December 3, 2004

December 3, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Lest we forget

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst ever industrial accident, at Bhopal in India. Thousands – we don’t know exactly how many – of people were gassed when a huge tank of methyl isocyanate leaked at Union Carbide’s plant there. Multiple layers of safety should have been present but were not. The victims…

December 3, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

That Awful Obscene Wallpaper!

The FT reports, via Suburban Guerrilla, on a bizarre request by US cinema distributors to the director of a film version of The Merchant of Venice. Michael Radford was a little surprised when he was asked to “paintbox the wallpaper”, as he didn’t think wallpaper existed in the 16th century. Closer examination showed that the…

December 3, 2004 by yorksranter 0 comments

Ohio: Blackwell Before Beak

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has been summoned to Congress’ Judiciary Committee to answer a detailed list of electoral irregularities. It’s too long to repost here, but as a taster, it includes places where there was a 124% turnout, others where 5,000 more people voted for a Democratic judge than for a Democratic president,…

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 […]