Month: August 2019

GPT-2 6-Month Follow-Up

people find GPT-2 synthetic text samples almost as convincing (72% in one cohort judged the articles to be credible) as real articles from the New York Times (83%) we expect detectors to need to detect a significant fraction of generations with very few false positives. Malicious actors may use a variety of sampling techniques (including rejection sampling) or fine-tune models to evade detection methods. A deployed system likely needs to be highly accurate (99.9%–99.99%) on a variety of generations. Our research suggests that current ML-based methods only achieve low to mid–90s accuracy, and that fine-tuning the language models decreases accuracy further.

The Greening Earth

The earth is getting greener, in large part due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Surprisingly, however, another driver is programs in China to increase and conserve forests and more intensive use of cropland in India.

2022-07-21: While Amazon deforestation continues, in other places it is reforestation.

England has 2x the amount of forestland in the past 150 years, and now has as much land dedicated to forests as the year 1350.

Easy VPN

Wouldn’t it be nice though? If you could have servers, like you did in the 1990s, with the same simple architectures as you used in the 1990s, and the same sloppy security policies developer freedom as you had in the 1990s, but somehow reach them from anywhere? Like… a network, but not the Internet. One that isn’t reachable from the Internet, or even addressable on the Internet. One that uses the Internet as a substrate, but not as a banana. That’s what we’re working on.

Life sciences progress

Academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists.

2022-06-02: A contrarian perspective

Stepping back, I’m claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past. Diverse groups – the Nobel nominators, contemporary surveyed scientists, academics, and inventors – all seem to have an increasing preference for the work of the past, relative to the present. And looking at growth in the number of topics covered by scientists also suggests it has become harder to make forward progress.

Approximating Pi

Under what circumstances is it possible to represent irrational numbers that go on forever—like pi—with simple fractions, like 22/7? The proof establishes that the answer to this very general question turns on the outcome of a single calculation. The Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture has you add up the measures of the sets of irrational numbers captured by each approximating fraction. It represents this number as a large arithmetic sum. Then it makes its key prediction: If that sum goes off to infinity, then you have approximated virtually all irrational numbers; if that sum instead stops at a finite value, no matter how many measures you sum together, then you’ve approximated virtually no irrational numbers.

Sixpoint Gowanus

Sixpoint Brewery announced plans for a 2K m2 brewery and taproom in Gowanus, Brooklyn today, their first significant expansion in the city in their 15-year history. The space, which will be at the intersection of 9th Street and 2nd Avenue in the shadow of the MTA’s Culver Viaduct that carries the F and G Train from Carroll Gardens into Park Slope. The space is planned to open in Spring 2020.

2 Generals problem

1 night in September 2018 the food delivery service Deliveroo went haywire. It sent some customers the same food order several times, and other customers got nothing. In this video, Tom Scott explains that this was a classic example of the “2 Generals” problem, and how Deliveroo’s “Night of the Multiple Orders” could have been mitigated — by using something called an “idempotency token,” which allows a transaction to only happen once.

Pleasure & Pain Log Scales

Based on: the characteristic distribution of neural activity, personal accounts of intense pleasure and pain, the way various pain scales have been described by their creators, and the results of a pilot study we conducted which ranks, rates, and compares the hedonic quality of extreme experiences, we suggest that the best way to interpret pleasure and pain scales is by thinking of them as logarithmic compressions of what is truly a long-tail. The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure).