Links for 2023-01-31
Insurance trivia: Private insurance pays for free gym membership in order to attract healthier-than-average new clients. Auto insurers want to know the academic records of prospective clients because people with more success in school file fewer auto insurance claims. People who acquire life insurance are more likely to die younger. But it is unclear why, based on available health metrics. Making health insurance the same price for everyone can make everyone worse off. https://news.mit.edu/2023/risky-business-book-insurance-amy-finkelstein-0130
ChatGPT Firm CEO: Worst Case for AI Is 'Lights Out for All of Us' https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-ceo-worst-case-ai-lights-out-for-all-2023-1
Moûsai: Text-to-Music Generation with Long-Context Latent Diffusion: “…a cascading latent diffusion approach that can generate multiple minutes of high-quality stereo music at 48kHz from textual descriptions. For each model, we make an effort to maintain reasonable inference speed, targeting real-time on a single consumer GPU.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11757 (samples: https://anonymous0.notion.site/Mo-sai-Text-to-Audio-with-Long-Context-Latent-Diffusion-b43dbc71caf94b5898f9e8de714ab5dc)
Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models https://text-to-audio.github.io/
Neural networks generalize because of this one weird trick https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/fovfuFdpuEwQzJu2w/neural-networks-generalize-because-of-this-one-weird-trick
Simple neural networks outperform the state-of-the-art for controlling robotic prosthetics https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/01/simple-neural-networks-outperform-the-state-of-the-art-for-controlling-robotic-prosthetics/
Risky business: linking Toxoplasma gondii infection and entrepreneurship behaviours across individuals and countries https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.0822#d1e623
Multimaterial 3D printing with a twist https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2023/01/multimaterial-3d-printing-twist
“The Natufian culture is a Late Epipaleolithic archaeological culture of the Levant, dating to around 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. The culture was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture
“China Needs Couples to Have More Babies: Can I.V.F. Help? China is trying urgently to address its declining population. One idea is to subsidize assisted fertility procedures, which are often a last resort for couples and out of reach for many.” [The New York Times] https://archive.is/5YNgh
Verifying Sweden's Impressive Covid Performance https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/verifying-swedens-impressive-covid
More than 75% of South Koreans consider it necessary to develop their own nuclear weapons to counter the threats from North Korea, survey shows https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20230130005551325
Rheinmetall eyes boost in munitions output, HIMARS production in Germany: “We can produce 240,000 rounds of tank ammunition (120mm) per year...The capacity for the production of 155mm artillery rounds can be ramped up to 450,000 to 500,000 per year...” https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/rheinmetall-eyes-boost-munitions-output-himars-production-germany-ceo-2023-01-28/
“In Germany, shell production of all calibers increased from 343,000 a month in 1914 to 11,000,000 a month in 1918…” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anecdotes-from-the-archive/war-of-the-manufacturing-machines-1916/