| Essays · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2026-03-01 |
Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net page |
| March 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-03-01 |
March 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-03-01 |
February 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-27 |
January 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-05-31 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 5 new essays; links on deep learning, history, technological/cultural evolution, & Scott Alexander; and 2 books & 1 movie review |
| May 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-04-26 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on cloning, DRL, religion, parasites; 6 movie reviews. |
| January 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-12-18 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with Danbooru2018 release announcement, links on genetic engineering, reinforcement learning, compression, and 3 book/movie reviews |
| August 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-07-21 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 short essays, a major new site features, and links on AI, progress, and technology; 1 short book review, and 2 long movie reviews on ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘S |
| March 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-02-28 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 3 writeups; links on genetics, ads, poetry; and 1 anime review, 1 opera review, and 1 movie review. |
| February 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-01-20 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 essays/projects, site improvements; links on genetics, AI, propaganda, and typography; and 1 opera review. |
| July 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-06-20 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on science and history; 1 book review; and 7 movie/TV series reviews. |
| April 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-03-27 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI, biology, SIGBOVIK, Dresden Codak; 1 book review, 3 movie reviews. |
| October 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-09-30 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on DL scaling, SDAM, and public goods; 1 book and 2 opera reviews. |
| September 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-08-03 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 behavioral genetics analyses and links on AI text generation, Registered Reports, political polarization, and history of technology; 4 movie reviews. |
| December 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-11-21 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on gene editing, the Replication Crisis, computer latency, and suffering; 4 book reviews, 2 opera/movie reviews, and 2 anime reviews. |
| November 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-10-13 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 essays, links on PGD and AI scaling, disappearing polymorphs, and The Public Domain Review; 2 opera and 1 anime reviews. |
| 2019 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-11-21 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2019 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2019 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2019, with some general discussion of the year and the |
| June 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2027 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2027 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2027 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with 3 new pages/essays, and links on CRISPR, population screening, AI scaling, politics, and technological unemployment. |
| May 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2020 Gwern.net newsletter: GPT-3 scaling, implications, deep theory; anime GAN updates, and 1 book review. |
| January 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with 5 writeups, and links on AI scaling, videos-for-cats, and art; 1 book and 1 opera review. |
| August 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with an essay on sidenotes; links on human competence, efficient computing, and hardware overhangs; no reviews. |
| March 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on pandemics, politics, DL; one anime review. |
| February 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling and disasters; 1 book, 1 movie, and 2 opera reviews. |
| July 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on the Uighurs, authoritarianism, negative emissions, AI overhang; 1 movie & 2 anime reviews. |
| April 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on music generation, data augmentation, terrorism, Matt Lakeman, and 1 documentary review. |
| October 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling, Euclid; further site reorganization & improvement. |
| September 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on DRL and AI scaling, psychiatric disorders; no reviews. |
| 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2020 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2020 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2020, with some general discussion of the year. |
| June 2029 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2029 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2029 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2029 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2025 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2025 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2025 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2025 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2025 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2028 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2028 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2028 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with new site features/refactoring, and links on Codex, embryo selection, and gametogenesis. |
| May 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI hardware, diffusion models, optogenetics, brain scanning. |
| January 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling up and down. |
| August 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on molecular recording, TODO |
| March 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2021 Gwern.net newsletter; 2 major new site features: ‘popins’ and recursive Wikipedia popups. |
| February 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling, semaglutide, and ethicist ethics. |
| July 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling, particularly new East Asian record-breaking work & deep reinforcement learning. |
| October 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2020-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2021 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| 2021 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2021-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2021 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2021 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2021, with some general discussion of the year. |
| June 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| 2024 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2024-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2024 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2024 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2024, with some general discussion of the year. |
| June 2014 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2014-05-20 |
2026-02-25 |
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| May 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-05-22 |
2026-02-25 |
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| January 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-02-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| August 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-06-21 |
2026-02-25 |
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| March 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-04-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| February 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-03-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| July 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-06-21 |
2026-02-25 |
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| April 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-04-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| October 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-09-29 |
2026-02-25 |
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| September 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-08-31 |
2026-02-25 |
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| December 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-11-30 |
2026-02-25 |
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| November 2014 News · Gwern.net |
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2014-10-31 |
2026-02-25 |
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| 2014 Year in Review · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2014-12-18 |
2026-02-25 |
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| June 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2026 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2026 News · Gwern.net |
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2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2026 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2025-01-25 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| June 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2022 News · Gwern.net |
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2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2022 News · Gwern.net |
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2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2022 News · Gwern.net |
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2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2022 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| 2022 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2022-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2022 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2022 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2022, with some general discussion of the year. |
| June 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-06-03 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on dysgenics, genetics, AI, PC history, and 5 movie reviews |
| May 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-05-02 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2017 Gwern.net newsletter: deep reinforcement learning, music. No completed writings. |
| January 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-12-31 |
2026-02-25 |
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| August 2017 News · Gwern.net |
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2017-07-17 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, AI, measurement error, bioethics, catnip, formal schooling, 1 book review, 2 anime reviews |
| March 2017 News · Gwern.net |
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2017-02-23 |
2026-02-25 |
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| February 2017 News · Gwern.net |
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2017-01-19 |
2026-02-25 |
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| July 2017 News · Gwern.net |
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2017-06-14 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on intelligence, GANs, malaria, Borges’s essays, 2 book reviews |
| April 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-03-31 |
2026-02-25 |
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| October 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-09-08 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on heritability, AlphaGo Zero, peer review, gifted-and-talented; 1 book & 1 movie review. |
| September 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-08-16 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics (GWAS, engineering, evolution), intelligence, AI, metformin, lithium; 2 book and 6 movie reviews |
| December 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-11-30 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics/AI/politics/psychology/biology/economics, 2 movie reviews and 1 anime review |
| November 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-10-17 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, reinforcement learning, psychology, economics; 2 book reviews, 1 movie review |
| 2017 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-11-30 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2017 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2017 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2017. |
| June 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-05-27 |
2026-02-25 |
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| May 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-04-30 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| January 2014 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2014-12-18 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| August 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-07-17 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| March 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-02-14 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| February 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-01-28 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| July 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-07-02 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| April 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-03-31 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| October 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-09-23 |
2026-02-25 |
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| September 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-09-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| December 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-11-28 |
2026-02-25 |
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| November 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2015-10-31 |
2026-02-25 |
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| 2015 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-02-04 |
2026-02-25 |
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| June 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-05-31 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, reinforcement learning, cats, experimentation, with 6 book reviews and 12 music links. |
| May 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-05-10 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with 3 essays, links on genetic engineering/heritability/human evolution, politics, psychology, advertising, and 1 book and 1 movie review. |
| January 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2017-12-21 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with 3 tech/philosophy essays and links on genetics, AI, biology/medicine, Bitcoin, linguistics, Touhou, and 2 anime reviews. |
| August 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-08-01 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetic engineering, DRL, research quality, security, economics, and 4 book/movie reviews |
| March 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-02-28 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, RL, politics, Uber, 2 book reviews, and 2 movie/anime reviews |
| February 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-01-28 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with 3 new essays and links on genetics/AI/psychology/economics, 1 book review, 1 movie review, and 7 pieces of music. |
| July 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-05-01 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, RL, true crime, tech economics, and 4 book reviews |
| April 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-04-02 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genome synthesis, cloning, RL, causation, diet, and 1 movie review. |
| October 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-09-23 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with 5 new posts, links on genetics/human evolution/AI/meta-science/history of tech, 2 book reviews, 2 movie reviews, 1 series review. |
| September 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-09-02 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, human evolution, genetic engineering, LSD, and 1 book review. |
| December 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-11-18 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetic engineering, NLP/DRL, history of technology, online economics; 2 book and 3 movie reviews. |
| November 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-10-19 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, CRISPR, political change, oil; 1 book and 1 movie review. |
| 2018 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2018-12-08 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2018 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2018 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2018, with some general discussion of the year. |
| June 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-05-26 |
2026-02-25 |
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| May 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-04-30 |
2026-02-25 |
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| January 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-01-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| August 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-07-20 |
2026-02-25 |
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| March 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-03-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| February 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-02-01 |
2026-02-25 |
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| July 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-06-23 |
2026-02-25 |
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| April 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-03-15 |
2026-02-25 |
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| October 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-09-25 |
2026-02-25 |
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| September 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-08-18 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| December 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-12-03 |
2026-02-25 |
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| November 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-10-30 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| 2016 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2016-12-31 |
2026-02-25 |
|
| June 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
June 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| May 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
May 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| January 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
January 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| August 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
August 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| March 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
March 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| February 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
February 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| July 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
July 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| April 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
April 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| October 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
October 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| September 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
September 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| December 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
December 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| November 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-08 |
2026-02-25 |
November 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO |
| 2023 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2023-01-02 |
2026-02-25 |
Annual summary of 2023 Gwern.net newsletters, selecting my best writings, the best 2023 links by topic, and the best books/movies/anime I saw in 2023, with some general discussion of the year. |
| Internet Search Case Studies · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-09-23 |
2026-02-24 |
Real-world examples of using advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books. |
| Apollonian #2: A Poet Teaches AIs, by Gwern, Gemini-3.1-pro-preview, Claude-4.6-opus, GPT-5.2 Pro, Kimi K2.5 Thinking · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-02-22 |
2026-02-23 |
<span class="reader-mode-not">A poet stands before an audience of AIs spanning the scale of intelligence—from bits to Jupiter-brains—and answers ‘What is a poem?’, reciting a love poem for his dead gi |
| Spoilage, by GPT-5.2 Pro, Claude-4.6-opus, Gwern, Kimi K2.5 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-02-10 |
2026-02-13 |
LLM creative writing exercise: <em>Primer</em> fanfic. Claude summary: ‘A startup engineer developing commercial ‘stasis fridges’ discovers, through a miswiring accident, that the device creates close |
| Self-experiment risk-taking interview, by Elizabeth van Nostrand, Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-02-12 |
2026-02-12 |
Interview transcript about risk-taking in self-experimentation, LLM creativity, and the limits of self-tracking metrics. |
| Symbolic PFNs (SPFNs): Training LLMs for Symbolic Bayesian Inference by Reversing Stan · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-02-02 |
2026-02-09 |
Proposal: train LLMs to predict Stan code from synthetic data sampled from Stan’s prior predictives. The output is an interpretable, executable Bayesian model, and a symbolic posterior over model stru |
| Hacking Smartphone ESP Apps · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-02-08 |
2026-02-08 |
Illustration of how to think about security and reward-hacking by walking through ways to fake psychic powers even on <em>someone else’s</em> smartphone and ESP application. Supply-chain attacks, slei |
| 2025 Inkhaven Writing Interview, by Gwern, Adam Mastroianni · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-05 |
2026-02-05 |
Interview with Adam Mastroianni (<em>Experimental History</em>) on writing and where ideas come from; done November 2025 at the Inkhaven writing residency. |
| Some 2025 LLM System Prompts, by Gwern, Gemini-3-pro-preview, GPT-5 Pro, Claude-4.5-opus · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-18 |
2026-02-05 |
Trying out having Gemini-3-pro-preview write system prompts compatible with creative fiction writing (sci-fi short story examples), and trying it out on GPT-5 Pro and Claude-4.5-opus with mixed result |
| Internet Community Design: Slow To Fast · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-07-04 |
2026-02-01 |
Internet communities are multilevel selection systems across time-scales. Platforms fail when they privilege the stream and block promotion into durable memory. Good design builds explicit promotion p |
| Perished Paradise Graveyard, by Gwern, GPT-4 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-03-31 |
2026-01-31 |
Experiments in translating John Milton’s <em>Paradise Lost</em> to alliterative verse using LLMs, 2023–2025 and prototyping inner-monologue prompts for iterative composition. |
| Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-01-20 |
2026-01-27 |
Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript makin |
| Apollonian #1: The Counted & the Crowned, by Gwern, GPT-5.2 Pro, Claude-4.5-opus, Kimi K2 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-12-15 |
2026-01-26 |
<span class="reader-mode-not">Pindaric ode commemorating millions of laboratory animals sacrificed for science, in a strict alliterative meter. Synthesizing the history of mice strains with mythic fig |
| Towards a Better Hutter Prize, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-01-22 |
2026-01-22 |
The Hutter Prize compression benchmark has not led to any progress towards AGI because it is too small. To work, it needs to be much larger, move to temporally heldout data rather than compression bou |
| Recent Blog Posts · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2026-01-22 |
Index of my most recent longer off-site writings, presented as annotations. (Sorted in reverse chronological order. Intended for transclusion onto the homepage index.) |
| Video Games as Art · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-31 |
2026-01-17 |
Video games are art, but a strange art: their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player. This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible—you can point at the moon, but i |
| Changelog · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-09-15 |
2026-01-16 |
Monthly chronological list of recent major writings/changes/additions to Gwern.net (see also the monthly newsletter). |
| How Many Shower Controls Are There?, by Gwern, GPT-5.2 Pro · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-07-31 |
2026-01-15 |
Answer: Too many! After observing 14 unique shower controls across 20 stays while traveling, I used capture-recapture statistics to estimate the total population of designs, finding a likely mean of & |
| First, Make Me Care, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-08 |
2026-01-14 |
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic inte |
| Manual of Style · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-07 |
2026-01-14 |
Style guide documentation of Gwern.net writing conventions for essays and code. |
| Poetry HTML Typesetting · Gwern.net |
essay |
2026-01-03 |
2026-01-04 |
Web design post-mortem of ways to typeset poetry and how we developed our advanced approach. Possible approaches are PDF plugins, PNG screenshots, semantic class soup, and Pandoc line blocks. Gwern.ne |
| Anti-Spaced Repetition for Serendipity · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-03-24 |
2025-12-30 |
Proposal: the spacing curve could be used to review only flashcards one <em>has</em> forgotten, instead of almost forgotten. This inverse or opposite spaced repetition system would be useful for syste |
| Anencephaly Infant Organ Donation Survey · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-13 |
2025-12-30 |
American public survey suggests meaningful support for organ donation from anencephalic (terminal) babies. |
| Oh Deer: Could Deer Evolve to Avoid Car Accidents? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-11-11 |
2025-12-30 |
I wondered how fast deer could evolve to avoid car fatalities. Truncation selection with known mortality and generation length suggests that it would take a long time even with high heritability. |
| Claude-2: Bats With Baby Faces, by Claude-2, GPT-4o, Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-07-11 |
2025-12-27 |
Some July 2023 Claude-2 & ChatGPT satirical writing samples of gonzo journalism & typography. |
| ‘The Fourth Truth Of Pain’ Graveyard, by Gwern, davinci-001, davinci-003, GPT-3.5, Kimi K2 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview, GPT-5.1 Pro, Claude-4.5 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-11-30 |
2025-12-26 |
Prototype poems and abandoned draft completions of a William Empson poem, by various LLMs 2022–2025. Samples illustrate the inverted U-curve of LLM creative writing, where RLHF destroyed creativity fo |
| Why Is Microwave Tea Bad? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-03-22 |
2025-12-24 |
Microwaving water for tea makes it taste bad, for unknown reasons. Is it a lack of bubbles? Lingering CO<sub>2</sub>? Comments and proposed experiments. |
| Your Hands And Mine, by Gwern, Claude-4.5-opus, GPT-5.1 Pro, Kimi K2 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-25 |
2025-12-15 |
<span class="reader-mode-not">A 9-part lyric narrative poem in mostly loose 13-syllable ABAB quatrains, punctuated by terse italic weekday refrains that read as a chore-and-ritual checklist. Beginning |
| What Begets the End, by Alexander Wales · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-11-14 |
2025-11-25 |
Commissioned short story on the theme of the shoggoth and contemporary AI. |
| The Fourth Truth Of Pain, by Gwern, Kimi K2 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview, GPT-5.1 Pro, Claude-4.5 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-11-30 |
2025-11-21 |
<span class="reader-mode-not">A collaborative AI completion of the second half of William Empson’s poem “This Last Pain” that transforms his locked-door metaphor into a camera obscura of Buddhist no-s |
| A Christmas Protestation, by Gwern, ChatGPT-4 o1-pro, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, ChatGPT-5 Pro, Kimi K2 Thinking, Gemini-3-pro-preview · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-25 |
2025-11-19 |
Satirical Christmas monologue by unreliable narrator disavowing his sins to Santa Claus; 16-stanza 64-line comic monologue in rhyming couplets, using regular iambic pentameter. |
| LLM Challenge: Write Non-Biblical Sentences · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-28 |
2025-11-18 |
Can 2024-era LLMs reason successfully about how to write using only words that could <em>not</em> have appeared in any Bible ever? Mostly. |
| Tilakkhana: The 3 Scars of Existence, by Gwern, Kimi K2, GPT-5 Pro, Claude-Sonnet-4.5, DeepSeek-V3.2 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-10-18 |
2025-10-22 |
A poem for the end of the Anthropocene. 3-part Buddhist meditation on the ethics and nature of AI minds, largely written by LLMs. |
| Silver Bird Above San Francisco, by Gwern, Claude-Sonnet-4.5, GPT-5 Pro, Gemini-2.5-pro · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-09-30 |
2025-10-14 |
A free-verse ode to aviation’s mundane miracle, using William Carlos Williams’ “so much depends” as structural refrain across six sections—from a torque-spec’d bolt to sleeping passengers to ground ob |
| Why Cats Love Earwax · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-11-05 |
2025-08-15 |
Collation of anecdotes and speculation about why many cats like earwax, and human earwax especially. Is it the valeric acid? Plus human sweat. |
| LLM Daydreaming · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-07-12 |
2025-07-14 |
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems. |
| Conference Fermi Problems, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-07-06 |
2025-07-06 |
A field guide to inferring how many people are at a convention using nothing but on-the-spot observation. It surveys flow/dwell tricks, density sampling, capture–recapture, supply-exhaustion indices, |
| Perfume Reviews, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-07-05 |
2025-07-05 |
Discussion of dabbling in samplers of ‘avant-garde’ perfumes and other perfumes; what I liked and did not like, and what 2 perfumes I ultimately bought for myself (Acqua di Sale and Kyoto Incense). |
| Towards Better LLM Creative Writing, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-29 |
2025-07-01 |
What have I been up to with regards to LLM writing? A quick overview of how it all fits together, as of the first half of 2025. |
| Tracking Phishing Bots Via Locations, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-06-04 |
2025-06-06 |
Proposal: use an information leak from catfishing/thirst-trap bots of ‘their location’, which they set to a target’s location, to monitor their collective activities and infer their attacks. |
| Conferences As D&D Tabletops, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-28 |
2025-05-30 |
Proposal for a conference organization tool modeled after ad hoc collaboration tools like tabletop roleplaying games or disaster response: just have everyone scribble on a map of the conference locati |
| Hacking Pinball High Scores, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-28 |
2025-05-28 |
Illustration of how to think about security and reward-hacking by walking through many ways to fake a pinball high score. |
| Bell, Crow, Moon: 11 Variations, by Gwern, Claude-4-opus, Gemini-2.5-pro, GPT-4-o3 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-25 |
2025-05-27 |
Set of 11 <em>haiku</em>/<em>waka</em> variations on the theme ‘A struck gong. The crows launch from the trees. Behind them: the moon.’, written using LLMs. |
| Meta-Learning Information-Maximizing Personality Surveys · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-17 |
2025-05-26 |
Proposal to teach LLM efficient interviewing by using psychometric tests to construct optimal question-and-answer sequences to train on. Would enable better personalization and imitation, and eventual |
| Quantifying Truesight With SAEs · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-25 |
2025-05-26 |
Proposal to use SAEs to crack open the dark matter of LLM inference about text. |
| You Could’ve Invented Transformers, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-25 |
2025-05-25 |
Proposal for a ‘You Could Have Invented Transformers’ tutorial; someone should write a series showing a logical recreation of Transformers from primitive <em>n</em>-gram language models to full-streng |
| Does website luxury exist? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-29 |
2025-05-23 |
There are many luxury goods. Are there luxury websites? They could exist, but mostly don’t. Maybe website quality is too hard to understand right now. |
| Human Cannibalism Alignment Chart, by Gwern, Gemini-2.5-pro, GPT-4-o3 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-12 |
2025-05-20 |
Taxonomy of possible kinds of human cannibalism, in 3×3 form vs function alignment table. Surprisingly many cases to consider. |
| October The First Is Too Late · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-09 |
2025-05-19 |
Short story about ‘The Institute of September the Thirtieth’, dedicated to the study of a single day in 1939, in the form of a review of a fictional book. |
| Cats As Horror Movie Villains · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-04-11 |
2025-05-11 |
Speculation on feline-human fascination being ancestral vigilance triggered by their behavioral similarity to major primate predators, evolutionarily, creating a compelling ‘safe danger’ like watching |
| Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-05-05 |
2025-05-05 |
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted |
| Review of I Remember Lemuria!, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-26 |
2025-05-01 |
Pulp SF novel about mind-controlling evil UFO alien abductions seems more about BDSM and furries than appreciated, possibly explaining its early popularity and eventual disappearance. |
| The Meta-LW Doomsday Argument, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-04-29 |
2025-04-30 |
N/A |
| Review: The Birth of Sake (2015), by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-19 |
2025-04-29 |
Review of sake-making documentary; moody cinematography on a declining industry, way of life, and country. What is the point of sacrificing your life and family to make a drink no one cares about? Wha |
| AI Cannibalism Can Be Good, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-04-27 |
2025-04-27 |
Training new LLMs on old LLM outputs is a good way to get a lot more data and recycle compute, and is not paradoxically self-defeating nor necessarily harmful. |
| Design Graveyard · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-01 |
2025-04-26 |
Meta page describing Gwern.net website design experiments and post-mortem analyses. |
| Visualizing Active Learning Sample-Efficiency, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-07-25 |
2025-04-25 |
Visualizing the sample efficiency of adaptiveness in active learning using R and the pedagogical example of binary search on an interval. |
| Parliament of Rag & Bone, by Gwern, GPT-4.5, GPT-4-o3, GPT-4-o4-mini-high, Claude-3.7 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-04-19 |
2025-04-20 |
N/A |
| Area Man Angry AI Not Silver Bullet, by Gwern, Gemini-2.5-pro, GPT-4-o3 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-04-19 |
2025-04-19 |
<em>Onion</em>-style fiction satire of complaints about automation or scaling not proceeding fast enough for some individual with unstated comparisons or timelines. (Partially an LLM style-imitation w |
| Speedrunning Is Not Such A Waste Of Talent · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-14 |
2025-04-09 |
On statistical and psychological grounds, we probably are not losing many future Einsteins to speedrunning or streaming or e-sports etc. |
| The Unreasonable Selectiveness of Mathematics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-14 |
2025-04-09 |
Meta-mathematics discussion of why math is open-ended and generalizes, from the perspective of meta-reinforcement learning and contrasted with fields like speedrunning: it culturally selects for feasi |
| Absolute Unit NNs: Regression-Based MLPs for Everything · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-07-20 |
2025-04-07 |
Proposal for a general NN architecture handling arbitrary tasks, for scaling up MLPs, with applications. |
| Sidenotes In Web Design · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-08-06 |
2025-04-06 |
In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons. |
| Adding Bits Beats AI Slop, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-23 |
2025-03-24 |
AI slop is unsatisfying because there is no <em>there</em> there. It is intellectual junk food that mimics nutrition but delivers only empty calories. Satisfying AI outputs must embed dense informatio |
| Little’s Law in the Wild, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-10-27 |
2025-03-22 |
N/A |
| Best Student Ever! · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-08-27 |
2025-03-22 |
Harold Bloom amusingly recommends all students as his ‘best student ever’; modeled as a ‘record value’ order statistics problem, this is more common than it seems. |
| Simulating ‘tail Collapse’ in R, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-23 |
2025-03-21 |
N/A |
| Plumbing vs Internet, Revisited, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-01-02 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Regexps Used to Be AI, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-24 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Trying Pemmican, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-09-01 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Weinersmith’s Trajectoid Words, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-04 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Kids Are Sick, A Lot, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-04-21 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| On First Looking Into Tolkien’s Tower, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-04-06 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Cleanup When: Before or After?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-01-28 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Peak Pre-Modern Human Speed, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-01-02 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-01-23 |
2025-03-19 |
N/A |
| Copyright & AI · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-11-26 |
2025-03-18 |
The moral application of copyright and intellectual property to AI is the minimum protection necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. |
| Scaling Hypothesis Revisited: GPT-3’s 2^(nd) Anniversary & Looking Forward 2 Years · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-05-28 |
2025-03-17 |
Revisiting GPT-3 and my ‘Scaling Hypothesis’ 2 years: it holds up and scaling has been too successful to be strangled in th ecrub. I speculate about the immediate future of scaling for 2023–2024 and b |
| Scaling Hypothesis Revisited: GPT-3’s 2^(nd) Anniversary & Looking Forward 2 Years · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-05-28 |
2025-03-17 |
Revisiting GPT-3 and my ‘Scaling Hypothesis’ 2 years: it holds up and scaling has been too successful to be strangled in th ecrub. I speculate about the immediate future of scaling for 2023–2024 and b |
| Spend Writing Weirdness Points Well, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-07-20 |
2025-03-17 |
N/A |
| DMT Factoring Experiment Cost Estimate, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-04-22 |
2025-03-16 |
N/A |
| You Can’t Countersignal Online Writing, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-12-29 |
2025-03-16 |
N/A |
| Running Traffic Lights as Complex Disasters · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-16 |
2025-03-16 |
James Reason’s Swiss cheese model illuminates how running red lights happens when multiple failures align—not from recklessness but from decision paralysis at the wrong moment. A ‘point of no return’ |
| Wolfe’s ‘Fat Magician’: Marx Brother?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-02-10 |
2025-03-15 |
Was Gene Wolfe’s opaque short story ‘Fat Magician’ inspired by a scene from the famous Marx Brothers movie, <em>A Night at the Opera</em>, and the vaudeville gags solve the mystery of the short story? |
| Gwern.net Large File Support, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-03-09 |
2025-03-09 |
N/A |
| Oldest possible food: 20_(mya)? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-06-22 |
2025-03-08 |
Looking into the oldest edible food suggests a range of 0.05–20<sub>mya</sub> food, after discarding myths like honey or woolly mammoth. |
| Intentionally Blank Page · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2025-02-10 |
This page deliberately left blank. It is meant to serve as a placeholder for client-side transclusion purposes. |
| LLMs Can Be Faster Than You Think, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2025-02-07 |
2025-02-09 |
2025 LLM technology is still far from the physical and statistical limits of how fast text or programs can be generated. It is plausible that with enough money, optimization, and hardware, large progr |
| Rock-Paper-Scissors Optimality · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-25 |
2025-02-02 |
Speculation on why 3-move games like Rock-Paper-Scissors are so common in games & decisions: aside from allowing ties, is this design information-theoretically optimal in game difficulty vs inform |
| Danbooru2021: A Large-Scale Crowdsourced & Tagged Anime Illustration Dataset · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-12-15 |
2025-02-01 |
Danbooru2021 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.9m+ images annotated with 162m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation. |
| Miscellaneous · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-08-05 |
2024-12-28 |
Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc. |
| Self-Blinded Mineral Water Taste Test · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-02-15 |
2024-12-16 |
Blind randomized taste-test of mineral/distilled/tap waters using Bayesian best-arm finding; no large differences in preference. |
| Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-08 |
2024-12-15 |
Discussion of possible tasks to measure LLM capabilities in soft ‘creative’ tasks like brainstorming or editing, to quantify failures in creative writing domains. |
| Towards Better RSS Feeds, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-07-30 |
2024-12-14 |
Discussion of the mismatch between blog-oriented RSS feeds and longform/wiki writing methods, and how providing a ‘temporal hierarchy’ of raw edits → summaries may help square the circle. |
| Second Life Sentences · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-03 |
2024-12-12 |
Variations on the idea of criminals being convicted and sentenced to a ‘second’ life sentence—what could that possibly mean…? |
| ‘Tools For Thought’ Failure, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-05-12 |
2024-12-10 |
The tools-for-thought movement has, like earlier attempts, largely failed. Users wind up doing a lot of work to make the tools work, and save little thought with their fancy notes. The tools are just |
| Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-10 |
2024-12-10 |
List-processing tricks for generating embeddings at different levels of document abstraction to allow efficient semantic searching. |
| Is OpenAI OK?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-19 |
2024-12-04 |
Has OA lost its mojo and ability to push AI paradigms in the wake of its hypergrowth and the OA Altman coup? Is OA OK? How would we know & what would it look like if it was not? |
| Site Help · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-04-05 |
2024-12-04 |
Short cheatsheet documentation about Gwern.net keybindings & features. |
| Borges’s Tlön: Fascist Idealism, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-12-01 |
2024-12-03 |
Analysis of Jorge Luise Borges’s short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ as a satire of authoritarian dynamics, where the regime often declares something to be ‘true’ and people scramble to make it s |
| Virtual Comments: LLM Idea, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-29 |
2024-11-30 |
N/A |
| LLM Acceptable-Use Policy, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-24 |
2024-11-30 |
An LLM acceptable-use policy: authors must <em>improve</em> samples so as to be worth reading and training on, rather than spamming the world with random LLM outputs. |
| Writing for LLMs So They Listen · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-30 |
2024-11-30 |
Speculation about what sort of ordinary human writing is most relevant and useful to future AI systems. |
| ‘Winning’ AI Arms Races: Then What?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-23 |
2024-11-24 |
Challenge to proponents of AI arms races and Manhattan Projects: state plainly, what is your long-term exit plan? What does ‘success’ look like? Or what good is it to beat rivals to AGI and then stand |
| Self-Funding Harberger Taxes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-21 |
2024-11-22 |
Copyright mechanism proposal to solve the orphan works problem: self-assessed Harberger taxes on any inherited copyright are then invested, and dedicated to eventually buying out the owners. Works are |
| GPT-3 Semantic Derealization, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-16 |
2024-11-19 |
N/A |
| Scaling ‘Diminishing Returns’, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-14 |
2024-11-19 |
What do we mean by dimishing returns in scaling? Returns have always missed— what it really means is <em>worse</em> than extrapolation of the known scaling power laws. |
| The State of Chinese AI, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-15 |
2024-11-19 |
N/A |
| Website Colors: Red vs Blue · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-11-07 |
2024-11-10 |
I manually extract RGB colors for 225 websites and graph them: <span style="color: red">red</span> > <span style="color: blue">blue</span> > <span style="color: green">green</span> > <span st |
| Against Caring About Subtle Poisons, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-09-30 |
2024-11-07 |
N/A |
| Can You Unsort Lists for Diversity? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-11-24 |
2024-11-04 |
Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize. |
| Subscripts For Citations · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-01-08 |
2024-11-01 |
A typographic proposal: replace cumbersome inline citation formats like ‘Foo <em>et al.</em> (2010)’ with subscripted dates/sources like ‘<span class="cite"><span class="cite-author-plural">Foo</span> |
| Dropcap Generation With AI · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-10-15 |
2024-10-30 |
We develop AI image generation workflows for webpage dropcap typography, creating PNGs & SVGs using image generators. As demos, we create new Gwern.net logos and several custom FLOSS dropcap sets, |
| The Existential Risk of Math Errors · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-07-20 |
2024-10-20 |
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them. |
| Celebrity Masquerade Game Proposal · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-18 |
2024-10-17 |
Ideas for a costume party game revolving around guessing identities, with an asymmetrical twist. |
| The Diamond Earrings · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-05-09 |
2024-10-16 |
Short story varying ‘The Whispering Earring’ on willpower and Goodharting values. |
| Research Ideas · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-03-19 |
2024-10-15 |
Someone (who is not me) should do something: a wishlist of miscellaneous research or project ideas—free to a good home. |
| Abs-E, Or, Speak Only Positively, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-09-27 |
2024-10-06 |
A practical LLM-based test of Abs-E linguistic proposal to avoid negation shows that many natural statements are very hard to write and the idea probably can’t work outside narrow niches like technica |
| Acne: a good Quantified Self topic · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-01-08 |
2024-10-04 |
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 CureTogether. |
| Why So Few Matt Levines? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-09-24 |
2024-09-24 |
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combinat |
| Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-22 |
2024-09-17 |
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers. |
| About This Website · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-01 |
2024-08-30 |
Meta page describing Gwern.net site ideals of stable long-term essays which improve over time; idea sources and writing methodology; metadata definitions; site statistics; copyright license. |
| What Is an ‘AI Warning Shot’?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-07 |
2024-08-26 |
N/A |
| Hardware Hedging Scaling Risks, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-22 |
2024-08-26 |
N/A |
| Number Search Engine via NN Embeddings · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-10 |
2024-08-25 |
Proposal to create a ‘search engine’ like OEIS but for individual numbers, allowing fuzzy lookups, by training a neural net embedding on the scientific & mathematic literature’s corpus of co-occur |
| You Should Write More Online, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-21 |
2024-08-22 |
You should write more online: it is still a good time to influence humans and AI, especially as everyone else foolishly retreats into hiding out of fear. |
| Statistical Notes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-07-17 |
2024-08-21 |
Miscellaneous statistical stuff |
| Marvel: Humanizing Mythology, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-08-16 |
2024-08-16 |
Marvel’s Silver Age of Comics was due to inventing a new kind of <em>mythology</em>, humanizing it, providing an appealing new formula which could be mined for decades. |
| A Gambler’s Verity World, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-07-29 |
2024-08-16 |
We can imagine a world where the gambler’s fallacy is true if randomness is implemented by sampling-<em>without</em>-replacement. |
| Midjourney Personalization Flaws, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-07-22 |
2024-07-23 |
Flaws in Midjourney’s new personalization feature: inefficient, noisy, and crude… but still useful and recommended. |
| Why Do Writers Still Underestimate LLMs?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-11-12 |
2024-07-10 |
N/A |
| Movie Reviews · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-05-01 |
2024-06-29 |
A compilation of movie, television, and opera reviews since 2014. |
| On the Impossibility of Superintelligent Rubik’s Cube Solvers [Claude-3.5-sonnet], by Claude-3 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-21 |
2024-06-22 |
Satirical essay on how AI can never truly solve a Rubik’s Cube like human beings can, written by Claude-3.5-sonnet. |
| On the Impossibility of Superintelligent Rubik’s Cube Solvers, by Gwern, Claude-3, Claude-2 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-07-19 |
2024-06-22 |
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 al 2017). |
| Review Of The Last Unicorn · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-06-06 |
2024-06-16 |
Children’s animated fantasy movie with surprisingly deep thoughts about personal identity and immortality. |
| Anime Reviews · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-12-14 |
2024-06-06 |
A compilation of anime/manga reviews since 2010. |
| Review Of Crumb · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-05-23 |
2024-05-25 |
Autobiographical documentary about ‘underground artist’ Robert Crumb on his 1991 farewell tour, discussing his personality, family, mental health, and source of his graphomanic art. |
| Review of The Bridge · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-04-28 |
2024-04-30 |
Documentary about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge sheds little light on the brute facts of suffering and mental illness—facts which perhaps <em>cannot</em> be conveyed to others (on film or otherwi |
| Why is Western Animation Ugly? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-04-26 |
2024-04-26 |
Western TV animation is often shockingly ugly and crude compared to other animation like French or Japanese. Why, when it’s not even cheaper? Degenerate echoes of what were once cutting-edge art. |
| Utext: Rich Unicode Documents · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-10-08 |
2024-04-24 |
An esoteric document proposal: abuse Unicode to create the fanciest possible ‘plain text’ documents. |
| Novelty Nets: Classifier Anti-Guidance · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-02-23 |
2024-04-06 |
Generative modeling proposal for increasing diversity of samples by a helper NN memorizing past samples and ‘repelling’ new samples away from old ones. |
| Proposal: Hybridizing Forums/Wikis, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2024-03-24 |
2024-03-28 |
N/A |
| InvertOrNot.com Proposal · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-03-21 |
2024-03-25 |
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 inverted in a website/app dark-mode, or faded. |
| The Second Apocalypse: Freedom In An Unfree Universe · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-08-01 |
2024-03-21 |
Bakker’s <em>Second Apocalypse</em> vs Frank Herbert’s <em>Dune</em>: time loops and finding freedom in an unfree universe. In Dune, humanity is liberated by growth and development and escaping the pr |
| Epigrams · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-04-30 |
2024-03-15 |
Witticisms, parodies, pointed observations, japeries and/or jocularities, Tom Swifties, nominative determinism, and discursive drollery |
| Review Of The Quantum Thief Trilogy · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-08-31 |
2024-03-13 |
Explanation of the emotional core of <em>The Quantum Thief</em>’s exploration of the trap of persistent personal identity and seeking freedom. |
| Interpreting ‘Suzanne Delage’ as Dracula · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-23 |
2024-03-03 |
On the interpretation of Gene Wolfe’s short story ‘Suzanne Delage’ as inversion of Bram Stoker’s <em>Dracula</em> horror novel. |
| What Is The Morning Writing Effect? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-11 |
2024-03-01 |
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why? |
| Startup Ideas · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-08-21 |
2024-01-14 |
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious. |
| Nenex: A Neural Personal Wiki Idea · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-09-13 |
2023-12-31 |
Proposal for a personal wiki built on neural nets: all edits are logged & used to finetune a NN assistant in realtime. |
| Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-10-28 |
2023-12-14 |
A review of Russell 1986’s <em>Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England</em>, describing development of selective breeding and discussing models of the psychology an |
| Timecrimes: Time Travel In Hell · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-11-15 |
2023-11-18 |
The 2007 indie SF film <em>Timecrimes</em> shows the horror & metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the protagonist commits escalating crimes while trapped in a 3-iter |
| The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-01-05 |
2023-11-18 |
I explain the somewhat arbitrary-seeming death of the popular <em>Star Wars</em> character Grand Admiral Thrawn as being the logical culmination of a tragic character arc in which his twisted (or ‘thr |
| Tea Reviews · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-04-13 |
2023-11-16 |
Teas I have drunk, with reviews and future purchases; focused primarily on oolongs and greens. Plus experiments on water. |
| CQK Is The First Unused TLA · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-09-29 |
2023-11-11 |
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 out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter |
| Cat itecture: Better Cat Window Boxes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-11-01 |
2023-11-02 |
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: <em>progressive concealment</em>, for cat l |
| Poems · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-07-28 |
2023-10-14 |
Miscellaneous waka/haiku, by season |
| A/B Testing Indentation & Justification · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-09-27 |
2023-08-23 |
1-year-long website A/B test of controversial typographic choices of indenting & justifying paragraphs: a fairly precise null result. No design change was made. |
| Gwern.net Website Traffic · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-02-03 |
2023-08-19 |
Meta page describing Gwern.net editing activity, traffic statistics, and referrer details, primarily sourced from Google Analytics (2011-present). |
| Internet Search Tips · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-12-11 |
2023-08-08 |
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples. |
| Language-Conditioned Absolute Unit NNs · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-10-22 |
2023-08-08 |
Proposal for applying the AUNN neural net architecture to reconstruction of historical documents using pretrained large language models. |
| Modular Brain AUNNs for Uploads · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-05-22 |
2023-08-08 |
Proposal for applying the AUNN neural net architecture to reconstruction of brains in a modular piece-wise fashion. |
| Who Buys Fonts? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-04-21 |
2023-08-02 |
Fonts are durable, highly-reusable, compact, & high-quality software products which do not ‘bitrot’. Nevertheless, hundreds or thousands of new ones come out every year despite enormous duplicatio |
| CO₂ Coin: Decentralized Carbon Capture Blockchains · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-06-12 |
2023-07-13 |
Sketch of a decentralized mineralization-based carbon capture: suppliers stake on reported deposits of mineral dust in publicly-auditable locations. |
| The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-09-20 |
2023-07-04 |
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened. |
| Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-11-03 |
2023-06-30 |
Extended book review of Bradshaw 2013 (<em>Cat Sense</em>) on the connections between cat psychology, evolution/genetics, history of domestication or lack thereof, & possible dysgenics, highlighti |
| Why Cats Knock Stuff Over · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-06-30 |
2023-06-30 |
Why do cats like to push stuff over edges and then curiously watch the fallen object? I suggest that they are play-hunting, and are testing the ‘prey’ for liveness & playing-dead, similarly to tos |
| Fuzz Testing · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-06-01 |
2023-06-30 |
Catalogue of errors or problems caused by cats randomly doing things (ie. real-life fuzz testing). |
| Content Unit Test Page · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-06-27 |
2023-06-27 |
Transclude testcase page. |
| The Impossibility of Knowledge of Retrocognitive Knowledge · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-06-06 |
2023-06-10 |
Is it possible to prove the existence of retrocognition if precognition also exists, because precognition could be used to foresee any proof found of retrocognition? Does this also disprove precogniti |
| Free-Play Periods for RL Agents · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-05-07 |
2023-05-09 |
Proposal for incentivizing meta-learning of exploration in deep reinforcement learning: domain randomization with reward-shaping, where there is a fixed-length ‘play time’ with no rewards/losses at th |
| Feynman’s Maze-Running Story · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-05-04 |
2023-05-03 |
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’. |
| Everything Is Correlated · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-09-12 |
2023-04-30 |
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘nu |
| Design Of This Website · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-01 |
2023-04-20 |
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting. |
| It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-03-06 |
2023-03-28 |
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature. |
| GPT-3 Creative Fiction · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-06-19 |
2023-03-11 |
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors. |
| Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-02-24 |
2023-03-09 |
The Twitter UI/UX for accepting follow requests is a fractal of bad design. |
| How OVAs Worked · Gwern.net |
essay |
2023-03-09 |
2023-03-09 |
Brief description of how the direct-to-video-rental model helped create the anime boom by allowing wide diversity in bankrolled anime projects, outside the production committee system. |
| Archiving URLs · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-03-10 |
2023-03-02 |
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources. |
| Newton’s System of the World and Comets · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-06-13 |
2023-02-23 |
Isaac Newton’s cosmology apparently involved regular apocalypses caused by comets overstoking the furnace of the Sun and the repopulation of the Solar System by new intelligent species. He supports th |
| Open Questions · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-10-17 |
2023-02-13 |
Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying. |
| Dreams Don’t Matter Morally, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-11-09 |
2023-02-03 |
N/A |
| Rubrication Design Examples · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-05-30 |
2023-01-13 |
A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis. |
| My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-04-28 |
2022-12-20 |
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers. |
| Surprisingly Turing-Complete · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-12-09 |
2022-12-17 |
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability. |
| Making Anime Faces With StyleGAN · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-04 |
2022-10-19 |
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. |
| Problem 14 Dynamic Programming Solutions, by Gwern Branwen, FeepingCreature, nshepperd, Khoth · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-10-02 |
2022-10-17 |
Timothy Falcon’s quantitative-finance interview problem #14 asks for the optimal stopping strategy when playing a card-drawing game of <em>l</em> cards where red = +$1 & black = −$1; the value ap |
| Calculating The Gaussian Expected Maximum · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-01-22 |
2022-10-15 |
In generating a sample of <em>n</em> datapoints drawn from a normal/Gaussian distribution, how big on average the biggest datapoint is will depend on how large <em>n</em> is. I implement a variety of |
| GANs Didn’t Fail, They Were Abandoned, by Gwern Branwen · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-10-04 |
2022-10-15 |
Diffusion models supposedly beat GANs because they scale better and stabler. That is unproven, and false. GANs should be revisited. |
| Review of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-03-01 |
2022-10-13 |
Review of Isao Takahata’s last & greatest film on how to accept the transience of life, filled as it is with both joy & sorrow. |
| Book Reviews · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-08-23 |
2022-10-13 |
A compilation of reviews of books I have read since ~1997. |
| A/B testing long-form readability on Gwern.net · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-06-16 |
2022-09-27 |
A log of experiments done on the site design, intended to render pages more readable, focusing on the challenge of testing a static site, page width, fonts, plugins, and effects of advertising. |
| GPT-3 Nonfiction · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-06-19 |
2022-07-03 |
Nonfiction writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, testing logic, commonsense reasoning, anagrams, PDF/OCR cleaning, creative nonfiction, etc. |
| How Often Does Correlation=Causality? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-24 |
2022-06-14 |
Compilation of studies comparing observational results with randomized experimental results on the same intervention, compiled from medicine/economics/psychology, indicating that a large fraction of t |
| SMPY Bibliography · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-07-28 |
2022-06-11 |
An annotated fulltext bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth. |
| ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-19 |
2022-05-05 |
N/A |
| Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-04-29 |
2022-04-29 |
Many fashions and artworks originate as copies of practical objects. Why? Because any form of optimized design is intrinsically esthetically-pleasing, and a great starting point. |
| 404 Not Found · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2022-04-19 |
404 Not Found Error: no page by this name! |
| The Gift of the Amygdali · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-10-29 |
2022-04-15 |
A high-concept <em>Batman</em> short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script (alluding to <em>The Wasteland</em>) about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates: pain/guilt/fear/anxiety. |
| Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading · Gwern.net |
essay |
2022-03-07 |
2022-03-25 |
Discussion of how to teach active reading and questioning of scientific research. Partially fake research papers may teach a critical attitude. Various ideas for games reviewed. |
| What Is The Collecting Mindset? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-03-31 |
2022-02-25 |
The activity of manufactured collecting is puzzling; what explains the enormous resources spent on what is, by and large, neither lucrative, prestigious, nor entertaining? Is it just a misfire and qui |
| Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-03-17 |
2022-01-11 |
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are co |
| I-Zombies: Hard Problem of Unconsciousness, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-12-18 |
2022-01-08 |
N/A |
| One Man’s Modus Ponens · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-05-01 |
2022-01-06 |
<em>One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens</em> is a saying in Western philosophy encapsulating a common response to a logical proof which generalizes the <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> |
| The Scaling Hypothesis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-05-28 |
2022-01-02 |
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifest |
| Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-12-15 |
2022-01-02 |
Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly u |
| Opera Reviews · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-02 |
2021-12-03 |
A compilation of opera reviews since 2019. |
| Review of Space Battleship Yamato · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-09-29 |
2021-12-03 |
Why is <em>Yamato</em> so influential on a generation of anime otaku and later anime, despite a weak story and compromised production? It offers a fantasy WWII in which Imperial Japan is the hero, and |
| Dog Cloning For Special Forces: Breed All You Can Breed · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-09-18 |
2021-12-02 |
Decision analysis of whether cloning the most elite Special Forces dogs is a profitable improvement over standard selection procedures. Unless training is extremely cheap or heritability is extremely |
| Rare Greek Variables · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-04-08 |
2021-11-28 |
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, & Π. Avoid overused letters like λ, and spice up |
| Creatine Cognition Meta-analysis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-09-06 |
2021-11-14 |
Does creatine increase cognitive performance? Maybe for vegetarians but probably not. |
| Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert’s Dune-verse · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-05-05 |
2021-10-29 |
Discussion of fictional eugenics program in the SF <em>Dune</em>-verse and how it contradicts contemporary known human genetics but suggests heavy agricultural science and Mendelian inspiration to Fra |
| What Is It Like To Be A Cat Tail?, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-10-17 |
2021-10-17 |
N/A |
| ML Scaling Subreddit, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-10-30 |
2021-08-25 |
N/A |
| WBE & DRL: Brain Imitation Learning, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-10-20 |
2021-08-25 |
N/A |
| The ‘Screwfly Solution’ Solution: Bi-Sexuality · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-07-26 |
2021-08-01 |
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 read shows that the alien attack affected <em> |
| Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-12-06 |
2021-07-04 |
Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase’s theory of the firm/linear optimization/DRL/evolution/multicellular life/pain/I |
| Auto-Smallcaps Filter, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-02-19 |
2021-06-29 |
N/A |
| Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-06-06 |
2021-06-22 |
Neural networks like GPT-3 power text adventure games where you can do anything; but they are too expensive. I propose that if we turn them into Choose Your Own Adventure hypertext games, they become |
| Common Selection Scenarios · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-06-11 |
2021-06-11 |
Cookbook of code for common selection & order statistics scenarios in economics, psychology, decision theory, drug development etc. |
| Crowdsourcing The Best GPT-2-1.5b Poetry, by Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-02-09 |
2021-06-09 |
N/A |
| GPT-2 Preference Learning for Music Generation · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-12-16 |
2021-06-07 |
Experiments with OpenAI’s ‘preference learning’ approach, which trains a NN to predict global quality of datapoints, and then uses reinforcement learning to optimize that directly, rather than proxies |
| Ordinary Incompetence · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-06-04 |
2021-06-04 |
Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with |
| Origin of ‘Littlewood’s Law of Miracles’ · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-16 |
2021-05-18 |
Leprechaun hunting the origins of the famous skeptical observation that because millions of events are constantly happening, ‘miracles’ happen once a month; it was actually coined by Freeman Dyson. |
| Progress In Beauty · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-08-25 |
2021-05-18 |
Physical beauty & attractiveness of the general population of men/women seems to have increased greatly in the past few centuries, judging by surviving art/photos, contemporary judgments, and obje |
| Does Mouse Utopia Exist? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-08-12 |
2021-05-16 |
Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for doubt. |
| Leprechaun Hunting & Citogenesis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-30 |
2021-05-15 |
List of academic urban legends, and references on how often writers do not check references, which seems to be a major reason for their propagation. |
| Review Of The Cultural Revolution, Dikötter 2016 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-04-27 |
2021-05-14 |
The Cultural Revolution was one of the greatest disasters in human history, the result of a self-reinforcing cycle of ideology failing to match reality and unsolved social problems, and the deranged r |
| Umineko: The Hopium Of The Magics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-07-04 |
2021-05-14 |
Review of famous light novel series <em>Umineko no Naku Koro ni</em>: it is a highly idiosyncratic, wildly self-indulgent, yet impressive exploration of all possible locked-room mysteries, knocked for |
| McNamara’s Folly: The Denial of Individual Differences · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-05-17 |
2021-05-14 |
Account of well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to conscript unintelligent or outright mentally-retarded men into fighting in the Vietnam War after remedial education, illustrating the difficulty of |
| Race in My Little Pony · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-06-04 |
2021-05-14 |
In MLP:FiM, the 3 pony races sometimes bear offspring of other pony races; I review 4 complicated Mendelian models attempting to explain this, and note that a standard polygenic liability-threshold mo |
| Fashion Cycles · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-05-14 |
2021-05-14 |
Links on the circularity and mimetic desire basis of fashions in consumer goods, ideologies, politics, organizations like academia, religion etc. |
| ARPA and SCI: Surfing AI · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-07-04 |
2021-05-06 |
Review of Roland & Shiman 2002 history of a decade of ARPA/DARPA involvement in AI and supercomputing, and the ARPA philosophy of technological acceleration; it yielded mixed results, perhaps due |
| How Many Computers Are In Your Computer? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-01-18 |
2021-05-05 |
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts. |
| The sort –key Trick · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-03-03 |
2021-05-05 |
Commandline folklore: sorting files by filename or content before compression can save large amounts of space by exposing redundancy to the compressor. Examples and comparisons of different sorts. |
| On Seeing Through and Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-12-09 |
2021-05-04 |
Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism: ignoring the surface abstractions and limitations to treat a system as a source of parts to manipulate into a different system, with diffe |
| Computer Optimization: Your Computer Is Faster Than You Think · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-04-24 |
2021-04-24 |
Compilation of links demonstrating that it is common to find order-of-magnitude speedups in software, especially when designed carefully for (extraordinarily powerful) contemporary computer hardware w |
| Local Optima & Greedy Choices · Gwern.net |
essay |
2021-03-24 |
2021-03-24 |
Some interesting links on local optima/greediness/risk-aversion/creative destruction (eg. Porter hypothesis or equity premium puzzle), sometimes demonstrated by disasters. |
| Darknet Market Archives (2013–2015) · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-12-01 |
2021-03-20 |
Mirrors of ~89 Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets & forums 2011–2015, and related material. |
| Neon Genesis Evangelion source anthology · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-09-30 |
2021-02-10 |
Extensive anthology of Gainax/Anno/<em>Evangelion</em> quotes, excerpts, sources, references, and analyses, organized by reliability and year. |
| Anime Neural Net Graveyard · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-04 |
2021-01-29 |
Post-mortems of failed neural network experiments in generating anime images, pre-StyleGAN/BigGAN. |
| Making Anime With BigGAN · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-04 |
2021-01-29 |
Experiments in using BigGAN to generate anime faces and whole anime images; semi-successful. |
| November 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2021-01-09 |
November 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on DL and genomics scaling, dark mode rewrite, 1 essay, and 1 opera review (<em>The Ring</em> cycle). |
| December 2020 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2019-12-26 |
2021-01-06 |
December 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on AI and technology; major new site feature: fully-generalized recursive popups. |
| What If Everyone Was A Clone? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-04-04 |
2021-01-01 |
Speculative world-building about a clonal humanity, based on identical twins and asexual reproduction. |
| Banner Ads Considered Harmful · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-01-08 |
2020-12-12 |
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing. |
| MLP: Immanetizing The Equestrian · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-10-24 |
2020-11-30 |
A meditation on subcultures & review of the cartoon series <em>My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic</em>, focusing on fandom, plot, development, and meaning of bronydom. |
| On Development Hell · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-11-17 |
2020-11-17 |
Why do movies or games go through development hell, and usually come out worse, rather than better, and long gestation times do not seem to improve them despite the large resources poured into them by |
| Blackmail fail · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-12-10 |
2020-11-12 |
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers |
| Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-08-28 |
2020-08-28 |
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 torment you like demons. |
| Anime Crop Datasets: Faces, Figures, & Hands, by Gwern Branwen, Arfafax, Shawn Presser, Anonymous, Danbooru Community · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-05-10 |
2020-08-05 |
Description of 3 anime datasets for machine learning based on Danbooru: cropped anime faces, whole-single-character crops, and hand crops (with hand detection model). |
| Technology Holy Wars are Coordination Problems · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-06-15 |
2020-07-09 |
Flamewars over platforms & upgrades are so bitter not because people are jerks but because the choice will influence entire ecosystems, benefiting one platform through network effects & avoidi |
| About Gwern · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-08-05 |
2020-06-14 |
Who am I online & what have I done? Contact information; sites I use; computers and software tools; things I’ve worked on; psychological profiles |
| Hydrocephalus and Intelligence: The Hollow Men · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-07-28 |
2020-05-13 |
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 necessary. Neither is true. |
| GPT-2 Folk Music, by Gwern Branwen, Shawn Presser · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-11-01 |
2020-04-25 |
Generating Irish/folk/classical music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results. |
| Magnesium Self-Experiments · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-05-13 |
2020-01-31 |
3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium <span class="smallcaps">l-</span>threonate and magnesium citrate. |
| This Waifu Does Not Exist · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-02-19 |
2020-01-20 |
I describe how I made the website ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net (TWDNE) for displaying random anime faces generated by StyleGAN neural networks, and how it went viral. |
| Embryo Selection For Intelligence · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-01-22 |
2020-01-18 |
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art |
| Tryon’s Rat Experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2020-01-13 |
2020-01-14 |
Tryon’s Rat Experiment is a multi-decade selective breeding animal experiment begin in the 1930s which rapidly bred enormous differences in a complex psychological trait, maze-running, demonstrating c |
| The Most ‘Abandoned’ Books on GoodReads · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-12-09 |
2020-01-05 |
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts. |
| Redshift sleep experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-05-09 |
2019-12-27 |
Self-experiment on whether screen-tinting software such as Redshift/f.lux affect sleep times and sleep quality; Redshift lets me sleep earlier but doesn’t improve sleep quality. |
| The Replication Crisis: Flaws in Mainstream Science · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-27 |
2019-12-09 |
2013 discussion of how systemic biases in science, particularly medicine and psychology, have resulted in a research literature filled with false positives and exaggerated effects, called ‘the Replica |
| Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-24 |
2019-12-09 |
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 possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the dir |
| Lithium in ground-water and well-being · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-14 |
2019-12-07 |
Lithium is a well-known mood stabilizer & suicide preventive; some research suggests lithium may be a cognitively-protective nutrient and at the population level, chronic lithium consumption (thro |
| Dual n-Back FAQ · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-03-25 |
2019-12-05 |
A compendium of DNB, WM, IQ information up to 2015. |
| The Power of Twins: The Scottish Milk Experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-01-12 |
2019-11-29 |
In discussing a large Scottish public health experiment, Student noted that it would’ve been vastly more efficient using a twin experiment design; I fill in the details with a power analysis. |
| GPT-2 Neural Network Poetry, by Gwern Branwen, Shawn Presser · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-03-03 |
2019-10-29 |
Demonstration tutorial of retraining OpenAI’s GPT-2 (a text-generating Transformer neural network) on large poetry corpuses to generate high-quality English verse. |
| Solving Pascal’s Mugging with Dynamic Programming · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-09-12 |
2019-10-07 |
Attempt to resolve Pascal’s mugging by examining whether optimal policies with linear utility do in fact engage in ‘mugging’ behavior |
| Notes on Pascal’s Mugging · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-12-23 |
2019-09-13 |
Attempt to resolve Pascal’s mugging by proposing & justifying a linear prior probability which bounds losses. |
| Reasons of State: Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-01-01 |
2019-08-17 |
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America g |
| Genius Revisited Revisited · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-06-19 |
2019-07-26 |
A book study of surveys of the high-IQ elementary school HCES concludes that high IQ is not predictive of accomplishment; I point out that the disappointing results are consistent with the subjects no |
| How Should We Critique Research? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-05-19 |
2019-07-07 |
Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless. What makes a good criticism is the chance of being a ‘difference which makes a d |
| LSD microdosing RCT · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-08-20 |
2019-06-25 |
Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit |
| Amusing Ourselves to Death? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2018-05-12 |
2019-06-25 |
A suggested x-risk/Great Filter is the possibility of advanced entertainment technology leading to wireheading/mass sterility/population collapse and extinction. As media consumption patterns are high |
| Timing Technology: Lessons From The Media Lab · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-07-12 |
2019-06-20 |
Technological developments can be foreseen but the knowledge is largely useless because startups are inherently risky and require optimal timing. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, t |
| Catnip immunity and alternatives · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-11-07 |
2019-06-19 |
Estimation of catnip immunity rates by country with meta-analysis and surveys, and discussion of catnip alternatives. |
| Hafu Gender Ratios in Anime · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-04-06 |
2019-06-14 |
Race as reflected in gender ratios within fictional bi-racial marriages in anime/manga show equal sex ratios and Western European overrepresentation with striking absence of Korean characters. |
| How Complex Are Individual Differences? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-06-23 |
2019-06-14 |
Individual human brains are more predictable and similar than they are different, reflecting low Kolmogorov complexity and implying that beta uploading may be more feasible than guessed, with suggesti |
| DNM-related arrests, 2011–2015 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-07-14 |
2019-06-13 |
A census database of all publicly-reported arrests and prosecutions connected to the Tor-Bitcoin drug darknet markets 2011–2015, and analysis of mistakes. |
| On Having Enough Socks · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-11-22 |
2019-06-12 |
Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of explicit deliberative thought where no natur |
| Are Sunk Costs Fallacies? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-01-24 |
2019-06-12 |
Human and animal sunk costs often aren’t, and sunk cost bias may be useful on an individual level to encourage learning. Convincing examples of sunk cost bias typically operate on organizational level |
| Darknet Market mortality risks · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-10-30 |
2019-06-09 |
Survival analysis of lifespans, deaths, and predictive factors of Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets |
| Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-01 |
2019-06-09 |
Pessimistic forecasters are overconfident in fixating, hedgehog-like, on only <em>one</em> scenario for how they think something <em>must</em> happen; in reality, there are always many ways through th |
| Complexity no Bar to AI · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-01 |
2019-06-09 |
Critics of AI risk suggest diminishing returns to computing (formalized asymptotically) means AI will be weak; this argument relies on a large number of questionable premises and ignoring additional r |
| ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ as realistic SF · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-06-28 |
2019-06-05 |
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 in space travel, which were partially vi |
| Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-03-11 |
2019-05-17 |
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for. |
| Prediction Markets · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-10 |
2019-05-16 |
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments |
| Time-lock encryption · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-24 |
2019-05-06 |
How do you encrypt a file such that it can be decrypted after a date, but not before? Use serial computations for proof-of-work using successive squaring, chained hashes, or witness encryption on bloc |
| On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-12-18 |
2019-05-05 |
A common dream in philosophy and politics and religion is the idea of languages superior to evolved demotics, whether Latin or Lojban, which grant speakers greater insight into reality and rationality |
| The Narrowing Circle · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-04-24 |
2019-04-27 |
Modern ethics excludes as many beings as it includes. |
| The Explore-Exploit Dilemma in Media Consumption · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-12-24 |
2019-04-14 |
How much should we rewatch our favorite movies (media) vs keep trying new movies? Most spend most viewing time on new movies, which is unlikely to be good. I suggest an explicit Bayesian model of impr |
| Embryo editing for intelligence · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-01-22 |
2019-04-04 |
Preliminary draft notes towards a cost-benefit analysis of CRISPR-based editing for complex human traits with 2015–2016 SOTAs; obsolete. |
| Predicting Google closures · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-03-28 |
2019-04-04 |
Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns |
| December 2013 News · Gwern.net |
newsletter |
2014-01-01 |
2019-03-29 |
|
| RNN Metadata for Mimicking Author Style · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-09-12 |
2019-03-26 |
Teaching a text-generating char-RNN to automatically imitate many different authors by labeling the input text by author; additional experiments include imitating Geocities and retraining GPT-2 on a l |
| An Abortion Dialogue · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-11-10 |
2019-03-05 |
Dialogue pointing out some difficulties of materialist objections to abortion. |
| Music and distraction · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-09-26 |
2019-03-03 |
Does music impede studying and thinking? |
| The Ones Who Walk Towards Acre · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-12-21 |
2019-02-24 |
Short story on assassination markets. |
| The Mulberry Tree · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-12 |
2019-02-24 |
Essay on writing & rewriting short tanka |
| The Palace of Wonders · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-23 |
2019-02-24 |
A Borgesian fable about the Caliph and the Koran. |
| The Last Muezzin · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-06-15 |
2019-02-06 |
Another tribute to Borges; you can be me when I’m gone. |
| The Melancholy of Subculture Society · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-12 |
2019-02-05 |
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad. |
| History of Iterated Embryo Selection · Gwern.net |
essay |
2019-01-18 |
2019-01-19 |
The multiple-invention (>3) history of the idea of extremely-powerful embryo selection by using gametogenesis to run many ‘generations’ in vitro. |
| Nootropics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-01-02 |
2018-12-20 |
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments |
| The Kelly Coin-Flipping Game: Exact Solutions, by Gwern Branwen, Arthur Breitman, nshepperd, FeepingCreature, Gurkenglas · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-01-19 |
2018-12-12 |
Decision-theoretic analysis of how to optimally play the Haghani & Dewey 2016 300-round double-or-nothing coin-flipping game with an edge and ceiling better than using the Kelly Criterion. Computi |
| World Catnip Surveys · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-11-15 |
2018-12-02 |
International population online surveys of cat owners about catnip and other cat stimulant use. |
| Dual n-Back Meta-Analysis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-05-20 |
2018-11-30 |
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups. |
| Electric vs Stove Kettle · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-02-28 |
2018-11-29 |
I compare my electric tea kettle to my stove kettle, and apply some simple statistical modeling verifying the electric is faster. |
| In Defense of Inclusionism · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-15 |
2018-11-28 |
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die. |
| Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-27 |
2018-11-21 |
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties |
| Life Extension Cost-Benefits · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-06-01 |
2018-10-26 |
Attempts at considering the profitability of life-extension interventions for healthy adults |
| Mead · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-05-02 |
2018-10-25 |
Ratings of mead and fruit wines I have tried. |
| Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-07-11 |
2018-09-29 |
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1 |
| The Morality of Sperm Donation · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-07-20 |
2018-09-02 |
Is sperm donating a worthwhile form of positive eugenics? |
| The Hyperbolic Time Chamber & Brain Emulation · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-08-29 |
2018-09-02 |
A time dilation chamber as thought experiment on the power of pure thought, with comparison to computer AGI advantages/disadvantages. |
| The Melancholy of Kyon · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-06-08 |
2018-09-01 |
Literary analysis of the light novel/anime series <em>The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya</em>: Haruhi is not God, Kyon is |
| Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-09-07 |
2018-08-28 |
AIs limited to pure computation (Tool AIs) supporting humans, will be less intelligent, efficient, and economically valuable than more autonomous reinforcement-learning AIs (Agent AIs) who act on thei |
| Resorting Media Ratings · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-09-07 |
2018-08-15 |
Commandline tool providing interactive statistical pairwise ranking and sorting of items |
| Modafinil community survey · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-06-01 |
2018-06-21 |
2015 survey of online modafinil users asking about dosages, consumption patterns, ratings, purchases, and demographics |
| ‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-12-12 |
2018-06-11 |
Famous Ted Chiang SF short story ‘Story Of Your Life’ is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version <em>Arrival</em>, being about time-travel/precognition; I explain it is instead an exploratio |
| LWer Effective Altruism donations, 2013–2014 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-05-12 |
2018-06-09 |
Analysis of 2013–2014 LessWrong survey results on how much more self-identified EAers donate suggests low median donation rates due to current youth and low incomes. |
| Dune notes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-18 |
2018-06-08 |
Observations on Frank Herbert’s <em>Dune</em> series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was <em>not</em> a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescien |
| Modafinil · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-20 |
2018-06-04 |
Effects, health concerns, suppliers, prices & rational ordering. |
| The Algernon Argument · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-03-23 |
2018-06-03 |
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics |
| Bacopa Quasi-Experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-05-06 |
2018-05-17 |
A small 2014–2015 non-blinded self-experiment using <em>Bacopa monnieri</em> to investigate effect on memory/sleep/self-ratings in an ABABA design; no particular effects were found. |
| ZMA Sleep Experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-03-13 |
2018-05-17 |
A randomized blinded self-experiment of the effects of ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6) on my sleep; results suggest small benefit to sleep quality but are underpowered and damaged by Zeo measurement e |
| Zeo sleep self-experiments · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-12-28 |
2018-02-28 |
EEG recordings of sleep and my experiments with things affecting sleep quality or durations: melatonin, potassium, vitamin D etc. |
| Long Bets as Charitable Giving Opportunity · Gwern.net |
essay |
2017-02-24 |
2018-02-24 |
Evaluating Long Bets as a prediction market shows it is dysfunctional and poorly-structured; despite the irrationality of many users, it is not good even as a way to raise money for charity. |
| When Should I Check The Mail? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-06-21 |
2018-02-24 |
Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times: modeling deliveries as survival analysis, model comparison, optimizing check times with a loss function, and optimal data collection. |
| Biased information as anti-information · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-10-19 |
2018-01-07 |
Filtered data for a belief can rationally push you away from that belief |
| Easy Cryptographic Timestamping of Files · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-12-04 |
2017-12-16 |
Scripts for convenient free secure Bitcoin-based dating of large numbers of files/strings |
| Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-04 |
2017-12-15 |
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in <em>Death Note</em> and considering fixes |
| CO₂/ventilation sleep experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-06-05 |
2017-10-29 |
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO<sub>2</sub> levels affect sleep quality |
| Slowing Moore’s Law: How It Could Happen · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-03-16 |
2017-10-09 |
Weak points in the networks powering technological progress: chip factories |
| Summers of Code, 2006–2013 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-11 |
2017-09-22 |
A retrospective of 8 years of SoC, and lessons learned |
| Writing a Wikipedia Link Archive Bot · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2017-09-08 |
Haskell: tutorial on writing a daemon to archive links in Wikipedia articles with TagSoup and WebCite; obsolete. |
| Iodine and Adult IQ meta-analysis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-02-29 |
2017-07-18 |
Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no. |
| HP: Methods of Rationality review statistics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-11-03 |
2017-06-18 |
Statistically modeling reviews for ongoing story with R. |
| Lunar circadian rhythms · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-07-26 |
2017-06-18 |
Is sleep affected by the phase of the moon? An analysis of several years of 4 Zeo users’ sleep data shows no lunar cycle. |
| Men of Iron · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-12-24 |
2017-06-04 |
What-if Chiang-style SF story on iron vanishing and the Great Silence |
| Notes on Evangelion · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-02-03 |
2017-05-14 |
<em>Evangelion</em> thoughts—anti-religion, pro-psychology, character development, otaku genre. |
| Terrorism Is Not Effective · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-04-14 |
2017-04-21 |
More effective ways to kill = terrorists are stupid, or killing not most important thing to them |
| Terrorism Is Not About Terror · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-04-09 |
2017-04-21 |
Terrorists act irrationally from a rational activism perspective, and groups act in ways most consistent with terrorism being about social status and belonging |
| Cultural drift: cleaning methods · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-05-07 |
2017-03-26 |
Forgotten chores and their use by Romanticism |
| The Three Grenades and the Four Noble Truths · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-11-24 |
2017-02-08 |
CMU game connected to error coding theory |
| The IQ Halo effect · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-04-01 |
2017-02-02 |
On desirable correlates of intelligence |
| Internet WiFi improvement · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-10-20 |
2017-01-05 |
After putting up with slow glitchy WiFi Internet for years, I investigate improvements. Upgrading the router, switching to a high-gain antenna, and installing a buried Ethernet cable all offer increas |
| AI Risk Demos · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-12-23 |
2016-12-23 |
Simple demonstrations of the AI control problem using MCTS in a Gridworld |
| Wooden Pillow · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2016-12-22 |
China & Egypt used wooden pillows; my recreations fail |
| Potassium sleep experiments · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-12-21 |
2016-11-15 |
2 self-experiments on potassium citrate effects on sleep: harm to sleep when taken daily or in the morning |
| Vitamin D sleep experiments · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-01-01 |
2016-11-10 |
Self-experiment on vitamin D effects on sleep: harmful taken at night, no or beneficial effects when taken in the morning. |
| Caffeine wakeup experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-04-07 |
2016-11-10 |
Self-experiment on whether consuming caffeine immediately upon waking results in less time in bed & higher productivity. The results indicate a small and uncertain effect. |
| Treadmill desk observations · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-06-19 |
2016-10-29 |
Notes relating to my use of a treadmill desk and 2 self-experiments showing walking treadmill use interferes with typing and memory performance. |
| On Really Trying · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-06-23 |
2016-09-16 |
What are the true limits to motivation? |
| Candy Japan’s new box A/B test · Gwern.net |
essay |
2016-05-06 |
2016-08-26 |
Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of the effect of fancier packaging on subscription cancellations & optimal experiment design. |
| The Erl King · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2016-08-20 |
Fairy tale tragedy, or, a lesson in courtesy and logic |
| Bitter Melon for blood glucose · Gwern.net |
essay |
2015-09-14 |
2016-07-29 |
Analysis of whether bitter melon reduces blood glucose in one self-experiment and utility of further self-experimentation |
| Wikipedia Résumé · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-10-18 |
2016-07-13 |
A precis of my old work on the English Wikipedia, 2004–2017 (edit counts, articles by subject, and particularly notable articles) |
| Diet Variance: Soylent study · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-05-22 |
2016-07-11 |
Proposal to use meal-replacements to partition daily variance in mood/productivity between diet and other factors |
| Who Wrote The Death Note Script? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-11-02 |
2016-04-27 |
Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of <em>Death Note</em> Hollywood script being real. |
| Nicotine · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-05-09 |
2016-03-06 |
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015) |
| LessWrong and cryonics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-01-01 |
2016-03-05 |
How does LessWrong usage correlate with cryonics attitudes and signup rates? |
| Conscientiousness & Online Education · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-07-20 |
2016-01-20 |
Technology-driven shift in demand for Conscientiousness, not intelligence |
| Weather and My Productivity · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-03-19 |
2015-12-18 |
Rain or shine affect my mood? Not much. |
| Hacker News submission analysis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-09-25 |
2015-12-01 |
Describing HN submissions; estimating manipulability |
| Charity is not about Helping · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-09-15 |
2015-09-12 |
Simple cost-benefit: distributed computing considered harmful as scientific lemon projects run at high resource cost. |
| Buckminster Fuller’s fog gun · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-13 |
2015-08-12 |
Remaining materials towards one day building and trying out a real fog gun |
| 2013 LLLT self-experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-12-20 |
2015-08-12 |
An LLLT user’s blinded randomized self-experiment in 2013 on the effects of near-infrared light on a simple cognitive test battery: positive results |
| Culture Is Not About Esthetics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-07-16 |
2015-07-05 |
Aesthetically & economically, maybe there is too much new art. Don’t take this too seriously. |
| 2012 election predictions · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-11-05 |
2015-04-21 |
Compiling academic and media forecaster’s 2012 American Presidential election predictions and statistically judging correctness; Nate Silver was not the best. |
| Education is not about Learning · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-07-25 |
2015-02-28 |
Examples of low-hanging fruit suggesting the education system does not solely optimize for learning |
| Touhou music by the numbers · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-02-28 |
2015-02-28 |
Collect music metadata and look for patterns |
| Girl Scouts & Good Corporate Governance · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-04-21 |
2015-02-15 |
Cookie prices & tax filings as evidence of corporate inefficiency |
| Melatonin · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-12-19 |
2015-02-14 |
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable |
| Isomorphisms & Meaning · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-04-25 |
2015-01-03 |
Haskell juvenilia, reinventing entry-level math wheels, of no interest to anyone; investigating when two theories or representations <em>mean</em> the same things. |
| Bitcoin donations on The Pirate Bay · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-02-25 |
2014-12-10 |
Downloading and parsing TPB metadata to estimate Bitcoin usage and revenue for uploaders |
| 2014 Spirulina randomized self-experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-10-05 |
2014-11-27 |
Spirulina users’ randomized trial on self-rated allergy symptoms: null result. |
| Plastination versus Cryonics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-07-24 |
2014-10-22 |
Break down survival as Drake equation, see how plastination differs from cryonics, try to calculate advantage |
| Why Anime? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-02-12 |
2014-09-14 |
Objectively, anime/manga better than American alternatives. So why the need to justify? |
| Ethics of Lithotomy · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-09-09 |
2014-09-09 |
Using modern statistical analysis, how quickly should improved bladder stone surgical methods have been adopted? |
| Ontological Pantheism · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-11-09 |
2014-07-11 |
Descartes’s God is pantheism; a reductio ad absurdum of his ontology |
| On Stress · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2014-06-24 |
Stoic meditation with reference to being homeless. Written to myself at a particularly low point; like many, I take comfort in considering how things could be worse. |
| Two Simple Happenings · Gwern.net |
essay |
2014-06-16 |
2014-06-17 |
Short story; psychological horror |
| Against Copyright · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2014-05-04 |
Copyright considered paradoxical, incoherent, and harmful from an information theory and compression perspective as there is no natural kind corresponding to ‘works’, merely longer or shorter strings |
| Methods of Rationality predictions · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-03-25 |
2014-03-07 |
Recording fan speculation for retrospectives |
| Poems on the theme of Genshiken · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-07-24 |
2014-02-23 |
Waka/haiku on <em>Genshiken</em>, clubs, and Comiket; allusions to Fujiwara no Teika and Shōtetsu. |
| Gilles Goullet, Author of the Blindsight · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-09-01 |
2014-02-20 |
A parody of SF, the Internet, and Borges. |
| LW anchoring experiment · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-02-27 |
2014-02-17 |
Do mindless positive/negative comments skew article quality ratings up and down? |
| Scientific stagnation · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-02-24 |
2013-12-30 |
Shrinking marginal returns to science and technology |
| Alerts Over Time · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-07-01 |
2013-11-26 |
Does Google Alerts return fewer results each year? A statistical investigation |
| Wikipedia & YouTube · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-15 |
2013-11-08 |
Why Wikipedia and YouTube will never be integrated. |
| Evolutionary Software Licenses · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2013-10-31 |
Game theory on BSD versus GPL: partnership? Is GPL an evolutionary stable strategy against invasion by proprietary copyright strategies? |
| Archiving GitHub · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-03-20 |
2013-10-28 |
Scraping and downloading Haskell-related repositories from GitHub |
| SICP Chapter 1.1 notes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-03-14 |
2013-10-02 |
Syntax, function definitions |
| Lifelogging · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-10-17 |
2013-09-10 |
Thoughts on uses and a categorization of said uses for lifelogging |
| Aria’s Past, Present, and Future · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-07-13 |
2013-08-03 |
On divining the esoteric truth of Neo-Venezia through holes in world-building. |
| 2013 Lewis meditation results · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-07-12 |
2013-07-25 |
Multilevel modeling of effect of small group’s meditation on math errors |
| Parody in Full Metal Panic! · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-10-09 |
2013-07-01 |
The unexpected critical depths of a single throw-away scene |
| Colder Wars · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-06-07 |
2013-06-22 |
MAD will not work in outer space; pre-emptive strikes are nigh-guaranteed. |
| Wikipedia & Knol: Why Knol Already Failed · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-21 |
2013-05-04 |
Why Knol is worse than Wikipedia, has failed, and will continue to fail. |
| Komm Susser Tod · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-11-05 |
2013-04-03 |
Perspective and interpretation |
| Wikipedia and Dark Side Editing · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-05-24 |
2013-02-16 |
Cynical tactics encouraged by Wikipedia’s abdication of thought known as ‘No Original Research’ and ‘Reliable Sources’ |
| NGE Rebuild Predictions · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-03-03 |
2013-02-05 |
a comprehensive taxonomy of predictions on future Evangelion media |
| Final Gifts · Gwern.net |
essay |
2013-01-24 |
2013-01-24 |
A poem for the end of history |
| Golfing Run Length Encoding in Haskell · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2013-01-16 |
Haskell: step by step refactoring to concision |
| Death Note’s Ending · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-29 |
2012-12-10 |
Ambiguous ending of <em>Death Note</em> means even the victor is unclear; who was right? |
| Writing a Wikipedia RSS Link Archive Bot · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-11-02 |
2012-11-05 |
Archiving using Wikipedia Recent Changes RSS feed (obsolete). |
| Choosing Software · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2012-10-28 |
Criteria making software useful long-term & worth learning in detail |
| Distinguishing sources of religion by their experiential differences · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-12-22 |
2012-10-09 |
Does the convergence of religious experiences point to a shared truth? |
| Insert, Abort, Retry? · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-08-02 |
2012-08-02 |
<em>Fullmetal Alchemist</em> insert meta-fiction |
| Life contracts · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-11-02 |
2012-07-30 |
How I reinvented longevity insurance, which provides payouts if one lives to a certain point and thus might run out of savings. |
| SICP Introduction · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-03-14 |
2012-07-28 |
Links to various resources for SICP studying |
| The Safecracker of Hearts · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-08-15 |
2012-06-28 |
The thief of time gives us memories, the safecracker of hearts restores them. |
| Wikipedia and Other Wikis · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-01-27 |
2012-05-12 |
Network effects & benefits of gritting one’s teeth & submitting to a Wikipedia’s rules, rather than using Wikia or one’s own site. |
| Simulation Inferences · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-05-29 |
2012-04-15 |
How small must be the computer simulating the universe? |
| The Presocratic’s Logical Path to Atomism · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-11-06 |
2012-03-06 |
How and why did they deduce atomism? |
| Intermittent Fasting · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-11-20 |
2012-02-21 |
Tricking the body into living longer? |
| Console Insurance Is A Ripoff · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-03-10 |
2012-02-02 |
Back of envelope financial calculations: Warranties, fine; insurance, no! |
| Hypertime in Haskell · Gwern.net |
essay |
2012-01-10 |
2012-01-10 |
Implementing the Hypertime multiverse model of time travel in Haskell |
| Against the Miletians and the One True Element · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-10-17 |
2011-11-25 |
Exploring consequences of material monism and conflict with observations |
| The Snowbanks of Time · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-01-15 |
2011-11-22 |
Essay on writing <em>waka</em> on truth & lies |
| SICP Chapter 1.3 · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-01-09 |
2011-08-13 |
Generalizing functions with hardwired values |
| Dinosaur Comics comics · Gwern.net |
essay |
2011-06-10 |
2011-06-10 |
Comics using the format of Ryan North’s <em>Dinosaur Comics</em> |
| Resilient Haskell Software · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2011-02-12 |
Lessons learned about bitrot in Haskell software |
| Barratry · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-11-02 |
2011-02-03 |
Re-inventing anarcho-capitalism in a French context. |
| The Buddha’s Wheel · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-11-30 |
2010-12-17 |
The enlightened is as one with cause and effect. |
| Gryyfins of the Word · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2010-12-14 |
Incomplete story, notes towards an imitation of <em>Foucault’s Pendulum</em> or <em>From Hell</em> in history-as-horror and re-enchating the world. Probably unwritable, but see ‘October’ for a more vi |
| Missing Cities · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-01 |
2010-12-03 |
3 short stories in the style of Italo Calvino’s <em>Missing Cities</em>. |
| Brave Poem · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-11-13 |
2010-11-13 |
Poem on memory inspired by the anime <em>Angel Beats!</em>; do you remember love? |
| Immoral Books · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-01-24 |
2010-01-24 |
Argument that texts are neither moral nor immoral as they require active interpretation. |
| SICP Chapter 1.2 notes · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-04-09 |
2010-01-09 |
recursion into iteration; primality testing |
| The Case of PenPen · Gwern.net |
essay |
2010-01-03 |
2010-01-03 |
A parody of <em>Evangelion</em> where PenPen leads Instrumentality. |
| Dying Outside · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-12-12 |
2009-12-12 |
Poem about Hal Finney announcing beginning tracheostomy before dying of ALS. |
| A Human Story · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-17 |
2009-02-17 |
The mutability of memory |
| Cloud Nine · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2009-02-09 |
Unfinished fantasy/SF novel |
| On Disrespect · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-09 |
2009-02-09 |
An attempt to reinvent classic theories of social interaction as expressions of power |
| How the Panther Got Black · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-02 |
2009-02-02 |
Mythic short story in the vein of Kipling’s Just-so Stories |
| Hybrid Rainbow · Gwern.net |
essay |
2009-02-01 |
2009-02-01 |
Poem about man & his machines. |
| On Justifications · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-09-26 |
2009-01-16 |
Philosophical fiction or a prose poem about suffering innocents and the theodicy |
| The Jaguars of God · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-12-03 |
2008-12-03 |
A dream of a strange judgment day |
| Dream · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-12-03 |
2008-12-03 |
An old childhood dream about WWI trench warfare. |
| Before Dawn · Gwern.net |
essay |
2008-12-03 |
2008-12-03 |
Alliterative verse about staying up all night |
| https://gwern.net/haskell/Redirect-bot.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/lcp.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/interwiki-compile.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/Permute.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/mnemo3.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/mnemo4.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/mnemo2.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/conjugate-present.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/mnemo.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/haskell/goodreadsToMarkdown.hs |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/robots.txt |
essay |
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| https://gwern.net/sitemap.xml |
essay |
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