March 19, 2006

March 19, 2006 by yorksranter 3 comments

LEO: alternative future history

Just been given a copy of Georgina Ferry’s book on LEO, the pioneering family of business computers developed by Lyons in the late 1940s. I was broadly aware that they had been a long way ahead of everyone else, having been the first company to use a computer to do anything useful and also having…

March 19, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Admin: Tiny Text

The problem that caused some 2005 archives to render in tiny text should now be solved.

March 19, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Strange Parallel in Kenya

Does anyone else remember the rigged treason trial of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai? The state’s case turned on tapes prepared by a so-called “political consultant” named Ari Ben-Menashe, who had filmed himself talking about a coup near Tsvangirai and then provided the tapes to the prosecution. It turned out that Ben-Menashe was an egregious…

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 […]