Wanktanks

February 7, 2010 by yorksranter 0 comments

a decline into local navel-gazing

Can we, can we, can we have better thinktanks already? I’m not so sure whether the worst bit is the fact they got the number wrong by a factor of four, or that they didn’t know that the National Rivers Authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t for 14 years, or just that it’s so obvious that…

January 24, 2010 by yorksranter 1 comment

a single net of conspiracy

Well, this is hardly surprising; the FBI was in the habit of pretending to be on a terrorism case every time they wanted telecoms traffic data. Their greed for call-detail records is truly impressive. Slurp! Unsurprisingly, the lust for CDRs and the telcos’ eagerness to shovel them in rapidly got the better of their communications…

January 3, 2010 by yorksranter 6 comments

Profiles in Wanktankery: Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens

How could I forget this? The Obscurer‘s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is: Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists. Awlaki had contacts with Major…

January 3, 2010 by yorksranter 0 comments

wanktanks against racial profiling

Whilst we’re on the subject, a couple of other terrorism things. Kingpin of Comedy Gladio, intimate of Patrick Mercer MP, and self-made spy Glen Jenvey has been arrested, ironically on charges of inciting hatred against Jews. He’s finally convinced somebody that he’s a real jihadi! Not that he’s likely to convince anyone else of anything…

December 30, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

CCC vs Wanktanks

Other people’s TDLs. I note that this year’s CCC has devoted some time to the wanktank phenomenon in Germany, and also elsewhere. Volker Bilk’s slides are here; it makes a lot of sense, but there’s quite a bit of German philosophical maundering in there, and I’d have liked to see more case studies/howtos. As far…

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 […]
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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 […]
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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
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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.
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Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
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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 […]