February 4, 2007

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 1 comment

Never get out of the boat

Sebastian Junger has a spectacular report in Vanity Fair on the MEND guerrillas in the Niger Delta. Seriously, read the whole thing – we have corrupt warlords, men with Czech machine guns, huge outboards, and a crazy look in the eye, communiqués issued by a mysterious online presence, people in the US phoning their friends…

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

What links these links?

Evolution appears to accelerate over time, and new scientific evidence suggests this is due to bacteria exchanging genes – but not within their own species, but horizontally, between groups. Thus, the total rate at which genetic information is exchanged can be faster than that provided by sexual reproduction and random mutations alone. Horizontal information exchange…

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

Oilrigs to turbines

In Louisiana, they’re rebuilding old oil rigs as platforms for an offshore wind farm. This is about the coolest thing I’ve heard in years. When do we start doing this in the North Sea? It’s not like we haven’t got enough dead shipyards. On a related issue, Lotus seems to be enjoying a new flush…

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

Wardriving Tony

The immeasurable SpyBlog has been doing fine work reducing the bamboozlement certain bloggers have been propagating regarding government e-mail addresses and the cash-for-peerages inquiry. (Shorter: “x.gsi.gov.uk” domains denote the top level of network security, not TEH SEKRIT EMAILS!!) But the Spy has found something, though – as well as the netblocks assigned to Energis and…

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

Here we go again, again, again

Well, Mick Smith quotes the Parachute Regiment’s journal as saying that Brigadier Butler was forced into going along with Operation MOUNTAIN THRUST, the offensive the US command in Afghanistan initiated the month before General Richards arrived in Afghanistan. Read the whole thing. This is much as I thought at the time – essentially, neither the…

February 4, 2007 by yorksranter 0 comments

This is Radio Clash on pirate WLAN

OK, so this guy’s designed a little program that is intended to provide access to pay-for-play wireless LANs. The idea is simple – one host actually pays up, and connects to the WLAN, and then acts as a proxy for other users, who treat the “WiFi Liberator” as a WLAN router. My initial thought was…

SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launch | Ars Technica
SpaceX has landed about 85 percent of the Falcon rockets it has launched. These days, more than 90 percent of all its missions launch on previously flown boosters. So rocket recycling is totally a thing.
Tesla profits drop 55% as Elon Musk dodges cheap car questions | Ars Technica
Musk continues to maintain that Tesla's future is in AI. It spent $1 billion on GPUs in Q1—almost as much as it spent on total R&D during the same time // that's funny as they have both training and inference asics
Man who bought fake Greek driving licence is sentenced | Bradford Telegraph and Argus
Saghawat Hussain paid £1,800 for a counterfeit full Greek driving licence, which he then sent to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). He had hoped to dupe the Swansea-based agency into giving him a full UK licence so that he could drive illegally having not passed his test // what is it with these […]
Eric Eiswert: Ex-Pikesville athletic director framed principal with AI voice, police say - The Baltimore Banner
Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors // a real one!
Royal Navy shoots down Houthi missile in first since Gulf War
The first time *ever* - the Iraqi Silkworm was a cruise missile (and was more than 30 years ago). anyway, give 'em a banana
Towards Greener LLMs: Bringing Energy-Efficiency to the Forefront of LLM Inference
in times of lower throughput needs, it is more energy-efficient to run TP8 than TP2 // because the GPUs can frequency-scale down. also worth remembering that the pre-fill is compute bound, the rest is memory bound
Inflation comes unstuck | UBS Global
Aside from rents and fictitious owners’ equivalent rents, there is deflation in almost every consumer price subcategory somewhere in the US. With collapsing clothing prices in Tampa or plunging communication prices in Chicago, it is difficult to argue that structural inflation stickiness exists when every key sector has deflation somewhere in the country. Food prices […]
Christian Heinzel on X: "God Rheinmetall is just so fucking cool, fully containerised 3D printer, metal 3D printer and CNC setup to produce custom replacement parts right behind the front, gone from a first display unit to production units being sent to U
God Rheinmetall is just so fucking cool, fully containerised 3D printer, metal 3D printer and CNC setup to produce custom replacement parts right behind the front, gone from a first display unit to production units being sent to Ukraine in less than a year
Saison startet im April: Das sind die fünf schönsten Biergärten Berlins
dammit why didn't I know about 5?
(1) Arin Dube on X: "Important new research showing how minimum wages were absorbed in past decade in US. It led to reallocation towards higher prod firms. Most of the cost increase was passed through to prices. Employment changes were modest." / Twitter
The reallocation results are quite important. They find MW winnows out lower prod employers but surviving higher prod employers actually see profits rise // Card-Krueger, the gift that keeps giving. A crucial way in which minimum wages ended up not costing jobs was that especially crappy firms shut down and their employees were rehired into […]