Health Alert: Your Survival Odds May Increase When Surgeons Take a Break!

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/86443.html

Impression, Sunrise by Monet, text to video AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/15hvuz8/impression_sunrise_by_monet/

Links for 2023-08-06

1. A new study shows what really explains educational attainment (e.g. years of schooling, highest degree earned): It's about 51% genes, 10% shared family environment, and the rest is other stuff, including random effects. https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1687517745376612367 (paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-023-00173-y)

2. Nuclear breakthrough beyond theory: a Japanese cyclotron has managed to create Sodium-39. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/177

3. Scaling Relationship on Learning Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Models — Pushing a 7b model to almost 50% accuracy on GSM8k https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01825

4. The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01907

5. People preferred product ideas generated by ChatGPT over ideas generated by other people. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4526071

6. Humans may be more likely to believe misinformation generated by AI https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/28/1075683/humans-may-be-more-likely-to-believe-disinformation-generated-by-ai/ [https://archive.is/AC84E]

7. Team creates simple superconducting device that could dramatically cut energy use in computing, among other important applications https://physics.mit.edu/news/team-creates-simple-superconducting-device-that-could-dramatically-cut-energy-use-in-computing-among-other-important-applications/

8. “This isn't something that people want to hear, but the United States needs to spend more on defense.” https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/uh-guys-we-really-should-think-about

9. Japan's just released defense whitepaper is projecting that their defense spending will more than double. Going from $122.5 billion over the last 5 years, to $310 billion over the next 5. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2023/07/28/japan-forecasts-large-boost-to-defense-spending-over-next-five-years/

10. The political impact of social media has been grossly overrated https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/the-political-impact-of-social-media-is-overrated.html

11. "a synthetic version of alcohol billed as having the fun effects of booze but without the negative toxins and hangovers. The regulatory side is much harder than the science." https://www.foodandwine.com/news/hangover-free-alcohol-alcarelle

Links for 2023-08-07

1. Intel CEO: ‘We’re going to build AI into every platform we build’ https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/27/23810360/intel-pat-gelsinger-ai-every-platform-promise

2. Apple has been quiet about ChatGPT. Now Tim Cook says its hefty $22.6 billion research spend is down to generative AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apples-ai-research-spend-generative-2023-8 [https://archive.is/UuRqR]

3. Every Amazon division is working on generative AI projects https://www.engadget.com/every-amazon-division-is-working-on-generative-ai-projects-142836534.html

4. US scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough: Federal laboratory experiment produces more energy than during landmark test last year https://www.ft.com/content/a9815bca-1b9d-4ba0-8d01-96ede77ba06a [https://archive.is/GOQbC]

5. Why do all brains, from worms to humans, have crisscrossed (decussated) connections? The answer may be found in mathematics: it's just easier to map the 3D world onto the 2D surface of the brain without errors that way! https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-brains-connections-to-the-body-are-crisscrossed-20230419/

6. How Palantir Is Shaping the Future of Warfare https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ [https://archive.is/wlC7Q]

7. Identifying Learning Models from Human Behavior using Bottom-Up Equation Discovery https://psyarxiv.com/65jqh

8. ‘It is not the owners. It is the breed.’ https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/it-is-not-the-owners-it-is-the-breed

9. “This is a thread about metallurgy's secret cheat code, and how it's used by the aerospace industry to accomplish things that no material should.” https://twitter.com/Jordan_W_Taylor/status/1602708433081454595

10. "The bottom line: white liberals may vote for diversity with their ballots, but their feet tell a different story." https://www.city-journal.org/article/white-progressives-more-likely-to-flee-diverse-neighborhoods

11. A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html [https://archive.is/CUnqV]

12. Two U.S. sailors (Jinchao Wei and Wenheng Zhao) arrested on suspicion of espionage, selling information to China https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/doj-thursday-announcement

13. "Nearly 20,000 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the US have left for other countries, [with] an accelerated departure rate in the last 3 years coinciding with the launch of the China Initiative in 2018" https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/scientists-of-chinese-descent-leaving-the-us-at-an-accelerating-pace/4017831.article

14. Philippines accuses China of firing water cannons at its ships https://twitter.com/JayBatongbacal/status/1688033385112059904

A list of all Russian nuclear threats: https://twitter.com/cuthbert_shaw/status/1685629198642085888

Links for 2023-08-08

1. ‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unforeseen test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth. This accident is making scientists realize that with not much effort we can geoengineer the earth and reduce the effect of greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth [https://archive.is/fpZSB]

2. Tool Documentation Enables Zero-Shot Tool-Usage with Large Language Models — Using only the docs for GroundingDino, StableDiffusion, XMem, SAM: LLMs re-invented the functionalities of just-released systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00675

3. "We present Perfusion, a new text-to-image personalization method. With only a 100KB model size per concept (excluding the pretrained model, which is a few GBs), trained for roughly 4 minutes, Perfusion can creatively portray personalized objects." https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/Perfusion/

4. A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards — Correctly identifies 93% of keystrokes via sounds over zoom calls. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01074

5. Since DeepMind's AlphaFold solved the "protein folding problem," AI tools have helped craft entirely new proteins. The benefits for medicine could be huge. https://www.dw.com/en/generative-ai-inventing-proteins-is-changing-medicine/a-66356415

6. parsel is a framework that helps large language models do a better job on tasks involving hierarchical multi-step reasoning and problem solving. http://zelikman.me/parselpaper/

7. “In this study, AI was more accurate than two thirds of radiologists, yet when radiologists had AI help their diagnoses did not improve. Why? Humans ignored the AI’s advice when it conflicted with their views.” https://blueprintcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Blueprint-Discussion-Paper-2023.10-Agarwal-Moehring-Rajpurkar-Salz_2.pdf

8. Yann LeCun on AGI and AI Safety https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zfik4xESDyahRALKk/yann-lecun-on-agi-and-ai-safety

9. “Both sides in British politics have an interest in overstating the level of crime. Neither narrative is correct.” https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/british-police-are-doing-a-pretty

10. Why You Should Never Update Your Beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LCduhA4m3RhMjZJPA/why-you-should-never-update-your-beliefs

11. How the pursuit of pleasure could doom all intelligent life to a blissful extinction https://bigthink.com/the-future/pursuit-happiness-doom-intelligent-life-blissful-extinction/

12. “One year ago, experts were certain that America was headed for a recession. But the 2023 economy is historically strong. What happened?” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/recession-doomers-economy/674900/ [https://archive.is/bMzgE]

"Elon and mark say no to fighting and instead start a family on mars"

Links for 2023-08-09

1. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says his timelines to "generally well educated human" are 2-3 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlkk3glap_U

2. “We present AgentBench, a multi-dimensional evolving benchmark that currently consists of 8 distinct environments to assess LLM-as-Agent's reasoning and decision-making abilities in a multi-turn open-ended generation setting.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03688

3. Autochain is a lightweight, simpler alternative to Langchain. It allows developers to build complex applications on top of large language models and databases. https://github.com/Forethought-Technologies/AutoChain

4. gpt-prompt-engineer is a tool that reads a denoscription of the task you want an AI to perform, plus a number of test cases. It then generates a large number of prompts about a topic, tests the prompts, and rates the results. https://github.com/mshumer/gpt-prompt-engineer

5. Untangling Infrabayesianism: A redistillation [PDF link; ~12k words + lots of math] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xne4Bma99bKXWc9AH/untangling-infrabayesianism-a-redistillation-pdf-link-12k

6. Desirable properties for a superconductor http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2023/08/desirable-properties-for-superconductor.html

7. “With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth. Data have spoken.” https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1688747910471561216

8. “I expected that interest in LK-99 would just die a slow death after no one could replicate it; rarely is a smoking gun found that explains the spurious observations. But in this case it seems we have a full coroner's report!” https://twitter.com/MichaelSFuhrer/status/1689098570920759296

9. LK-99 superconductor: Real money prediction markets fall to 13%... https://twitter.com/base_rate_times/status/1688987353866702848

10. The Collapse of Broken-Windows Policing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, 2013–22 https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/the-collapse-of-broken-windows-policing-in-new-york-city-los-angeles-and-washington-dc-2013-22/

11. "It is striking that asians with parents who did not complete high school score 100 points above blacks with PhD parents." https://humanvarieties.org/2023/08/06/a-remarkable-correlation-between-iq-and-sat-scores-across-ethnic-groups/

12. “Critics of the Supreme Court call its decisions "right wing" and "extreme." But read them yourselves and I'll bet you'll conclude, as I did, that they are more informed by small-l liberalism and that the vast majority are solidly in line with public opinion.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/defense-supreme-court/674874/ [https://archive.is/YKv6Q]

13. "I can hear legions of consequentialists desperately rationalizing 'the fact' that family punishment always fails a cost-benefit test. My one-word reply: 'Seriously?!'" https://betonit.substack.com/p/why-not-punish-families

14. How Taiwan plans to counter drones by mid-2024 https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2023/08/01/how-taiwan-plans-to-counter-drones-by-mid-2024/

The source for the old videos is here:

"In a previous life, the Boston Dynamics founders developed a new breed of dynamic robots. Here are clips from those early one-legged, two-legged and four-legged robots developed at Carnegie Mellon (1980-1986) and MIT (1987-1995)." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd5iEke6UlE

Tweet: https://twitter.com/whatisnuclear/status/1688383774822899712

See also: An Expert Explains Why The Radioactive Water Stored at Fukushima Should Be Released https://www.sciencealert.com/an-expert-explains-why-the-radioactive-water-stored-at-fukushima-should-be-released

Links for 2023-08-10

1. Experiment led by Med School professor allows animals to live 6-9 percent longer, lower biological age https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/blood-of-young-mice-extends-lives-of-old-mice/

2. Novo’s obesity drug Wegovy lowers cardiovascular risk by 20%, landmark trial finds https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/health/wegovy-obesity-drugs-heart-disease.html [https://archive.is/dLYkw]

3. On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas

4. AI offers huge promise on breast cancer screening https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66382168

5. “An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks: It is quite comprehensive and contains a ton of details about a) threat models of how AI could go catastrophically wrong b) countermeasures we could implement.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12001

6. Nvidia CEO: We bet the farm on AI and no one knew it https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/nvidia-ceo-we-bet-the-farm-on-ai-and-no-one-knew-it/

7. What is ontology? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZG94agRiYbHHcSSmp/what-is-ontology

8. US Army developing LASSO tank-killing drone for infantry https://www.militarytimes.com/unmanned/uas/2023/07/31/us-army-developing-lasso-tank-killing-drone-for-infantry/

9. The aliens could be signaling us now and we wouldn’t even “hear” it: X-ray or gamma-ray lasers for communication https://twitter.com/NukeSpaceCadet/status/1686907440414273536

10. Unpatchable AMD Chip Flaw Unlocks Paid Tesla Feature Upgrades https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tesla-mcu-amd-asp-flaw-jailbreak

11. Google Pays Apple $15,000 For Hacking Chrome Security https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2023/08/03/google-pays-apple-15000-for-hacking-chrome-security/

12. “Analysis of 50 major Europe- and North America-based global non-profit organizations…showed that environmental and climate groups were the most likely to include Taiwan as part of China, or exclude it altogether, in maps and reports.” https://hongkongfp.com/2023/08/06/why-are-the-worlds-climate-and-environment-ngos-trying-to-erase-taiwan-from-the-map/