From gwern.net
Why So Few Matt Levines? · Gwern.net
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Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
on Sep 25
From gwern.net
Dropcap Generation With AI · Gwern.net
2 3
<p>We develop AI image generation workflows for webpage dropcap typography, creating PNGs & SVGs using image generators. As demos, we create new Gwern.net logos and several custom FLOSS dropcap sets, including cats, Gene Wolfe horror fiction, and neural-net-inspired dropcaps.</p>
on Feb 4
From gwern.net
Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net
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A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
on Sep 17
From gwern.net
The Scaling Hypothesis · Gwern.net
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On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has...
on Aug 31
From gwern.net
‘truesight (stylometrics)’ tag · Gwern.net
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Bibliography for tag <code>statistics/stylometry/truesight</code>, most recent first: 1 <a class='icon-not' href='/doc/statistics/stylometry/truesight/index#see-alsos'>related tag</a>, 13 <a class='icon-not' href='/doc/statistics/stylometry/truesight/index#links'>annotations</a>, & 3 <a...
on Aug 23
From gwern.net
Review Of The Quantum Thief Trilogy · Gwern.net
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Explanation of the emotional core of <em>The Quantum Thief</em>’s exploration of the trap of persistent personal identity and seeking freedom.
on Aug 6
From gwern.net
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Satirical essay on how AI can never truly solve a Rubik’s Cube like human beings can, written by an AI. Inspired by ‘Supersized Machines’ (Garfinkel et al 2017).
on Jul 31
From gwern.net
Danbooru2021: A Large-Scale Crowdsourced & Tagged Anime Illustration Dataset · Gwern.net
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Danbooru2021 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.9m+ images annotated with 162m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation.
on Jun 1
From gwern.net
How Should We Critique Research? · Gwern.net
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Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless. What makes a good criticism is the chance of being a ‘difference which makes a difference’ to our ultimate actions.
on May 22
From gwern.net
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Criteria making software useful long-term & worth learning in detail
on May 19
From gwern.net
Why Cats Knock Stuff Over · Gwern.net
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Why do cats like to push stuff over edges and then curiously watch the fallen object? I suggest that they are play-hunting, and are testing the ‘prey’ for liveness & playing-dead, similarly to tossing or poking it with claws.
on Apr 23
From gwern.net
Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert’s Dune-verse · Gwern.net
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<p>Discussion of fictional eugenics program in the SF <em>Dune</em>-verse and how it contradicts contemporary known human genetics but suggests heavy agricultural science and Mendelian inspiration to Frank Herbert’s worldview.</p>
on Mar 24
From gwern.net
Does Mouse Utopia Exist? · Gwern.net
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<p>Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for doubt.</p>
on Feb 1
From gwern.net
About This Website · Gwern.net
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<p>Meta page describing Gwern.net site ideals of stable long-term essays which improve over time; idea sources and writing methodology; metadata definitions; site statistics; copyright license.</p>
on Jan 22
From gwern.net
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s · Gwern.net
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<p>A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.</p>
on Dec 19
From gwern.net
CQK Is The First Unused TLA · Gwern.net
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<p>Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused....
on Nov 15
From gwern.net
Surprisingly Turing-Complete · Gwern.net
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<p>A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.</p>
on Nov 13
From gwern.net
Are Sunk Costs Fallacies? · Gwern.net
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<p>Human and animal sunk costs often aren’t, and sunk cost bias may be useful on an individual level to encourage learning. Convincing examples of sunk cost bias typically operate on organizational levels and are probably driven by non-psychological causes like competition.</p>
on Nov 12
From gwern.net
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<p>On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)</p>
on Nov 11
From gwern.net
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<p>Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.</p>
on Nov 9
From gwern.net
Technology Holy Wars are Coordination Problems · Gwern.net
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<p>Flamewars over platforms & upgrades are so bitter not because people are jerks but because the choice will influence entire ecosystems, benefiting one platform through network effects & avoiding ‘bitrot’ while subtly sabotaging the rest through ‘bitcreep’.</p>
on Nov 7
From gwern.net
Utext: Rich Unicode Documents · Gwern.net
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<p>A document proposal: abuse Unicode to create the fanciest possible ‘plain text’ documents.</p>
on Oct 25, 2023
From gwern.net
Terrorism Is Not Effective · Gwern.net
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<p>More effective ways to kill = terrorists are stupid, or killing not most important thing to them</p>
on Oct 22, 2023