Issue #263

November 18, 2024

This weeks book is "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence" by S. I. Walker. In this book, Walker offers a groundbreaking reimagining of life’s nature, challenging traditional definitions and exploring the origins of living systems from a fresh perspective. At the heart of the book lies Assembly Theory, which proposes that all matter can be viewed as information, with life representing a highly complex assembly of causal information. This paradigm-shifting framework not only redefines life universally but also paves the way for identifying non-terrestrial life forms.

In an interdisciplinary approach that blends insights from Physics and Philosophy, the book explores key distinctions between knowledge, information, and consciousness. It encourages readers to move beyond anthropocentric perspectives, prompting us to consider the existence of life forms vastly different from anything encountered on Earth.

1. Understanding Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) [datastax.com]
2. garak, LLM vulnerability scanner [github.com/NVIDIA/]
3. Virality in cartography: What makes a map go viral? [geoawesome.com]
4. SQL Style Guide [sqlstyle.guide]
5. BAML is a domain-specific language to write and test LLM functions [github.com/BoundaryML]
6. From prediction markets to info finance [vitalik.eth.limo]
7. Misinformation really does spread like a virus, suggest mathematical models drawn from epidemiology [theconversation.com]

• An embedding-based distance for temporal graphs (L. Dall’Amico, A. Barrat, C. Cattuto)
• Mapping the ionosphere with millions of phones (J. Smith, A. Kast, A. Geraschenko, Y. J. Morton, M. P. Brenner, F. van Diggelen, B. P. Williams)
• Comparative Evaluation of Behavioral-Epidemic Models Using COVID-19 Data (N. Gozzi, N. Perra, A. Vespignani)
• Consumption-based approaches in proactive detection for content moderation (S. Elisha, J. N. Pougué-Biyong, M. Beguerisse-Díaz)
• BERTs are Generative In-Context Learners (D. Samuel)
• The Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure (Y. Li, E. J. Michaud, D. D. Baek, J. Engels, X. Sun, M. Tegmark)
• Distinguishing Ignorance from Error in LLM Hallucinations (A. Simhi, J. Herzig, I. Szpektor, Y. Belinkov)

AI Scaling Hits Wall, Rumours Say. How Serious is it?

November 18, 2024

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