December 2016

December 21, 2016 by yorksranter 3 comments

2016 in a link

This is a cracking piece of work from the Bellingcat gang. It’s also quite possibly the most grimly 2016 thing of 2016 – having to do OSINT verification on a 7-year old girl’s Twitter from the siege of Aleppo, because the trolls are denying she ever existed.

December 11, 2016 by yorksranter 4 comments

The turn to neo-Edwardian politics

OK, so an interesting point came up on twitter regarding former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, aka Europe’s Mr Brexit Except For The Other One. Isn’t one of the problems here that British politicians are socialised into a relatively simple kind of state? Basically unitary, usually with a strong executive government, powerful party whips, and unambiguous…

December 9, 2016 by yorksranter 1 comment

The Daily Telegraph’s personal finance page is depraved

So, on Monday, the Daily Telegraph ran this story on how you too can incorporate your BTL portfolio as a limited company and dodge tax. You’ll note that the story only exists because mortgage broker Kent Reliance pushed a report at the paper. And yes, it’s totally about tax. Kent Reliance, the buy-to-let lender who…

December 8, 2016 by yorksranter 10 comments

Everyone else is whining about Peter Thiel so why can’t I?

Here’s a long read on Peter Thiel’s brilliant scheme to pull brilliant young people out of boring old university and get them to take risks! with skin in the game! on the big technologies of the future. And what have they delivered? The short answer would be the square root of fuck-all. The slightly longer…

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