December 6, 2009

December 6, 2009 by yorksranter 3 comments

submarine, cocktail party, etc

I’m going to America. Specifically, I’ll be organising Telco 2.0 Americas in Orlando on the 9th and 10th of December. Then, I’ve got a two-and-a-half day layover in a hotel with marching ducks. The prose is worth quoting: In a special elevator, the five North American mallard ducks, four hens and one drake, comprising The…

December 6, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

progress in the arsehole theory of terrorism

Here’s something interesting, from Kings of War; statistical analysis shows that there is no correlation between arrests on terrorism charges and the concentration of Muslims in the population. It’s almost as if…a gratifyingly small percentage of people are completely fucking stupid and pig-ignorant, that this is normally distributed in the population, and it’s essentially a…

December 6, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

revenue engine

We had a post about the MQM in Karachi and the Taliban. Strangely enough, Reuters got a fascinating interview with the MQM mayor of Karachi a couple of days later. It’s a must-read – one of the main points that comes through is the way in which the struggle up on the frontier and in…

December 6, 2009 by yorksranter 3 comments

I should really think of an Ali Farka Toure lyric title for this post

OK, so there’s a recently wrecked aircraft on an airstrip in northeastern Mali and the UN reckons it brought over 10 tons of cocaine into the new West Africa-Southern Europe smuggling route. However, no-one seems to know what type of aircraft it is or what the registration was. All sources I can find – which…

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 […]