Links for 2022-02-04
EleutherAI has released their open-source 20B parameter GPT-3 competitor! https://blog.eleuther.ai/announcing-20b/
The concept of zero-knowledge proof is explained in five levels of difficulty: a child, teen, undergrad, grad student, and expert. Proving that you know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that you know the value x. https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c
Unprecedented New Telescope Image Reveals Nearly 1,000 Mysterious Strands in Milky Way’s Center https://scitechdaily.com/unprecedented-new-telescope-image-reveals-nearly-1000-mysterious-strands-in-milky-ways-center/
“The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
Our obligate dependence on fire is remarkable, given the lack of innate fire-control instincts. Human Adaptation to the Control of Fire https://drive.google.com/file/d/13u8mS4rwisZ61F63vOsspUf5LaXGbdjB/view
"Doug and Bill" (can a biochemist or a geneticist fix a car?) http://www2.biology.ualberta.ca/locke.hp/dougandbill.htm
The Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG sold equipment to governments and militaries around the world for decades after World War II. It was owned by the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service. [Posted on February 11, 2020] https://schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/crypto_ag_was_o.html
The conservative advantage in mental health keeps replicating https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-conservative-advantage-in-mental
Physicists report first creation of self-heating plasma for nuclear fusion https://www.axios.com/plasma-nuclear-fusion-energy-a48ab2dc-f467-4976-a29c-31a30d0cfe0c.html
Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony | Lex Fridman Podcast — “Yaron Brook is an objectivist. Yoram Hazony is a national conservative. This is a conversation and debate about national conservatism vs individualism.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q24cpnHzx8I
“There is 100 times more solar energy available from a narrow strip around the earth at Geostationary Earth Orbit than the forecast global energy demands of humanity in 2050.” [ft.com] https://archive.fo/uu5jJ
Facebook teaches language models to speak ~30 languages https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10668