February 12, 2005

February 12, 2005 by yorksranter 0 comments

A Night In in Baghdad

Abu Aardvark reports on spending a night with three different Arabic TV channels, Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and the US-funded al-Hurra (who, of course, had a journalist shot in Basra last week). It’s worth reading, even if some of the methodology leaves something to be desired (“p.s. the jazeera and arabia presenters are WAY hotter than any…

February 12, 2005 by yorksranter 1 comment

India now up for a chunk of Yukos

The public prints have it that the Indian minister of oil and natural gas is off to Moscow to discuss buying into a chunk of Yukos’s assets. This comes at the same time as the intrigues surrounding exactly how the Yuganskneftegaz/Rosneft deal (and the subsequent Rosneft/Gazprom deal) was financed, and specifically what the involvement of…

February 12, 2005 by yorksranter 0 comments

On that West African theme…

Le Monde reports rioting in Togo after the semi-coup that installed the old dictator’s son. They go on to speculate that the Nigerian-led Economic Community of West African States might apply sanctions: interestingly, a source in the area told me last night that he expected ECOWAS intervention as the Nigerians had pointedly not been invited…

February 12, 2005 by yorksranter 0 comments

Slight Return to the Ivory Coast

Back in November, I blogged on a curious incident during the French intervention in the Ivory Coast. Recapping, when the French army there moved into Abidjan after the Ivorian air-raid on one of their outposts, they established an HQ and registration point for evacuees in the best hotel in town. There they discovered that someone…

February 12, 2005 by yorksranter 0 comments

Morning (just) Briefing

Starting with the admin, please note that the comments service is unavailable. I have been promised that it will soon return. G2: There’s some follow-up on the Ivory Coast/Israel arms story we covered over at Ha’aretz. More semi-results have appeared from the Iraqi elections, we shall be having a look to see if the prediction…

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 […]
The Fraudulent Science of Success - The Atlantic
Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the […]
Generalizable Autoregressive Modeling of Time Series Through Functional Narratives - Apple Machine Learning Research
Analogous to the next word prediction task in languages that learns narratives by connecting different words, our autoregressive transformer aims to learn the Narratives of Time Series (NoTS) by connecting different functions in time // transformers are good at predicting the next word, if we look at a time series as a sentence of functions, […]
2410.09407v1.pdf
great paper! doing complicated agent stuff on a phone without RAGging. also MS Phi shines again. why why would Apple do that...