February 17, 2006

February 17, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Airpower!

So there’s this great big bunker fulla bombs and shells an stuff left behind by ol evil Saddam’s roving ghost just downs the street in Baghdad. What do you think they did? That’s right, call in an airstrike by four (yes, four) F-15Es. Call it faith-based strategy.

February 17, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

No surprises here

Southern Thai rebels download bomb development environment from iraq.com. Apparently the in-thing is putting your IED in a concrete shell shaped like a roadside milepost – not only for camouflage but for containment and flying lumps of concrete. Does that count as glorification?

February 17, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Arms and Influence

Kingdaddy’s Arms and Influence is one of the best blogs around. Check out this post on the US military’s problem with management consultant speak (itself essentially IT-speak with the clue taken out). It’s a relief someone else noticed it – for example, when I read Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die, I was…

February 17, 2006 by yorksranter 1 comment

ID Cards and the Vodafone Scandal

Most readers of this weblog will be aware that a political scandal recently occurred in Greece after it emerged that persons unknown had been illegally intercepting the mobile phone calls of a wide range of prominent Greeks, including senior ministers and ex-ministers of the Interior, Defence, Merchant Shipping (a Greek touch), and many civil servants…

February 17, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Back from 3GSM

Well, as the title suggests, I’m back from the 3GSM World Congress, the monster mobile telecoms shindig held this year in Barcelona. The doctors tell me most of the bullshit should have passed through my system in a few days’ time. Some points: Video-sharing through the IP Multimedia Subsystem, demonstrated at the show, sucks so…

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 […]