May 18, 2004

May 18, 2004 by yorksranter 1 comment

More on the Viktor Bout story

I’ve just been doing some more searches about this. Need to read the docs first, thought. The names to watch are “Flying Dolphin”, “Air Cess”, “Santa Cruz Imperial”, and “Centrafricain Airlines”. As far as folk go, apart from the man himself, look out for Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Saqr al Nayhan(link), Sanjivan Ruprah(link), and…

May 18, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

The Times: that “sarin bomb” and a curious photo

Well, I may have said that the neo-cons weren’t trying to claim that the alleged sarin bomb justified the invasion of Iraq. I wasn’t entirely right. The Times, that sad ruin of a newspaper, illustrated the story with a large picture of various chemical-looking tubes and instruction leaflets printed in Arabic, English and Russian. The…

May 18, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

This is the best the Loyal Opposition can come up with?

Michael Howard stakes out a radical challenge to Blair “Mr Howard is thinking of ways within the parliamentary rules of presenting Mr Blair with some oysters at Prime Minister’s questions tomorrow (Wednesday). “The thing that disturbs me,” he said, “is that the in-fighting that is taking place at the highest levels of the Labour Party…

May 18, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Why no WMD victory parade?

Despite yesterday’s discovery of a sarin-filled artillery shell in Iraq, the Americans seem strangely reluctant to trumpet the obvious fact that their mission has now been justified. A weapon of mass destruction has been found? So – where are the victory parades? Of course, there were a couple of flies in the sarin. The shell…

May 18, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

It’s a Dustbin Lorry; It’s an Industrial Oven; It’s a Disaster!

It is reported that the Health & Safety Executive is concentrating on an industrial oven at the Glasgow plastics factory that blew up and killed nine people. This oven is not like other ovens because this one is special. In fact, it’s that special it used to be a dustbin lorry!Report “Jim Fletcher, 33, a…

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 […]