April 2025 News
April 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
April 2025’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2025 (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
Github popups?
Links
AI
History of the Micromouse robotics competition (Micromouse maze-running wasn’t actually about naive algorithmic maze-solving, but end-to-end minimization of time—completely different! Also showcases evolutionary shifts in record-setters)
“Cyc: Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI”, Yuxi 2025
“Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly”, et al 2024
“Interpreting Emergent Planning in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2025 (model-free RL agents can learn to do model-based-RL-like planning)
“The world’s first commercial automatic chicken sexing machine” (chick sexing falls to the machines)
“NeuRaLaTeX: A machine learning library written in pure LaTeX”
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
“Primates as prey: Ecological, morphological and behavioral relationships between primate species and their predators”, 2000 (our primate ancestors were hunted a lot, especially by cats)
“Dose-response relationship between evening exercise and sleep”, et al 2025
Technology
“The Secret History of the War in Ukraine” (good, fast command & control, with fast OODA loops, are critical to making modern weapons extremely effective in war)
Economics
“The M6 forecasting competition: Bridging the gap between forecasting and investment decisions”, et al 2024
“The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments”, et al 2024
“Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush: White snus pouches were designed to help Swedish women quit cigarettes. They’ve become a staple for American dudes” (where did all this Zyn suddenly come from nowhere out of? Sweden, turns out)
“The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers” (Why super-yachts? Because they are still exclusive, and due to legal regulations, offer “a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”)
Philosophy
Fiction
Books
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated: