November 2022 Link Incubator, rtheory.xyz
links on AI human level speech recognition, diffusion models, FTX fallout, Super Mario physics.
I've moved the newsletter to a monthly send. Also, aiming to design categories so that you guys can jump around.
Here’s your monthly dose of treats, goodies, ideas, pieces of research, principles, models, and other random stuff curated by Robert
Follow the white rabbit 🐇
.
.
.
1 Writings
2 Links
2.1 Meta-Science / Statistics
How a Publicity Blitz Created The Myth of Subliminal Advertising
Universities are really not prepared for the flood of LLM-based honor code violations that are coming, and I'm really not sure what it's possible to do about it. I'd estimate ~5% of university students will submit an assignment largely written by a LLM by end of 2023.
2.2 Psychology / Biology / Genetics
Subagents, trauma and rationality
Dissociation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Part I: Definitions and Review of Research
If we all do our job well in synthetic biology everything will grow on trees.
[Book Review] "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane
Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought
2.3 Technology / AI
George Hotz engages with Elon Musk on Twitter and gets a job. All he asks is cost of living in SF. People are saying: no way this dude come in and fixes twitters unusable broken search in a month while the thousands of people couldn't in years + George's reply
Hacked Twitter data includes phone numbers, personal emails for celebrities, prominent politicians
Whisper AI - open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.
Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs Have a 20-Minute Chat in AI-Powered Podcast
2.4 Politics / Religion / Culture
In some parts of the world, children will risk their lives just to get to school.
Protests at Foxconn’s plant in Zhengzhou (up to a third of iPhone production) escalated into riots. These are apparently due to a combination of pay & conditions and Covid-related restrictions stemming from China’s zero-Covid policy. But now that policy seems to have led to much larger, national protests of a kind not seen in a very long time. Tech supply chains are clearly not the most important part of this story, but decoupling is becoming real. (Via Ben Evans)
Kanye West just stormed out of a livestream on @Timcast because Pool refused to go along with West's antisemitic and conspiratorial assertion that Jews control the corporate press.
2.5 Tools
Obsidian 1.0 — Everyone seems to be raving about this. It looks like another Notion but I’ve seen Hacker News comments about how it’s changed their life.
Archive sanity - Periodically polls arxiv API for new papers. Then allows users to tag papers of interest, and recommends new papers for each tag based on SVMs over tfidf features of paper abstracts. Allows one to search, rank, sort, slice and dice these results in a pretty web UI. Lastly, arxiv-sanity-lite can send you daily emails with recommendations of new papers based on your tags.
How to build a personal webpage from scratch — If you know nothing about making a website from scratch, this could be useful.
anytype.io - Your very own set of tools to build and explore the new internet. From private notes to decentralized communities.
Examples of exercises to develop the reading microskills
2.6 Miscellaneous
This is a cockpit view of a plane landing during a rain storm
Matt Mochary has been CEO coach to Naval Ravikant, the founders of OpenAI, Notion, Rippling, Robinhood, Coinbase, Reddit, Plaid, Flexport, Opendoor, partners at Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, and many others. He also open-sourced his entire curriculum, templates and all. Here's a link
Is wine fake? by Scott Alexander
Wine commands wealth, prestige, and attention from aficionados. How much of what they admire is in their heads?What are the similarities between Spinoza and Schopenhauer philophically?
List of atmospheric optical phenomena (How many would you recognize from a distance or plane? How many have you even heard of?)
“The Strange Story of Dagobert, the Duck Tales Bandit: In the ’90s, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero.” (WP; another reminder for Americans—odd as it may seem, Donald Duck is extremely popular overseas; see also the unknown-in-the-USA character John D. Rockerduck or beloved Scandinavian tradition From All of Us to All of Youwho 2020 airing set an all-time record of >4.5m viewers)
Are personality traits associated with smoking and alcohol use prior to and during pregnancy?
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in Children
Speech brain-machine interfaces (BMI’s) translate brain signals into words or audio outputs, enabling communication for people having lost their speech abilities due to diseases or injury.
The Acceleration of Addictiveness — An old blog post but highlights how maybe we’re becoming addicted to other things at a quicker rate.
Marcus Hutter: Universal Artificial Intelligence, AIXI, and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #75
House of Chickens? Architecture and Ideas
Quote of the month
It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive.
Announcement: the Link Incubator Subscriber Chat
Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: the Link Incubator subscriber chat.
This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.
How to get started
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Other places
(͡ ͡° ͜ つ ͡͡°) Telegram/Discord group for me to save & share random stuff that might be useful.
I have created a special page related to the Russian-Ukraine war. This list will update as I read more.
👾 some YouTube video essays
— Robert
Thank you for reading!
How’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment? I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message.