June 27, 2004

June 27, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Allawi and those “models of democracy”

I know it’s terribly eurocentric and arrogant to complain about this sort of thing, and we should be tolerant of alternative cultural values, but is anyone else worried by Iyad Allawi’s assertion that “Iraqi democracy should not be a replica of models imported from America, Britain or any other country”? Now, this is all very…

June 27, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Just when do you become a tyrant?

Kremlin Looking for Loyal NGOs It is reported that the Russian government is trying to build up a base of friendly NGOs as a counterweight to the numerous campaign groups that are about the only effective opposition left in Russia. First question – is an NGO created to be nice to the Kremlin “nongovernmental” in…

June 27, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Fatal attack on Chinese in Afghan province “not terrorism,” minister says

CNEWS:Fatal attack on Chinese in Afghan province “not terrorism,” minister says Canadian news site reports that the bombing of a peacekeeping force vehicle and the murder of some 11 Chinese workers in northern Afghanistan was “not terrorism”. These supposed non-attacks non-occurred in Kunduz on the 10th fo June. Kunduz, significantly, is the first town outside…

June 27, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

First Clues on UKIP’s real policy

What You Can Get Away With – Nick Barlow’s weblog It appears that UKIP’s Nick Croucher has very clear ideas on the content of that “free trade agreement” they think we could have with the EU in the event of withdrawal. Apparently he’s only going “to Europe” (eh? he’s standing on it!) in order to…

Mass Precision Strike: Designing UAV Complexes for Land Forces - mass-precision-strike-final.pdf
If a new UAV control technique is used near to a specialised counter-UAV EW asset such as the Russian Shipovnik-Aero, then the process of enemy adaptationis significantly faster – typically around two weeks...The development of AI-enabled signals analysis and EW signal development means that these timeframes for hostile adaptation against newly deployed UAV control and […]
L&Q’s house exchange scheme turned our lives into a nightmare | Property | The Guardian
It stirred itself when I first got in touch in December, and contractors were redeployed. It wasn’t until March that a technician discovered the boiler was leaking gas and capped the supply. L&Q’s scanty terms and conditions on mutual exchange state tenants accept properties “as seen”. However, that does not absolve it of basic legal […]
Apple releases eight small AI language models aimed at on-device use | Ars Technica
Apple also released the code for CoreNet, a library it used to train OpenELM—and it also included reproducible training recipes that allow the weights (neural network files) to be replicated, which is unusual for a major tech company so far.
US probe into China's RISC-V role casts shadow on Samsung's AI chip ambitions and foundry biz expansion
the DOC is conducting probes into possible national security risks associated with China's significant presence in the RISC-V domain. In addition, they are also assessing possible countermeasures while highlighting the need to avoid harming US companies engaged in RISC-V development...It is reported that Samsung is conducting trial production of server chips for Baidu, a Chinese […]
Three women contract HIV from dirty “vampire facials” at unlicensed spa | Ars Technica
The woman's case led investigators to VIP Spa, which was unlicensed, had no appointment scheduling system, and did not store client contact information. In an inspection in the fall of 2018, health investigators found shocking conditions: unwrapped syringes in drawers and counters, unlabeled tubes of blood sitting out on a kitchen counter, more unlabeled blood […]
(1) Sarastro on X: "Imagine the impact of this in places like the Caribbean where power prices are very high and there are huge problems with sourcing drinking water." / Twitter
outrageous cheap solar! really ironically the only place it *will* be kosher to have a golf course will be in the desert.
A Few Thoughts on Rachel Reeves - by Simon Nixon
Police insfrastructure, police performance, and crime: Evidence from austerity cuts - WP202416-Police-infrastructure-police-performance-and-crime-evidence-from-austerity-cuts.pdf
I estimate a positive elasticity of violence with respect to distance of approximately 0.09, so that a 10% increase in distance increases violent crimes by roughly 1%. This effect translates in 3 additional assaults and murders in each block per year, for a total of 5,500 additional violent offenses city-wise...614 more assaults and murders are […]
jetmoe/jetmoe-8b · Hugging Face
We used a 96×H100 GPU cluster for 2 weeks, which cost ~$0.08 million // cool moddle. very tiny, too, and an MOE to boot
microsoft/rho-math-7b-v0.1 · Hugging Face
Rho-1 base models employ Selective Language Modeling (SLM) for pretraining, which selectively trains on clean and useful tokens that aligned with the desired distribution.