- https://intellectualmathematics.com/blog/review-of-netzs-new-history-of-greek-mathematics/
- https://vgel.me/posts/handmade-transformer/
- https://centrally-unplanned.tumblr.com/post/714240712354529280/in-search-of-romance-try-moving-abroad
- https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/contra-marc-andreessen-on-ai
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-nerds-and-hipsters
- https://bartleby.life/dfw.html
- https://yiqinfu.github.io/posts/ever-changing-theories-china-ai/
- https://letterboxd.com/kukukadoo/films/reviews/
- https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-aml-compliance/
- https://finmoorhouse.com/writing/clean-air/
- https://tsutsifrutsi.tumblr.com/post/139992202409/thoughts-on-the-stem-class
- https://longitudinal.blog/2023/01/10/general-automation-and-science/
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=89120&post_id=98798276&isFreemail=false&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyODY4OTQxLCJwb3N0X2lkIjo5ODc5ODI3NiwiaWF0IjoxNjg0MTg3ODIxLCJleHAiOjE2ODY3Nzk4MjEsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.qzy1gJO6i9spVmx-LSJLZgmAnpNk8JWzDgHSMTPBF-g&utm_medium=email
- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-singer/
- https://gothhabiba.tumblr.com/post/714970487195860992/people-are-now-watching-the-screen-even-more
- https://moultano.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/the-many-ways-that-digital-minds-can-know/
- https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/106/literal-banana-how-meanings-get-words-and-social-sciences-get-broken?time=8m2s
- https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/left-covid-and-roads-not-taken
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lg4voqq4vTXiCJNQP/jan-kulveit-s-corrigibility-thoughts-distilled
- https://jameshaydon.github.io/nats-fail/
- https://sjdm.org/dmidi/index.html
Vids
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQzD0ZYtJbI
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnISpahN2dM
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxo-loXdcH0
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG3XDu8aAf8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPQdVC5RHU&list=LL&index=8
- https://www.fyimusicnews.ca/articles/2023/03/07/rick-beato-interviews-keith-jarrett
Tweets
- https://twitter.com/spilendalaust/status/1620790630283894785
- https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1627381257968537602
- https://twitter.com/chipmonkmonk/status/1652691438101057539
- Hinton
- https://twitter.com/conradgodfrey/status/1712564282167300226?t=5vLJQB4JHqkLrMzCyMz8lw&s=19
- https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1654137072712658946
- https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1654171832994365475
- https://twitter.com/touchmoonflower/status/1711082642937127002
- https://twitter.com/hojucitas/status/1702244923263611360
- https://twitter.com/shagbark_hick/status/1659934818912616449
- https://twitter.com/sherjilozair/status/1658601758560595968
- https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1700554276886696280
- https://twitter.com/spaceweather9/status/1674953284023402497
- https://twitter.com/jd_pressman/status/1649130639814443008/
- https://twitter.com/SamuelSWatson/status/1690501323932807168
- https://twitter.com/CapenerSean/status/1692280999755870528
- https://twitter.com/tobyordoxford/status/1681257760531398657
Art
- Unknown artist (1989), four colour PC Engine still.
- What AI thinks of what the internet thinks. https://www.leap-labs.com/product
- https://twitter.com/t3xtm0de/status/1660719721103106066
- compare change from 2017, the dayglo sharpness
- https://www.worldnaturephotographyawards.com/winners-2022
- https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1698788497199407473/photo/1
- https://twitter.com/deepfates/status/1701055664603426970
- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arts-2
- Shout-out to Marnie Stern’s new album cover
Films / TV
Podcasts
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/1oLCZRf6RhLFCIKWCtG5Nv
Games
- Shortest Trip to Earth
- Wildfrost
- Shogun Showdown
- Cobalt Core
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Patrick’s Parabox
- Rogue Trader
- Manifold Garden
- Blacken Slash
- Disco Elysium again
- Dungeon of the Endless
- Shardpunk
- Against the Storm
Albums
- https://twitter.com/g_leech_/status/1737168051483652332
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWvkQqukPLg
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXH2gSX4BYE
- Roeland Hendrikx - The clarinet as prima donna
- Model/Actriz - Dogsbody
- https://thirdkindrecords.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-alice
- Angel Bat Dawid - Requiem for Jazz
- https://opussciencecollective.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-time (2020)
Songs
- I think this might be the best song of the last 10 years.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsE7H6YPfco
- dodie
- https://open.spotify.com/track/7wt4KWXhzgykix1HSKzsh3?si=2df2f36cf5cd4511
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230307050522/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkJks1kvQjc
- https://open.spotify.com/track/4YRvb9B8cgvhst11qk8CKn?si=b726553b675349ec
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilowY2p3cmM
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Mx42zOet4
- https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=19619
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JZ-o3iAJv4
- Gelb Patricia Taxxon
- https://aidanjohnmoffat.bandcamp.com/album/calm-the-beans