Links for 2023-02-26
“Composer is a large (5 billion parameters) controllable diffusion model trained on billions of (text, image) pairs. Composer exponentially expands the control space through composition, leading to an enormous number of ways to generate and manipulate images, i.e., making "the infinite use of finite means".” https://damo-vilab.github.io/composer-page/
“We use an encoder to personalize a text-to-image model to new concepts with a single image and 5-15 tuning steps.” https://tuning-encoder.github.io/
“…the basal ganglia action pattern generators look like they are selected by softmax influenced by cortical stimulus fit. They get made/updated by RL rather than backprop, but very much a stimulus-response chain.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1628179162413383680.html
Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tLGZXSNRos5Jhjg6P/why-should-ethical-anti-realists-do-ethics
Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted To Know https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than
Intelligence Really Does Predict Job Performance: A Long-Needed Reply to Richardson and Norgate https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/new-paper-out-intelligence-really
Finding counterexamples to conjectures via reinforcement learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMLVH6IEwlM
Jason Rute - Deep learning in interactive theorem proving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5ew0BrRm_I
“When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about worst-case complexity, and the average-case complexity is often much more tractable. Many industry problems are “well-behaved” and modern SAT solvers can solve them quickly.” https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/np-hard/
Male humpback whales are changing their mating tactics. Instead of singing to attract females, they’re beating up the competition: other males. A shift from intersexual selection to intrasexual selection. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04509-7
People transverse through different states and stages as they attempt to solve puzzles, how does it happen exactly? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2023.2172871?journalCode=hcrj20
Historical Artillery Logistics thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1626262724152856579.html
New meta-analysis on temperature effects finds "no clear support for two commonly adopted theoretical perspectives: warmth-primes-prosociality or heat-facilitates-aggression." https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12626
Is the US secretly amassing killer drone swarms to repel China? https://asiatimes.com/2023/02/us-secretly-amassing-killer-drone-swarms-to-repel-china/
The best part of the end-of-the-world interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Host(s): Is there the possibility of a good outcome, what would that look like, and how do we go about achieving it?
Yudkowsky: It looks like me being wrong…
…this is not a case where you get a good outcome by accident…you know, like if you have a bunch of people putting together a new operating system, and they've heard about computer security, but they're skeptical that it's really that hard, the chance of them producing a secure operating system is effectively zero. That's basically the situation I see ourselves in with respect to AI alignment.
I have to be wrong about something, which I certainly am, I have to be wrong about something in a way that makes the problem easier rather than harder…if you're building a rocket for the first time ever, and you're wrong about something it's not surprising if you're wrong about something it's surprising if the thing that you're wrong about causes the rock to go twice as high on half the fuel you thought was required and be much easier to steer than you were afraid of.
Host(s): So are you implying…if you're wrong about something, the rocket blows…
Yudkowsky: Yeah, and then the rocket ignites the atmosphere…
Advanced aliens really are out there, and we have enough data to say roughly where they are in space and time, and when we will see or meet them.
Robin Hanson’s https://grabbyaliens.com/
See also:
When the first computer wakes up we’ll call it “a pile of sed scripts”, and there are people so deep in denial they could be killed by a T-800, all the while insisting that some German philosopher has proven AI is impossible.
https://borretti.me/article/and-yet-it-understands
What's interesting about this from an epistemological point of view is you could have an army of woke academics study murder in El Salvador for a decade and they would come up with a bunch of ideas about inequality and education and poverty, and it would all be BS.
– Roko Mijic
...the gangs had largely disappeared and that their power had dissipated since the start of the state of exception in March 2022. They pointed to palpable signs like the suspension of extortion and other "taxes" on parking, real estate rentals, or cable TV contracts. Some marveled that restaurants, taxies, and ride hailing apps like Uber now offer services in their communities.
Read more: How to successfully deal with crime: El Salvador rounded up 60,000 criminals during a 10-month state of exception that has curbed basic constitutional rights https://elfaro.net/en/202302/el_salvador/26694/Bukele-Government-Dismantled-Gang-Presence-in-El-Salvador.htm