Links for 2024-01-07
AI:
A new post-pretraining method for improving an LLM's knowledge without catastrophic forgetting https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02415
OpenVoice: Instantly clone any voice and generate speech in any style and any language! https://research.myshell.ai/open-voice
LLM Maybe LongLM: With only four lines of code modification, the proposed method can effortlessly extend existing LLMs’ context window without any fine-tuning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01325
A transformer-based model for tracking any point in a video. https://github.com/facebookresearch/co-tracker
Boundary Attention: A form of local attention that infers unrasterized boundaries—including contours, corners and junctions—from the bottom-up. https://boundaryattention.github.io/
“Instruct-Imagen: We bring instruction tuning to image generation to combine diverse image generation tasks into a general format to see its generalization. Instruct-Imagen shows strong generalization to handle unseen compositional tasks.” https://instruct-imagen.github.io/
Engineering:
Building Apollo: “…the astronauts, and NASA, were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of industrial infrastructure, made up of 400,000 workers and 20,000 individual contractors that designed and built the various rockets and spacecraft of the Apollo program.” https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-apollo
The efficient heartbeat: Turns out that pumping fluids in pulses like our heart creates less friction (up to -27%) and loses less energy (-9%) than continuous pumping through a pipe. This was determined by watching turbulent flow in water using a laser. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-09-liquids-pulses-heart-friction-energy.html
Sex and race realism:
Will attempts to normalize HBD succeed? “It's uncomfortable to talk about. For the average low agreeableness internet autist this is not an issue, but this is a massive problem when dealing with normal people.” https://twitter.com/sebjenseb/status/1742383777740185694
Noah Carl and Michael Woodley wrote a response to a bizarre paper claiming there's no taboo against research on race and IQ. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289623000879
Are Men Smarter than Women? https://www.richardhanania.com/p/are-men-smarter-than-women
The Sex Wars Conference: Two sides in the debate about sex differences squared off for two days in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here’s what happened. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-sex-wars-conference
Politics:
Yet another study finds second-gen immigrants maintain the culture of their homelands and don't much assimilate. This new study finds (in 32 European countries) those whose ancestors are from clannish places are for cultural conservatism and against economic liberty. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/ancestral-kinship-and-the-origins-of-ideology/1A05C34B5B07A4664A8909E5663414BF
China's Biggest Land Grab Carves Into Ancestral Areas Of Bhutan's Royal Family https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/chinas-biggest-land-grab-carves-into-ancestral-areas-of-bhutans-royal-family-4811168
US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army: "The US assessments cited several examples of the impact of graft, including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-06/us-intelligence-shows-flawed-china-missiles-led-xi-jinping-to-purge-military [https://archive.is/jNa7A]
Ukraine:
Thread: “Ukraine society has become polarized by mobilization. Almost no one is covering this in English speaking social media, but that’s topic # 1 in Ukraine. The implication are huge: Ukrainians will either unify even more or there will be polarization” https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1743591462162288716
“Petr Tolstoy, deputy speaker of Russian parliament: the war will probably last for 2-3 more years. Ukraine must pay for its desire not to be with Russia. He says he doesn't care if anything is left of Ukraine after the war.” https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1702294350040809892
Quite surreal: An American traitor and convicted sex offender speaking to Putin's Islamist army. https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1743627014433587410 (But here is a worthy contender for the most surreal moment of this war. Putin's Jewish propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, chanting Allahu Akbar: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wx_PKIEwMlE)
The Patriot air-defense systems have helped Ukraine defend itself against Russian assaults, but Washington has warned that it will not be able to keep them supplied with missiles for much longer. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/world/europe/ukraine-patriots-us.html [https://archive.is/cLsal]