September 2003

September 30, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Workers occupying Appledore Shipyard

And blogging whilst they’re at it Appledore Shipbuilders in North Devon is under threat of closure. Receivers were appointed today. For the last few days, the work force has been occupying the yard in a so-called work-in. These are the lot who were demonstrating at the Labour conference yesterday. (Given that the MOD was apparently…

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Admin: Archives

The archives are back.

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Data Reveal Inaccuracies in Portrayal of Iraqis

Data Reveal Inaccuracies in Portrayal of Iraqis (washingtonpost.com) Sorry for the Washpost burst, but I feel I should share with you the fact that 55% of Baghdadis have a good impression of France and only 29% have of the US. Well, it is the cradle of civilisation.

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

…But they won’t give up

Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney (washingtonpost.com) No, “Dead” Dick Cheney won’t admit it – he still keeps talking about mystery meetings between Mohammed Atta and Iraqis in Prague even after the CIA, the FBI and Czech intelligence have admitted they had the wrong man. It’s a curious feature of the world, but one we…

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

And the Iraq story keeps rotting – Washington Post

Bush Aides Say They’ll Cooperate With Probe Into Intelligence Leak (washingtonpost.com) “Wilson said that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his…

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

What the hell?

Of course there was no strategy to belittle Dr. Kelly

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

STUFT Stuffed: dodginess of ships chartered for Iraq

Link to report It is reported that many of the ships chartered by the MoD to transport the Army to Kuwait for the war against Iraq were very dodgy indeed – up to and including the one that was detained by coastguards before it could leave on grounds of safety. This is very un-fantastic news:…

September 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

RIP Bar Room Philosophy

One of our partner blogs, the first ever to link to the Ranter, this fine institution has ceased to be. Meanwhile, problems continue with our RSS service. The Confined Space feed still won’t update, and our own feed returns meaningless error messages.

September 28, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Guardian: Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin – in Britain

Link A prison-grim story.

September 28, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

BBC NEWS Computer crashing, Ukraine-style

Is this how to give up blogging?>

Günter Gaus, Nischengesellschaft (1983) | German History in Documents and Images
Es ist das Wort: Nische, das den Genossen der SED unbehaglich ist, das ihr Weltbild einschwärzt. In dem Wort schwingen mit – völlig zutreffend für den Zustand in der DDR, den ich damit benenne – ein Rückzug ins Private, die Befriedigung individualistischer Bedürfnisse, die vom Kollektivismus nicht ausreichend geleistet wird. Die privaten Lebensräume, als tiefe […]
Schon vor Verzicht von Pistorius: Scholz legt im direkten Kanzlerduell gegenüber Merz zu
Für Scholz als Kanzler sprachen sich der am Freitag veröffentlichten Umfrage zufolge 39 Prozent der Wahlberechtigten aus – das waren zwei Prozentpunkte mehr als bei der vorherigen Erhebung im Oktober. Der CDU-Chef verlor dagegen vier Punkte auf 44 Prozent. 17 Prozent (plus zwei) legten sich nicht fest.
Dan Savage on blue America in the age of Trump
And we should be trying to undo both those things. Here, the white people are coming back. People want to live in the city again. People want diversity. It's actually what they want. What you're doing is looking at them and saying, "Fuck you. Fuck you for going, fuck you for coming back." Sometimes it […]
Thüringen: CDU, SPD und BSW präsentieren Koalitionsvertrag - DER SPIEGEL
Im Kapitel zur Europapolitik steht, man erkenne an, dass viele Menschen die Stationierung von Mittelstreckenraketen »als eine fundamentale Veränderung der strategischen und militärischen Lage in Europa und auch in Deutschland begreifen«. Nun heißt es in dem Papier: »Eine Stationierung und deren Verwendung ohne deutsche Mitsprache sehen wir kritisch« // whole thing is a bit silly […]
Grüne verzeichnen nach Koalitionsbruch Rekord-Mitgliederzahl - DER SPIEGEL
Insgesamt seien im Zeitraum zwischen dem Ende der Koalition am 6. November und dem 21. November »über 15.000 neue Mitgliedsanträge in der Bundesgeschäftsstelle eingegangen«, erklärte nun eine Parteisprecherin auf Anfrage des SPIEGEL // this would be an increase of 11 per cent
„Besser ist, man schreit die Wand in seinem Büro an”: Merkel hält Scholz-Rede für „kein Paradebeispiel für Würde“
Hinsichtlich der FDP sagte sie, die Partei habe sie „nie als einfachen Koalitionspartner erlebt“. „Aber sie existiert, und Politik beginnt eben mit dem Betrachten der Realität“, so Merkel.
HBM memory supply to scale in 2025
each HBM3E chip has a capacity of 24Gb, which is a 50% increase over the 16Gb of HBM3. With greater single-chip capacity of HBM and increasing GPU integration of HBM, large-scale mass production of HBM3E will require more overall DRAM capacity. According to industry analysts, HBM3E employs approximately two to three times the wafer volume […]
Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Finally, we feed the hidden states 𝐡+kg+e to the decoder of the MT model, which is now able to also attend to the entity embeddings from the retriever and fuse them with its hidden states. Our intuition is that the embeddings 𝐞i from the knowledge retriever can contain useful fine-grained, latent information about the retrieved […]
Divide-or-Conquer? Which Part Should You Distill Your LLM? - Apple Machine Learning Research
These results indicate that by using smaller, distilled problem decomposition models in combination with problem solving LLMs we can achieve reasoning with cost-efficient inference and local adaptation // Apple is doing a lot of these! this one has a model that makes a plan, and then the plan is executed by other task specific models
4M-21: An Any-to-Any Vision Model for Tens of Tasks and Modalities
We are able to train a single unified model on diverse modalities by encoding them with modality-specific discrete tokenizers (see fig. 3). For image-like modalities, e.g. RGB or edges, we train ViT-based [24] VQ-VAE [63] tokenizers to map the inputs into a small grid of discrete tokens. For modalities like 3D human poses or image […]