June 29, 2004

June 29, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Bush vs Chirac, and the Turks

At the NATO summit, George W. Bush made time for a demarche on the subject of Turkish membership of the EU, which angered Jacques Chirac. Chirac responded that “It’s as if I was advising the US on how they should manage their relations with Mexico.” Indeed. I am sure both the Turks and the French…

June 29, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

We’ve been here before

Well, that’s supposedly it. Calamity Paul Bremer handed over Iraq two days early and was out of the country the same night. If anyone thinks this is anything else than a response to some really ugly intelligence warning about (part-)independence day, they must be astonishingly naive. As Mountbatten’s chief of staff put it about the…

June 29, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Tech Active report

So, I did indeed attend Tech Active yesterday. Key points of the discussion, held in the all-white but strangly ransacked looking premises of the Stanhope Centre, covered a wide range of problems related to political campaigning and technology. A curious crowd, made up of equal parts tech-hipster/German video artist types in painfully fashionable (but ugly)…

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.