October 2003

October 31, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

First man sacked for blogging?

A Microsoft employee has been fired for blogging a picture of Apple Macs being delivered to company HQ in Seattle. This is the post at issue. God knows what’s wrong with them. Despite the dull techie Windows vs Mac wrangles, Microsoft have been selling software to run on the things since I were a lad…

October 31, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Ocean of nonsense? The elasticity of information

BBC story Apparently, researchers at Berkeley have concluded that 800 megabytes of information is produced for each person on the planet every year. That’s doubled since 1999, when they last checked. The conclusion is of course dependent on many other factors – just what is information? Does printing many copies of the same book create…

October 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Bog Rolls Over Baghdad

From the last issue of International Affairs, I see Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden’s review of the invasion of Iraq. How wonderful…reviewing a war like a book…I digress, though. On the question of propaganda, Sir Tim is moved to the following remark: “A total of 158 air missions dropped 31,800,000 leaflets. The US analysis equates…

October 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

BBC NEWS | Earth buffeted by big solar flare

Link I noticed on a bulletin board that someone saw the Northern Lights from an Edinburgh-London flight at the latitude of Manchester on Monday. Almost a pity not to be up north.. “The compass variation at the Lerwick geomagnetic observatory in Scotland changed by 5.1 degrees in only 25 minutes at about 0630 GMT. Japan’s…

October 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

BBC NEWS – Key Kremlin figure ‘quits’

Link This is the same chap who recently shocked the Russian and Ukrainian press by threatening to bomb the Ukraine at a press conference on a minor border dispute in the Straits of Kerch. I wonder whether that had something to do with it..or perhaps he was trying to embarrass Putin? Still, it’s very depressing…

October 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

A Fistful of Euros: Life outside of Europe

A Fistful of Euros: Life outside of Europe From the same lot, this is amusing.. “The Bible does not predict the establishment of the State of Israel, nor does it predict that the Antichrist will attack it when there is peace with the Palestinians. Yes, I’ve read the entire Bible. I even used to go…

October 29, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

A Fistful of Euros: The trials of the Tories

A Fistful of Euros Well, it finally happened. Letter number 25 arrived a day after IDS demanded that the plotters move by Wednesday. (not that he had any way of preventing them from writing in after Wednesday, but let that pass) Now we will all have the free entertainment of a Tory election. They aren’t…

October 24, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

BBC NEWS |Crash victims cheer rail overhaul

BBC NEWS | Business | Crash victims cheer rail overhaul Well, it’s finally happened – Network Rail has renationalised (well, I’m going to admit it even if the government won’t) all maintenance of the railways. The workers’ flag is deepest red… How odd, anyway. Like Christmas coming early for a lot of people. Puts the…

October 22, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

Europe: best when you don’t notice it?

A Fistful of Euros has this article on the slow progress and near-zero profile of the European intergovernmental conference that is currently struggling to agree the final text of the EU’s new constitution. According to another blogger quoted by Fistful, EuroSavant, a tougher and more power-political approach to the Constitution might have been more effective…

October 20, 2003 by yorksranter 0 comments

George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?

George W. Bush or Chimpanzee? Highly amusing link

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 […]