Links for 2022-03-13
Life is just easier in higher dimensions. Unless you want to "win": “…in higher dimensions, it gets rapidly harder to win, but rapidly easier to not lose. So adding dimensions turns symmetric games into asymmetric games: people who want to win get weaker. People who just want to keep playing get stronger.” https://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/how-to-not-lose-at-4d-chess
Anthropic's Interpretability Team has been making amazing progress building a mechanistic understanding of how transformers work! https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/in-context-learning-and-induction-heads/index.html
“You can't train GPT-3 on a single GPU, much less tune its hyperparameters (HPs). But what if I tell you……you *can* tune its HPs on a single GPU thanks to new theoretical advances?” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/%c2%b5transfer-a-technique-for-hyperparameter-tuning-of-enormous-neural-networks/
Amateur open-source researchers went viral unpacking the war in Ukraine https://restofworld.org/2022/osint-viral-ukraine/
“In short, every one of the over 600,000 “administrative villages” in China, with an average population of ~1000 each, now has broadband internet, which is either Fiber or 4G connectivity. Over 99% of villages have both. The average broadband fiber speed is 100Mbps.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758176
Sponge communities thriving by consuming an extinct ecosystem on the peak of a dead underwater Arctic volcano https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/02/sponges-arctic-worms-volcano/621621/
Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-widespread-cultural-diffusion-knowledge-thousand.html
How to make cryogenic Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) shields https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2020/06/16/how-to-make-cryogenic-multi-layer-insulation-mli-shields/
Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online, a report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has said. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/online-information-environment/
Q&A with Quaise CEO Carlos Araque on superhot geothermal https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-drilling-questions/
"The reality is that the Russian state is paying for its war against Ukraine with the funds it receives every day from the sale of oil and gas. Russia receives $1.1 billion from the EU...oil and gas revenues make up 36% of the Russian government’s budget" https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/03/western-unity-putin-russia-ukraine/627013/