April - May 2024 review
This is a new segment which will be a bimonthly review. Every two months I will review all the blog posts I’ve published on Substack or Medium along with my top posts from my LinkedIN and X. I may also include additional blog posts, news articles, books, and podcasts that I want to share.
This is loosely analogous to the monthly “links” posts on Astral Codex Ten or Keller Scholl’s “Monthly Shorts”.
When I first posted this I said I was going to do monthly, but shortly afterwards I realized bimonthly would be nicer for my readers (less inbox clutter). I don’t know about you, but I have thousands of unread emails in my “Substack” folder!
My blog posts this past month
Published on Substack:
Published on Medium:
Some criticisms I had of EA-funded AI safety efforts (mostly written in early 2021)
Some notes on loneliness and tips for dealing with it (written 2018)
My top LinkedIN posts this past month
Demo of Krea AI shows the future of artistic creation with AI
Evidence of dimethyl sulfide on exoplanet K2-18b found by James Web
How I try to stay on top of all the latest developments in AI
MRISegmentator-Abdomen - a new model from Dr. Summers lab at NIH
OpenAI GPT4o - a list of all the new capabilities (Shared on Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen!)
Massive study in BMJ on vaccinated vs unvaccinated cardiovascular risk
AI for the Life Sciences event at Bentley University (picture)
CDC PPE regulations for H5N1 - downplaying airborne transmission again
My top X posts this month
Top blog posts I read in May 2024
Profile: The Far Out Initiative on Astral Codex Ten (May 15, 2024) (on on the movement to abolish suffering)
Top podcasts I listened to in May 2024
Robert Wright podcast: The Cosmic Thought of Pierre Teilhard de Cardin
James D. Miller podcast - Malcomb Collins on grabby aliens and AI risk - quite a zany episode - many wild ideas on Fermi paradox and AI x-risk I haven’t heard before
Bonus section - blog posts I enjoyed reading in January 2024
“Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why” by Erik Hoel (Jan 9 2024)
“Conditional Approval for Human Drugs” by Alex Tabarrok (Jan 29 2024)
“Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model” by Jason Crawford (Jan 26 2024)
“Zeroth-Principles Thinking” by Bryan Johnson (Mar 9 2021)
“The False Claim of Cryonics as Pseudoscience” by Max More (Jan 31 2024)
“The dead and dying at the gates of oncology clinical trials” by Jake Seliger (Jan 29 2024)
“My idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion” by Kaj Sotala (Oct 29 2023)
“New Trek Loves Hostile Architecture” - by Eneasz Brodski (Jul 22 2022)
Bonus section - news & articles I read in January 2024
Japan landed on the moon - there was a cool little spheroidal robot.
Big scandal at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston - 6 papers published by their researchers are being retracted and 31 corrected after a data sleuth found tons of evidence of image manipulation. It’s mostly the photoshopping of images of western blots, and whereas some of it might be in error… lots of it is obviously fraud. There might be more to come. It is, to quote Derek Lowe, “a disgrace” - and that’s at one of the top research institutions in the US!
Large language models cannot generalize “A is B” to “B is A” (related twitter thread). The researchers christen it the “reversal curse”. As I said on Twitter, this is yet another way LLMs are weird aliens. While humans have a similar issue in memory recall, this points to a severe deficit in reasoning which I suspect will not be easily remedied just by scaling to larger models and more data.
10 emerging antidepressants to keep an eye on - very interesting to read about potential new treatments. List includes esmethadone, r-ketamine, and psilocybin. Interestingly, an ultra-short acting (2-3 hour half life) orexin antagonist has also made the list — Seltorexant. It is under development for “major depressive disorder with insomnia symptoms”.
An Enormous Gravity ‘Hum’ Moves Through the Universe - It turns out that scientists have been carefully monitoring pulsars across our galaxy for decades now, noting tiny shifts in timing over time between them. These waves have an insanely long wavelength: “Whereas LIGO’s waves might vibrate a few hundred times a second, it might take years or decades for a single one of these gravitational waves to pass by at the speed of light.” It is believed that they are due to supermassive black holes orbiting each other, however they could also be due to more exotic phenomena like cosmic strings.
Private Bard conversations accidentally leaked out by Google. Users who shared Bard conversations with friends and colleagues were taken by surprise when they realized that these interactions are now searchable via Google.