October 15, 2004

October 15, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

ESF Blogging: An International Festival of Puzzlement

The European Social Forum in London’s fabulous Alexandra Palace. Yes. This is the Las Vegas of ranting, an annual chance for the broad left and in fact any freak with £30 to discuss the world’s deadly serious problems with deadly serious people. I hoped to make a day of it, but then, London happened. Ken…

October 15, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Bougainville story update

Papua New Guinea’s biggest-circulation newspaper, the Post-Courier, has an interesting update on the “King of Papala” story here. “The trio claim they are members of the Independent State of Mogilano, the Singapore Royal World Bank, the Royal Assembly and National Kingdom of Solomon Islands and now the Royal Kingdom of Papala. The Royal Kingdom of…

October 15, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Curious and interesting

In Germany, an exhibition has opened displaying selected images from the Stasi’s immense library of surveillance photos and film built up over forty years of repression. The few I’ve seen, here, are promising, showing a bizarre humour and a kind of sinister glamour.

October 15, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

The Grauniad – A Bad Day

The Guardian’s nickname arises from its alleged tendency towards original and amusing typo errors. Everyone has a fave, for example the near-legendary occasion when they managed to review a production of Doris Godunov. One of the paper’s former editors claims that the reason for this reputation is buried in a British Railways working timetable from…

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.
Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
We follow the sequence of works initiated in “Textbooks Are All You Need” [GZA+23], which utilize high quality training data to improve the performance of small language models and deviate from the standard scaling-laws. In this work we show that such method allows to reach the level of highly capable models such as GPT-3.5 or […]
The Anglosphere has an advantage on immigration
in Britain, second-generation children from the poorest Bangladeshi communities achieve better results at school than the average white British pupil, while Black Britons are more likely to attend university than their white counterparts. In the US, the children of foreign-born parents are now more likely to attend college than those with native-born parents. In France, […]
Post Office paid widow in instalments for silence, inquiry hears - BBC News
During a second day of questioning, former Post Office executive Angela van den Bogerd was shown emails where she and her colleagues discussed hiring a media lawyer after learning that Mr Griffiths was seriously ill in hospital...It also emerged that the then chief executive, Paula Vennells, questioned whether Mr Griffiths had "previous mental health issues […]
Tom Witherow on X: "New at Post Office inquiry: Angela Van den Bogerd admits she got her bonus in 2019 after "lying" to the High Court in the Bates trial. "So despite a finding in the High Court that basically you lied, you got your bonus?" Edward Henry K
and then there's perjury.
Meta value falls $190bn as investors react to plan to increase spending on AI | Meta | The Guardian
A relaxation of that restraint has rattled investors after Meta raised the upper bound of its capital expenditure guidance on Wednesday, from $37bn to $40bn...The share decline follows a record gain in market value by Meta in February, when the company added $196bn to its stock market capitalisation – a measure of a company’s worth […]
Broadcom Scales Connectivity And Performance For Advanced AI Workloads
This is why consumer AI hyperscalers have looked to work with Broadcom to develop what it refers to as an XPU—an AI accelerator that is not quite a GPU and certainly not an ASIC. Instead, it has all the foundational elements of a computational platform—memory, networking, interconnectivity and I/O. The only thing missing is the […]