quackery

June 24, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

Cash rules everything around me

OK, remember this post on the Labour Party’s “Faith Task Force”, academies, and the PR man to the Saudis, BAE, and HIV-quack dictator Yahya Jammeh? For a start, it’s drawing referrals from the Conservative Party’s network. This story in the Torygraph gives more detail: it’s the PM’s pet priest, Michael Seed, who introduced Bailey and…

May 20, 2007 by yorksranter 3 comments

leaves the bowl sparkling clean continuously

Ben “Badscience” Goldacre gets stuck into Patrick Holford’s rampant quackery like a big hot meal: Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it. The eight copper pads do…

January 22, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

Yahya Jammeh: Quite Literally the World’s Worst President

Gambia’s President, Yahya Jammeh, whose personal plane, the Ilyushin 62M C5-GNM, is on the UN asset freeze list, is..well. You’d be surprised, but every now and then in this game I see something that shocks even me. Via Ben Goldacre’s Badscience, his pet newspaper, the Daily Observer, would like us all to know he’s discovered…

June 1, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Time is on my side

More than two years ago now, I poured scorn on the Grauniad for running ads for an evidently fraudulent anti-allergy gadget whilst also running Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column. A taste: Which is all very good news for little “James”, the emetic blond child whose likeness takes up one of those two pages with the…

May 3, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

The Climax of Stupidity

That’s it. It’s done. The most stupid remark possible. The Sistine Chapel of stupidity. Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then. From…

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 […]