Links for 20210811
A demo of Codex, an AI that translates natural language to code. They coded a computer game from scratch in a few minutes. In English! youtu.be/SGUCcjHTmGY
Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? — “Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it.” constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-robotic-bricklayers
A New Neural Network For Turning Sketches Into Photos https://80.lv/articles/a-new-neural-network-for-turning-sketches-into-photos/
Are mirror cells an existential risk? — "Mirror cells would slowly convert edible matter into more of themselves. Anything that ate them wouldn't be able to digest the mirrored molecules, they'd pass right through predators' guts. And as the mirror cells excreted waste and died, the accumulating material would be like a self-generating oil spill with nothing to clean it up...Kasting isn't sure which would kill us first: the global famine or the ice age. "It would quickly consume all available nutrients," he says. "This would leave fewer or perhaps no nutrients for normal organisms." It would wipe out the global ocean ecology and starve a significant portion of the human population." https://www.wired.co.uk/article/building-a-parallel-universe
Progress in the tools for engineering mirror-image molecules by dedicated mirror-image biology labs, such as presented in this recent article, might soon enable the creation of mirror cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00969-6
New AI Research Work Fixes Your Choppy Videos! Event-based Video Frame Interpolation youtu.be/G00A1Fyr5ZQ
Introducing the non-radiating antenna: “By placing antennas inside a hollow dielectric disc, the researchers exploited interference phenomena to create a non-radiative “meta-atom”…” https://physicsworld.com/a/introducing-the-non-radiating-antenna/
How are the resources in effective altruism allocated across cause areas? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nws5pai9AB6dCQqxq/how-are-resources-in-ea-allocated-across-issues