2006

January 2, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

So what was all the propaganda for?

All the US reconstruction funding for Iraq, all $18 billion, has now been spent or committed and there will be no more. What sticks out, though, in the light of the great pay-for-play journalism affair, is this: “It is easy for the Americans to say, ‘We are doing reconstruction in Iraq,’ and we hear that.…

January 2, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

BGIA: Off to Bagram

The ever-helpful Sharjah Airport website reports that old friends British Gulf International’s flight BGK1222 from Bagram AFB is delayed, expected in at 1630. The Irbis flight from Riyan is also running late, but the corresponding BGK1221 to Bagram got off all right, as did another to a destination given as “unknown”. Would passengers for the…

January 2, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

More on DeLay/Abramoff and the Russians

Some months ago, we took note of a curious twist in the scandals surrounding Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Texan politico Tom DeLay. You may recall that they were revealed to have been involved in exporting Russian night-sights to a group of West Bank settlers, and to have received cash and hospitality from a mysterious…

January 2, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Working without thinking

Somebody chose this winter to release a joke newswire story regarding the State of Narnia’s decision to walk out of WTO talks in Hong Kong into the wild. The financial news agency AFX was apparently Patient Zero in the outbreak, which spread to other financial news sites including Forbes. Everyone and his dog has blogged…

Groq CEO: ‘We No Longer Sell Hardware’ - EE Times
“Long term, we always wanted to go there, but the realization was, you cannot sell chips as a startup, it’s just too hard,” Ross told EE Times in a recent in-person interview. “The reason is the minimum quantity of purchase for it to make sense is high, the expense is high, and no-one wants to […]
The end of the “best open LLM” - by Nathan Lambert
let’s add the models for 2024, which shows that models are not only getting bigger, but they’re getting better. The models are improving in MMLU with constant compute budgets // specifically, the sparse switchtransformer MoEs seem to be pulling up and to the left
Fever&spear on X: "@j_r_stocker A necessary corollary of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is that most of its ballistic missile force becomes tactically unusable - countries like Israel or even Pakistan will declare that any MRBM use will be deemed a first
A necessary corollary of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is that most of its ballistic missile force becomes tactically unusable - countries like Israel or even Pakistan will declare that any MRBM use will be deemed a first strike // a good point! either much of the investment in rocketry would become unusable, or else they […]
The pitfalls of pluralism: a reply to John Denham | Renewal
(Labour Together, for instance, has received £1.8 million in donations since April 2020). The soft left’s critiques of capitalism mean it struggles to attract the kind of individual and business donations that fuel the Labour right, while it lacks (and this is perhaps more to its discredit) the union connections that are vital to Labour’s […]
Renewal 32.1.indd - 04 Renewal 32.1_Denham.pdf
Many MPs supported the coordinated resignation of shadow ministers prompted by Labour’s dismal polls and Corbyn’s minimal contribution to the Remain campaign, but grassroots activists often engaged with Momentum and Corbyn’s anti-austerity politics. Labour’s relative recovery in the 2017 general election has largely been ignored as an inconvenient truth but it was also a missed […]
The Hallow app and the scandal-ridden internet guru - Where Peter Is
In an Instagram reel released on Good Friday, Brand brandished a fake skull while talking about sacrifice and praising Father Schmitz. Ever since the allegations came out, Brand has gone to great lengths to draw comparisons between himself and the suffering Christ without directly acknowledging any of his own wrongdoing.
Tony 'King Scum' Felloni, one of Ireland's most notorious drug dealers, dies aged 81 - Irish Mirror Online
Felloni gained notoriety in the '80s and '90s when it emerged he recruited kids to join the family business and got them hooked on drugs to ensure his control over them. His brutality towards women and his family earned him his nickname 'King Scum'.
Powerless over London: The crash of British Airways flight 38 | by Admiral Cloudberg | Apr, 2024 | Medium
a couple of things: the crew, NATS, HAL, and AAIB all excelled, the tabs managed somehow to burrow even deeper into depravity, and BA corporate tried to bothsides this and ended up looking even worse. As usual
Walking Phoenix - Chris Arnade Walks the World
within a month of this he was shouting the odds on twitter about how everyone outside the US secretly wanted to live like that. tbh it was rather nice when I went, but then I recommend staying in a fancy hotel on a huge semiconductor company's dime.
Law Commission misrepresented experts when it changed rule on computer evidence | Computer Weekly
Stephen Castell, Alistair Kelman and Richard Sizer argued for the opposite of a presumption that computers are reliable. They stressed the importance of evidence to show that systems are developed and managed responsibly. The Law Commission cherry picked quotes out of context to support the conclusion they obviously always wanted to reach....Professor Tapper, the expert […]