Links for 2023-07-01
Researchers uncover a new CRISPR-like system in animals that can edit the human genome https://news.mit.edu/2023/fanzor-system-in-animals-can-edit-human-genome-0628
Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Models — “Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15448
Long-range Language Modeling with Self-retrieval https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13421
Bring Your Own Data! Self-Supervised Evaluation for Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13651
New 3D‑printing method builds structures with two metals https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2023/06/22/new-3dprinting-method-builds-structures-with-two-metals/
Aspartame: Why you can ignore the WHO claims that Diet Coke sweetener is a cancer risk https://inews.co.uk/news/aspartame-ignore-who-diet-coke-sweetener-cancer-risk-2444109 [https://archive.is/Ayuhq] (also: “Aspartame does not cause cancer at normal doses in humans. Genuinely ridiculous headlines off a stupid, badly designed concept from an organisation that's been screwing up health-science communications for years now” https://twitter.com/TomChivers/status/1674426827392286720)
Paul Ehrlich's “The Population Bomb” led to the sterilization of 8 million Indians. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
“Suppose when you are about to die, time freezes, and Omega shows up and tells you this: "I appear once to every human who has ever lived or will live, right when they are about to die. Answer this question with yes or no: are you in the last 95% of humans who will ever live in this universe? If your answer is correct, I will bring you to this amazing afterlife that I've prepared. If you guess wrong, you get nothing." Do you say yes or no?” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xHA7jHafbkxrYLJhx/why-am-i-me?commentId=SELixjCWBBrEJsjm6
Women in highly religious relationships report the highest levels of relationship quality. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/4328/
Four Cases for Panspermia https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/four-cases-for-panspermia
Explaining Affirmative Action to a Martian https://afro-optimist.blogspot.com/2018/05/explaining-affirmative-action-to-martian.html
Israeli firm Smartshooter unveils remote weapon station-radar combo to hunt drones: The Hopper uses a 5.56mm or 7.62 caliber rifle, but Aloni said in the future it could be paired with light machine guns. https://breakingdefense.com/2023/06/israeli-firm-smartshooter-unveils-remote-weapon-station-radar-combo-to-hunt-drones/
If you think this is silly, read about the amazing advances being made in robotics literally every week.
A small selection:
1. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/robocat-a-self-improving-robotic-agent
2. https://sites.google.com/view/op3-soccer
3. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/robots-learning-video-simulation-artificial-visual-cortex-vc-1/
4. https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/
5. https://rl-at-scale.github.io/
6. https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/04/towards-ml-enabled-cleaning-robots.html
7. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/vid2player3d/
8. https://sites.google.com/view/human-0shot-robot/
9. https://mimic-play.github.io/
10. https://sites.google.com/view/fastrlap
12. https://humanoid-transformer.github.io/
12. https://diffusion-rosie.github.io/
14. https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/