albigu
Se [Fabiano] aprendesse qualquer coisa, necessitaria aprender mais, e nunca ficaria satisfeito.
Huh, another one for my list of deeply unserious individuals. The text in the screenshot is so bad, at first I thought it was satire. But turns out it was probably written by a discord teenager from some YouTuber’s fanclub.
Their own page describe themselves pretty well, citing a thousand concepts and authors without elaboration or sources, or ever making clear any of their actual positions from either a theoretical or organizative perspective. Bonus points for calling “leftists” “mentally ill”.
But then you click on the page of the “main representative” and it’s an “autodidact” debatebro.
What purging and murdering proper communists over a century does to a country.
Side note: apparently editing their wiki is open, in case actual queer anarchists comrades from hexbear are feeling bored right now.
Edit: also it’s definitely a “me” thing, but I deeply hate how they overwrite the meaning of the already extant word “leftism” in Marxist theory (in short: unpragmactic idealism) with their own, which is just the “globalism” nonsense all over again.
Those actions described in that section are generated by an RL agent, used only for training. For the prediction and therefore results they still either check for aggregate metrics (which must use synthetic data in order to get enough of it), or do the MTurk comparison that generated up to 3 second clips which could in theory be created from real-time user input but since they have corresponding ground-truth frames it must at best be generated from sampled user input from a real gameplay session.
The clips they show on the YouTube video seem to have some interactive input, but the method for creating those is not described in the paper. So I suppose it is possible that there’s some degree of real time user input, but it’s not clear that it is in fact what’s happening there.
As a sidenote: ML researchers should really consider just dropping all the infodumping about their model architecture to an Appendix (or better yet, to runnable code) where they’ll clutter the article less and put in more effort into describing their experimental setups and scrutinizing results. I couldn’t care less about how they used ADAM to train a recurrent CNN on the Graph Laplacean if the experiments are junk or the results do not support the conclusions.
The human rater experiment (IMO the most important one for a human-interfacing software tool) is described from setup to a results in a single paragraph.
GameNGen (pronounced “game engine”)
That’s dumb.
The AI crowd continue to mangle the meaning of words to make their unimpressive work sound “revolutionary”. This isn’t a “game engine”, this is just a model to create plausible video game frames given previous video game frames. A video auto-complete.
At no point in the paper do they mention any human inputs in their experimental setup. They just generate clips, plop it on MTurk and claim “they’re as good as the original.”
From the very beginning of their paper.
Computer games are manually crafted software systems centered around the following game loop: (1) gather user inputs, (2) update the game state, and (3) render it to screen pixels.
Their work neither gathers user input, nor does it keep a game state, it just renders pixels from pixels.
And there’s this noise:
Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code.
“It’s all matrix weights”
GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware.
“Effectively run”
While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images.
Prompt-based games. Thankfully it’ll be cheaper for the poor video game companies (Nvidia subscription fee not included).
Note how nothing that they proposed is even hinted at by their research. They don’t even make the code available, so none of their actual research is verifiable. They just fill their article with incomprehensible jargon about metrics and loss functions so that journalists will just assume they’re really smart and knew what they were doing in order to uncritically report on this.
I propose a better name for the work: “Diffusion Models Are Video Generators”.
That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.
There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.
I’m shooting blind as I haven’t looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.
It isn’t that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.
Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending on using this blockade to cannibalise Europe’s economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don’t have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world’s population.
Did some searching, it comes from CIA director William Burns in 2022-03-08, you can see it here. It was actually 2 days.
“His own military’s performance has been largely ineffective,” Burns said of Putin. “Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what his plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city.”
If you go a bit further back, you have “sources” from the CIA already spouting the 2 days line a couple weeks earlier. Here’s an example from the day after the start of the SMO.
US intelligence officials are concerned that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days, according to two sources familiar with the latest intelligence.
It goes like this, US Intel are worried it could happen -> report it as Putin hinging his whole plan on it happening -> if it happens it’s because it was a massive gamble and “unfair” in some way, if it doesn’t happen it was an utter failure and Putin threw away his whole country.
A week later, business insider reports it as though Russia failed in the war and practically lost, and actually, it’s Russian intelligence which is bad for wrongly predicting their victory. Which the US intel also predicted. Go figure.
Narrative created. Consent manufactured. Redditor fooled.
P.S.: is there a Ukrainian civil war megathread I could read and contribute to somewhere? It’s fun to look up these little lies but it’s been 2 years now and there’s just too much stuff to hold on one’s head.
Rising rents coupled with high borrowing costs and low wage growth have hit some especially hard. “Lower income households are not keeping up,” Goldman said. “Everything looks great but when you look beneath the surface, the disparity between the wealthy and nonwealthy is widening dramatically.”
Everything is great, you’re just poor. Have you tried not being poor?
In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums on compensation to the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (729km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.
“Lavishing” on pensions. Imagine trying to paint that as a bad thing. Wonder how Yankees feel when they find out that the country they’re blowing hundreds of billions on to wage useless wars has free healthcare too.
