December 10, 2006

December 10, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

The Colonel of the 36th

You may recall that we’ve followed the career of the Iraqi Special Forces, née Ministry of the Interior Commandos, née 36th ICDC Battalion in some detail. This force is one of the few reasonably capable Iraqi units, made up of a mix of exiles and SCIRI Badr Corps men. Kazimi has a mildly hagiographic post…

December 10, 2006 by yorksranter 1 comment

For Dawkins’ sake…

Get your idle legs over to the Weblog Awards and vote for Fistful. Exercise your democratic rights here. We’re losing to some random bunch of Dutchmen, but you can help us finish ahead of the demented thrappers of Brussels Journal. As usual with blog awards, it’s stuffed with the overrated and the clichéd. There was…

December 10, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Saudi Nuclear Watch

Within months of the invasion of Iraq, Saudi Arabian sources began hinting at a contingency plan to obtain nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Now, some more. I’m not sure whether to take The Business seriously, but they seem to have been briefed in some detail: Western and Middle Eastern sources have told this magazine that, if…

December 10, 2006 by yorksranter 4 comments

Sunday Princess Diana Blogging

Rare feature, this, but the Observer has news: the Stevens report says, apparently, that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her phone calls the night of her death. A couple of questions: didn’t they have anyone better to bug? And, more importantly, what was the French government’s position on this? The Obscurer makes the…

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...
A Hackney Story - The Fence
Another drug dealer who sold crack and heroin as a young man in Hackney over the 1990s and 2000s, and who does not want to be identified because he still sells cocaine [well, that's a good reason!], remembers that LOM was a bigger threat than the police. // also contains the controversial assertion that Hackney […]
Nvidia outpaces revenue estimates with strong data center growth amid mixed analyst reactions
q-o-q now 17%
Japan expected to announce additional US$1.3 billion investment in Rapidus
The government's increased stake in Rapidus through direct investment allows it greater control and governance over the company, marking the first time it will hold equity in Rapidus. By October 2027, when Rapidus is set to begin mass production of 2nm chips, the government plans to exchange factory assets for shares in the company.
BYD-designed, TSMC-made automotive chip rumored to involve MediaTek collaboration
oooh