Links for 2024-01-01
AI:
LARP: Language-Agent Role Play for Open-World Games — “…includes a cognitive architecture that encompasses memory processing and a decision-making assistant, an environment interaction module with a feedback-driven learnable action space, and a postprocessing method that promotes the alignment of various personalities.” https://miao-ai-lab.github.io/LARP/
Unified-IO 2: the first autoregressive multimodal model that is capable of understanding and generating images, text, audio, and action https://unified-io-2.allenai.org/
InsActor: Instruction-driven Physics-based Characters https://jiawei-ren.github.io/projects/insactor/
Unsupervised Universal Image Segmentation https://github.com/u2seg/U2Seg
Compact Neural Graphics Primitives with Learned Hash Probing https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/compact-ngp/
NYT calls for the total destruction of all extant major LLMs https://twitter.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/1741053592335733196
MonadGPT is a chatbot fine-tuned on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French, and Latin — up to the 17th century.
Chat now: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Pclanglais/MonadGPT
Miscellaneous:
In defense of science fiction https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/in-defense-of-science-fiction
The most popular programming languages since 1965 to 2022 https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1741077744622907545
Psychology:
“Contrary to hysteria around dating apps driving young male sexlessness, we actually see that the men who remain virgins both abstain from dating app use and from pornography use.” https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1740580436810531167
“In Israel, the Ethiopian Jews score lower in cognitive tests than Arabs, despite them being part of the Jewish majority and therefore privileged, despite no history of slavery, Jim Crow, etc.” — Richard Hanania https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/updated-estimates-of-iqs-within-israel
Politics:
“A sweeping purge of Chinese generals has weakened the People’s Liberation Army, exposing deep-rooted corruption that could take more time to fix and slow Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s military modernization drive amid geopolitical tensions, analysts say.” https://www.reuters.com/world/china/sweeping-chinese-military-purge-exposes-weakness-could-widen-2023-12-30/ [https://archive.is/BuavA]
The Swiss newspaper-of-record Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that in Germany ~1000 women per year are raped or sexually assaulted by asylum-seekers. https://www.nzz.ch/international/asyl-und-sexualverbrechen-tausende-frauen-opfer-von-fluechtlingen-ld.1769909
I generally oppose any ideology whose vision of a good future is one where the quantity of a bad thing is reduced to exactly zero. If the vision isn't robust to imperfections then it ends up being authoritarian even if the original intentions are beautiful
— Vitalik Buterin
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
― C. S. Lewis
Ukraine:
“A Russian soldier films himself during a drive on the E97 near Oleshky while being hit by a Ukrainian FPV drone. Many other destroyed Russian vehicles and personnel can be seen during the ride.” https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1741456169028239387
A Russian BUK M2 air defense system destroyed in the Donetsk region by SSO units. https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1741770416123789313
This is what the former Black Sea Fleet Headquarters in Sevastopol looks like right now. Destroyed and abandoned. https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1741447925996143098
Killing Russians By The Truckload Around Avdiivka, Ukraine’s M-2 Fighting Vehicles Are Showing How Russia Loses—And Ukraine Wins https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/30/killing-russians-by-the-truckload-around-avdiivka-ukraines-m-2-fighting-vehicles-are-showing-how-russia-loses-and-ukraine-wins/
“THREAD on the impact of small quadcopters in the Ukraine war over the past year - based on my earlier analysis of how 2022 went and what I thought would be relevant in 2023.” https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1741454000463941648
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Carney