Robuta

Chemicals active at the nanogram scale are invisible, difficult to observe, and near-impossible to clean or remove; but they are still psychoactive enough to...

Timothy Falcon’s quantitative-finance interview problem #14 asks for the optimal stopping strategy when playing a card-drawing game of...

A tutorial explaining how to train and generate high-quality anime faces with StyleGAN 1+2 neural networks, and tips/scripts for effective StyleGAN use.

Famous Ted Chiang SF short story ‘Story Of Your Life’ is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version <em>Arrival</em>, being about...

On statistical and psychological grounds, we probably are not losing many future Einsteins to speedrunning or streaming or e-sports etc.

Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical...

Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.

I manually extract RGB colors for 225 websites and graph them: <span style="color: red">red</span> &gt; <span style="color:...

Alice Sheldon’s SF short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ is misread by most readers as an alien attack driving men to insane violence; a closer revisionist...

Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt...

Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of...

Explanation of the emotional core of <em>The Quantum Thief</em>’s exploration of the trap of persistent personal identity and seeking freedom.

Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.

Blind randomized taste-test of mineral/distilled/tap waters using Bayesian best-arm finding; no large differences in preference.

In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their...

The 2007 indie SF film <em>Timecrimes</em> shows the horror &amp; metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the...

A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.

Some claim the disease hydrocephalus reduces brain size by 95% but often with normal or even above-average intelligence, and thus brains aren’t really...

Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of...

Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use &amp; what it’s good for.

Extended book review of Bradshaw 2013 (<em>Cat Sense</em>) on the connections between cat psychology, evolution/genetics, history of domestication...

2013 discussion of how systemic biases in science, particularly medicine and psychology, have resulted in a research literature filled with false positives and...

Generating Irish/folk/classical music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results.

1955 letters of John Nash and the NSA on a cryptosystem and Nash’s belief that near-perfect cryptography could exploit exponential difficulties.

Post-mortems of failed neural network experiments in generating anime images, pre-StyleGAN/BigGAN.

Fictional short story about Clippy &amp; AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning,...

A high-concept <em>Batman</em> short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates:...

History, background, visiting, ordering, using, &amp; analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1

Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index...

On the interpretation of Gene Wolfe’s short story ‘Suzanne Delage’ as inversion of Bram Stoker’s <em>Dracula</em> horror novel.

Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns...

Systems stress-test page for Gwern.net functionality, a sandbox for exercising Markdown/HTML/CSS/JS features at scale to check that they render correctly in...

Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase’s theory of the firm/linear...

Cats are not humans, but we design things like they are, for our convenience. What are the design patterns for cat-architecture? One missing design pattern:...

Cookbook of code for common selection &amp; order statistics scenarios in economics, psychology, decision theory, drug development etc.

Does Google Alerts return fewer results each year? A statistical investigation

I scrape Arxiv to find underused Greek variables which can add some diversity to math; the top 10 underused letters are ϰ, ς, υ, ϖ, Υ, Ξ, ι, ϱ, ϑ,...

Autobiographical documentary about ‘underground artist’ Robert Crumb on his 1991 farewell tour, discussing his personality, family, mental health, and...

Experiments with OpenAI’s ‘preference learning’ approach, which trains a NN to predict global quality of datapoints, and then uses reinforcement learning...

Acne is a good way to learn self-experiments for teenagers. I offer tips on what one could do, and an initial list of crowdsourced interventions to test from...

Short story about ‘The Institute of September the Thirtieth’, dedicated to the study of a single day in 1​939, in the form of a review of a fictional...

Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism: ignoring the surface abstractions and limitations to treat a system as a source of parts to...

Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor...

Compilation of studies comparing observational results with randomized experimental results on the same intervention, compiled from...

Discussion of Cordwainer Smith SF story, arguing that the pain-of-space is based on forgotten psychological issues in air travel, and concerns about worse ones...

Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many...

Meta page describing Gwern.net editing activity, traffic statistics, and referrer details, primarily sourced from Google Analytics (2011-present).

Speculation on feline-human fascination being ancestral vigilance triggered by their behavioral similarity to major primate predators, evolutionarily, creating...

170 aphorisms, mini essays or poems on life by James Richardson

Satirical essay on how AI can never truly solve a Rubik’s Cube like human beings can, written by an AI. Inspired by ‘Supersized Machines’ (Garfinkel et...

Many fashions and artworks originate as copies of practical objects. Why? Because any form of optimized design is intrinsically esthetically-pleasing, and a...

Satirical Christmas monologue by unreliable narrator disavowing his sins to Santa Claus; 16-stanza 64-line comic monologue in rhyming couplets, using regular...

The Twitter UI/UX for accepting follow requests is a fractal of bad design.

Catalogue of errors or problems caused by cats randomly doing things (ie. real-life fuzz testing).

Documentary about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge sheds little light on the brute facts of suffering and mental illness—facts which perhaps...

Discussion of how to teach active reading and questioning of scientific research. Partially fake research papers may teach a critical attitude. Various ideas...

Review of Isao Takahata’s last &amp; greatest film on how to accept the transience of life, filled as it is with both joy &amp; sorrow.

Decision analysis of whether cloning the most elite Special Forces dogs is a profitable improvement over standard selection procedures. Unless training is...

Essay by Pop Art artist Takashi Murakami on Japanese society and on WWII infantilizing Japanese culture as revealed by media, anime, and otaku.

James Reason’s Swiss cheese model illuminates how running red lights happens when multiple failures align—not from recklessness but from decision paralysis...

Proposal for a general NN architecture handling arbitrary tasks, for scaling up MLPs, with applications.

Short cheatsheet documentation about Gwern.net keybindings &amp; features.

Description of a useful service for web development: a website which wraps a neural network trained to classify images by whether they would look better...

Experiments in using BigGAN to generate anime faces and whole anime images; semi-successful.

A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.

3 essays by AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter exploring cooperation/game theory/‘superrationality’ in the context of the failure of political coordination...

Pulp SF novel about mind-controlling evil UFO alien abductions seems more about BDSM and furries than appreciated, possibly explaining its early popularity and...

On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data &amp; compute, generalizing and becoming...

11 <em>haiku</em>/<em>waka</em> variations on the theme ‘A struck gong. The crows launch from the trees. Behind them: the moon.’,...