November 2022 News
November 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
November 2022’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, October 2022 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Mirror: ISIS propaganda magazine Rumiyah
Gwern.net: print mode CSS: looks much better, pages should print reasonably now (eg. icons aren’t screwed up, transclusions expand so nothing is lost, layout looks like regular pages more)
Minor Gwern.net changes since August 2022 not covered previously:
transcluded link-bibliographies, similar-links, and backlinks: these are now transcluded at the bottom of the page so you can “just keep reading”.
The links at the top of pages/annotations will continue to popup in desktop mode (as expected), but in mobile in popins, they instead jump down to the transcluded version (as opposed to creating a new popin for what might be a disappointment). This should feel pretty natural and friction-free.
similar-links/backlinks transclude by default at the end of annotations as well, similarly enabling ‘just keep reading’ and jumping-to-anchor behavior
‘partial’ link annotations: links which don’t have a true annotation but do have some metadata like tags or backlinks will not be marked as annotated links, but they will still pop up a bare-bones annotation showing what is known about that link. This avoids promising the reader too much; if you hover over a link, you know not to expect too much, and maybe what there is will be useful.
backlinks: now display the context of the reverse citation in the original page (like their popup but displayed b default via transclusion)
collapses: uncollapse on hover in popups/tag-directories
popup speed optimizations
WP annotations: lots of small style/bug-fixes to various special-cases like big inline images or mismatched curly quotes (due to a truly ancient bug, turns out, so old that it’s due to JavaScript changing how
for-in
works (!)) or thumbnails, removing admonitions & ‘list of X’ sidebar infoboxessimilar-links embeds with more metadata like backlinks, and filters out several kinds of unhelpful links now; these should increase relevance; backlinks also filter out more
transclude templating system
a justification+hyphenation A/B test has begun to measure if the book-like indentation has measurably harmful effects; if it does, guess we’ll revert to the more Internet-standard approach of no-indentation+newline.
similar-links/backlinks: automatically put into multi-columns if an improved heuristic says to (lots of previous multi-column lists were incorrect and shouldn’t’ve been in columns because the entries were too few and/or text too long)
JS works around flaws in backlinks analysis to guess the intended anchor
remove a lot of compile-only or unused classes/IDs from the HTML to simplify it
Windows: force Source Sans use so ToCs look a lot better (the default font stack, while well-intentioned, looked bad)
lots of renaming
obviously, tons of minor bug fixes, added link icons, added link-live domains, tests and checks (eg. a PHP script for dumping all defined HTML classes from the final compiled HTML was quite helpful in linting and finding a number of misspelled or outdated classes in content pages), in addition to the usual daily drumbeat of writing annotations & adding links…
Links
AI
“Legged Locomotion in Challenging Terrains using Egocentric Vision”, et al 2022
“Digital Astronomy with Cellular Automata”, Kyle Hovey (more ‘stupid compression tricks’: clustering possible CA rules by PNG ratio)
“CICERO: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning”, et al 2022; “Negotiation and honesty in artificial intelligence methods for the board game of Diplomacy”, et al 2022 (negotiating ‘contracts’ & learning to punish defectors)
“Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference”, et al 2022 (29ms/token generation PaLM-540B; even the chonkiest NNs can be superhumanly fast)
“Dungeons and Data: A Large-Scale NetHack Dataset”, et al 2022 (n = 1.5m human games for offline/imitation learning)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
“The connectome of an insect brain”, et al 2022
“Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry”, et al 2022 (the most successful members of SMPY are healthier); “High intelligence is not associated with a greater propensity for mental health disorders”, et al 2022
“Personality and Intelligence: A Meta-Analysis”, et al 2022
“Social media and psychological well-being”, et al 2022 (meta-analysis: correlation is near-zero & shrinking over time)
Technology
How an unpowered glider can reach >800kph using dynamic soaring
“Zendo—Design History”, Kory Heath (‘good design is invisible’: you’d never guess from playing Zendo how much iteration it took to design)
Economics
The Ethereum Merge defies half a decade of critics by happening successfully (may now be worth revisiting on-chain project failures like Augur)
Philosophy
Fiction
Toyota Century (‘that car’ in anime)
Miscellaneous
“Seraphim: A Biblically-Inspired Constructed Language”, Babelingua (“for multiple mouth angels using gematria to define phonemes, speaking in syntax trees + singing multilingual 4D-tense praises”); “Mpiua Tiostouea, a Language for Time Travelers”, Science Meets Fiction; “Goptjaam (欱攙): the unglossable language”, Kat Mistberg (encrypted embeddings)
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: