November 1, 2009

November 1, 2009 by yorksranter 1 comment

a bit of Bout

A bit of Viktor Bout news. It looks like, according to AFP, that the Americans are planning to deploy B. Hussein Stalinhitler himself, when the President is in that part of the world next month. I can remember when “someone high up in the contracting world” actively wanted to encourage him, in support of a…

November 1, 2009 by yorksranter 1 comment

blobby blobby blobby

Here’s a case study in unpopular populism: ‘The ravers should have more respect for Mr Blobby. He was a hero to a lot of kids and the thought of them taking drugs and having all-night raves in his house is completely disrespectful.’. The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one: Of course, it was never…

November 1, 2009 by yorksranter 4 comments

optimise your social isolation more efficiently

OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when…

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 […]