Links for 2021-09-06
Overview of factors affecting technological progress https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/oobot2tp/release/6
GPT-J is one of a number of open source alternatives to Github Copilot. It is smaller and faster, and appears to be at least as good. https://towardsdatascience.com/cant-access-gpt-3-here-s-gpt-j-its-open-source-cousin-8af86a638b11
Liquid Neural Networks are neural networks that can adapt in real time to incoming data. https://news.mit.edu/2021/machine-learning-adapts-0128
NVIDIA’s latest tech makes AI voices more expressive and realistic https://nv-adlr.github.io/RADTTS
Deep Learning Is Tackling Another Core Biology Mystery: RNA Structure https://singularityhub.com/2021/08/31/deep-learning-is-tackling-another-core-biology-mystery-rna-structure/
Facial expression recognition is being added to a future version of Android as part of their accessibility package. https://techxplore.com/news/2021-08-google-facial-recognition-android-accessibility.html
"We propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau5141
In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened. — "What I found was that, just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market." https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322
Do you worry about how our descendants will deal with radioactive waste? Do you believe that it will be dangerous for 100,000 years? Well, then you better hope that people like Musk or Bezos succeed at driving down space launch costs before it's too late. New calculations put the odds of asteroid Bennu hitting Earth in the next 300 years at 1 in 1,750. The expected kinetic energy associated with the collision would be equivalent to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. On average, an asteroid with a diameter of 500 m (1,600 ft; 0.31 mi) can be expected to impact Earth about every 130,000 years or so. If you worry that our descendants will, for some reason, be unable to deal with radioactive waste then you also need to make sure that we detect and neutralize all larger asteroids and comets that might impact Earth within the same timeframe. Because otherwise, nuclear waste will be the least of their worries. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/08/statisticians-put-odds-of-bennu-hitting-earth-into-perspective/