Links for 2023-01-07
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens https://www.gwern.net/Modus
Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/04/apple-artificial-intelligence-ai-audiobooks
AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code https://simonwillison.net/2022/Dec/5/rust-chatgpt-copilot/
In less than 4 months, OpenAI's valuation increased by $9b. [The Wall Street Journal] https://archive.is/sQXU5
Microsoft Hopes OpenAI’s Chatbot Will Make Bing Smarter [Bloomberg] https://archive.is/cqfT1
Recovering Smartphone Voice from the Accelerometer https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/recovering-smartphone-voice-from-the-accelerometer.html
The Continuity of Splines: “why are splines? well my god I have good news for you, here's why splines!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds
Moles shrink their brains in winter to conserve energy https://mpg.de/19235031/0919-ornr-scientists-unearth-another-brain-shrinking-mammal-987453-x
How to write an Eulerian fluid simulator with 200 lines of code. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKAVRgIrUOU
Self-diagnosed mental health impairments spread virally on social media (originally Tumblr now Twitter) and become “real” through a kind of reverse-CBT. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010440X22000682
The "Eat Local" myth pervades https://jamesozden.substack.com/p/the-eat-local-myth-pervades
A single genomic change may have given modern humans an advantage over more ancient contemporaries like Neanderthals by enabling increased neocortical neurogenesis, researchers report in Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl6422
"Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance [in student educational gain] at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains." https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8#
There seems to be a new language model called Claude trained by Anthropic AI that appears to be significantly better than ChatGPT. It's not public yet, but here are some examples I came across:
1. "Claude will give the first scene of a Seinfeld episode where Jerry receives the supposed key to AI alignment from Sam Altman, ignoring dire warnings from Kramer." https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1611309184150274049
2. "Write a poem about Transformer Neural Networks in the style of Poe's The Raven." (see screenshot above, but there is more at the link) https://twitter.com/andy_l_jones/status/1611063295850729472
3. "Why is wood so expensive? It literally grows on trees. Answer with a pun." https://www.facebook.com/jimrandomh8471/posts/pfbid0DZ5DxD8qACYo8adh8yfvvUhJRChbQFEZwHaBV7dAe6RSJhmNvuxPYW8zU8hvtut3l
4. Claude is “able to eloquently demonstrate awareness of what it is, who its creators are, and what principles informed its own design” https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1611456645737107456