NI

May 8, 2011 by yorksranter 0 comments

Callaghan-era surge

I have recently been reading David McKittrick (et al)’s Making Sense of the Troubles. An interesting point, which I wasn’t aware of before, is their contention that the late 70s and Roy Mason’s tenure as Northern Ireland secretary was an important turning point. In fact, you could make an interesting comparison with Iraq in 2007-2008.…

June 15, 2008 by yorksranter 0 comments

I’m a worse bastard than the fucking shite that I am, and that’s saying something

Finally, we have the best possible argument against the dire Counter-Terrorism Bill. Unfortunately, it’s one that by definition we couldn’t have had before last week’s pornographic nightmare of a vote. It’s a sort of recursive critique. Think about it – by far the worst feature of the damn thing is the awful “concession” that Parliament…

April 20, 2008 by yorksranter 3 comments

hey hey hey, ring ring ring

This looks like a must-read; Kevin Myers’ personal history of 1970s Belfast, complete with fundamentalist landladies, Provos concerned about the morality of using a condom in the initiator for a carbomb, the only civil war in history where both sides were receiving welfare benefits from the same government, the UDA as the only terrorists in…

November 26, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Anarchy in the UK!

It’s been a weird political week, no? There was “Loyalist” (scarequotes included because my definition of loyalty doesn’t include shooting fellow citizens, constables & c) nutbag Michael Stone’s public freakout-cum-terrorist attack on Stormont. I haven’t laughed as much in years – seriously, ten years ago this would have meant blood in the streets, all 39…

September 24, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Ending an army

Over at Slugger, they are discussing an alleged proposal from the UDA that the government give it £1 billion to end its campaign of violence and convert itself into a legal organisation. At one level, you’d be forgiven for spitting coffee on your keyboard at such shameless blackmail. But there is a valid point here.…

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