Links for 2022-09-27
Walkthrough of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's keynote at GTC. From generative video game engines, digital twins in the Omniverse platform, and a video-to-3D geometry pipeline. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1572562372082151428.html
Inverse Scaling Prize: Round 1 Winners (For example, NeQA: takes an existing multiple choice Q&A dataset and negates each question. Failure to be sensitive to negation is important, as the language model (LM) will do the exact *opposite* of what you want, in a way that seems to get worse as you scale LMs) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iznohbCPFkeB9kAJL/inverse-scaling-prize-round-1-winners
New Efforts to Relate Brain Structure and Function Reveal Surprising Properties of Neural Circuits https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2022/09/19/new-efforts-to-relate-brain-structure-and-function-reveal-surprising-properties-of-neural-circuits/
“A few fire ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them close together, and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. They can form rafts to survive flash floods, arrange themselves into towers, and you can even pour them from a teapot like a fluid.” https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/fire-ant-rafts-form-because-of-the-cheerios-effect-study-concludes/
Scientists Have Long Dreamed of a Memory Prosthesis. The First Human Trials Look Promising https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/20/a-memory-prosthetic-improved-memory-in-people-with-brain-injuries/
Mass DNA Collection in the Tibet Autonomous Region from 2016–2022 https://citizenlab.ca/2022/09/mass-dna-collection-in-the-tibet-autonomous-region/
Read more: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-25
They are so desperate that they send soldiers from Russia's Strategic Missile Forces to Ukraine:
Russian channels report that mobilized men are wandering for days on training grounds with no training provided and no equipment.
There is no future for Russia. All outcomes are leading towards doom:
1. Russia occupies Ukraine and faces decades of armed insurgency orders of magnitude worse than what the United States faced in Iraq or Afghanistan. Russia will likely lose most of its oil and gas revenues through targeted attacks on its infrastructure. Inevitable bankruptcy.
2. The Russian "special military operation" fails and Russia is humiliated. Russia's arms exports and sphere of influence collapse.
3. Russia becomes a Chinese vassal state.
4. Russia uses weapons of mass destruction and is either destroyed or becomes an international pariah.
5. A coup d'état removes Putin and plunges Russia into instability and chaos.