Recent updates to gwern.net (2017–2019)

[gwern]

Previously: 2011/​2012–2013/​2013–2014/​2014–2015/​2015–2016/​2016–2017.

“Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose, /​ And Jamshyd’s Seven-ring’d Cup where no one knows; /​ But still the Vine her Ancient Ruby yields /​ And still a Garden by the Water blows.”

An index of my recent writings, by topic:

• AI:

  • “How To Generate Faces With StyleGAN”; “This Waifu Does Not Exist” (background & implementation)

  • “Finetuning the GPT-2-small Transformer for English Poetry Generation”

  • Danbooru2018: a dataset of 3.33m anime images (2.5tb) with 92.7m descriptive tags

  • “Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning”

  • On the history of the tank/​neural-net urban legend

• Genetics:

  • Embryo selection: Overview of major current approaches FAQ, multi-stage selection, chromosome/​gamete selection, optimal search of batches, & robustness to error in utility weights; sub-essays: “Glue Robbers: Sequencing Nobelists Using Collectibles”, “Dynasties and Embryo Selection”,

    • “Multi-Stage Selection Bean Machine Demo”

  • Cat Sense, Bradshaw 2013: Are We Good Owners?

  • “Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding”

  • “Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert’s Dune”

• Psychology:

  • SMPY bibliography

  • “Everything Is Correlated”

  • What is the morning-writing effect?

  • Cordwainer Smith’s “‘Scanners Live in Vain’ as realistic SF”

  • “The Gift of the Amygdali”

• Tech:

  • “Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement”

  • “How many computers are in your computer?”

  • The most common error in technological forecasting: conjunctive vs disjunctive reasoning

  • “Banner Ads Considered Harmful”

  • “Internet Research Tips”

  • “Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media”

  • Small ways in which ordinary life has been getting better since the late ’80s/​early ’90s

• QS:

  • Acne: a good Quantified Self topic for self-experimentation

  • ZMA sleep self-experiment

  • Bacopa quasi-experiment

• Misc:

  • On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages

  • “My Little Pony: Immanetizing The Equestrian”

  • A list of open questions

  • “Origin of ‘Littlewood’s Law of Miracles’”

  • jailbreaking Frank P. Ramsey’s & Arthur Jensen’s papers

• gwern.net changes: Obormot has done a thorough redesign & implemented a number of new features, analogous to his work on replacing LW2 with GreaterWrong.com.

  The major changes:

  • moved from MailChimp to TinyLetter; minimalist monochrome ‘responsive’ redesign, particularly for mobile; Tufte-style sidenotes via sidenotes.js; collapsible sections; static compilation of MathJax of MathML math via mathjax-node-page; prototype inflation-adjuster; click-to-zoom images (image-focus.js); Tufte-style tables & epigraphs; font improvements (eg drop caps, smallcaps, numerals, better Mac rendering); ‘dark mode’

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This will be the last gwern.net changelog I post on LW, as it seems increasingly redundant with my newsletter & subreddit, and my occasional regular LW link submissions. Please subscribe to those for future updates.

[Martin Sustrik]

“On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages”: Have you read Umberto Eco’s “The Search for the Perfect Language”? It’s a pretty good history of the past efforts to create powerful artificial languages, from Raymon Lull to John Wilkins etc.

[gwern]

I haven’t but I should.

[Said Achmiz]

See also: These Waifus Do Not Exist.

[Said Achmiz]

These Waifus Do Not Exist have also been upgraded:

These Waifus Do Not Exist 2.0

[gwern]

TWDNE has now been upgraded with samples from an additional 2 months of training on bigger faces, which should make them considerably better: https://​​twitter.com/​​gwern/​​status/​​1123640762309201921

[habryka]

Small meta thing: I think we could set up automatic crossposting for the gwern newsletter, in the same way we do for the alignment newsletter, which might save you a bit of manual labor.

[gwern]

Maybe. I think you would have to check the metadata field for ‘finished’, because otherwise there’s no definitive criteria: I put up the notes weeks in advance, and they usually aren’t finished on the 1st of the month. I don’t especially mind manual submission since I have to crosspost to Twitter/​Reddit/​#lesswrong/​TinyLetter anyway.