When Ramón Méndez Galain’s phone rang in 2008, he could hardly believe who was on the other end of the line. It was the president of Uruguay, Tabaré Vázquez, and he was calling with an offer: Would Galain, a self-described simple university professor, be interested in serving as the country’s energy secretary?

This project started as a search problem and ended as something more. The most important result isn’t which neighbourhood tops the rankings – it’s the realisation that platforms now quietly structure survival in everyday urban markets.

The crisis that began during the financial crash of 2008 is still unfolding. What began as a banking collapse was turned into a crisis of living standards and the democratic system. Popular support for privatisation and austerity collapsed long ago, but our political class continues to prioritise assets and profits above all else. Faced with historically speaking moderate social democratic alternatives, such as the 2017 Labour Party manifesto, they react like an immune system swarming to destroy a virus. The unsurprising result is that the far right is ascendent, and now within touching distance of power. It is using the […]

The introduction of Titans and the MIRAS framework marks a significant advancement in sequence modeling. By employing deep neural networks as memory modules that learn to memorize as data is coming in, these approaches overcome the limitations of fixed-size recurrent states. Furthermore, MIRAS provides a powerful theoretical unification, revealing the connection between online optimization, associative memory, and architectural design.

The Global AI Index is composed of 108 indicators, collected from 24 different public and private data sources. These are split across three pillars and seven sub-pillars.

Binge-watching late-night TV shows has become far more common due to the popularity of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon and their ‘dump release’ of new shows at midnight. We examine how the sleep loss associated with this phenomenon affects financial markets and find that market returns significantly decline on the day following the release of popular late-night shows.

So, why are structuralists so hesitant to take the win? Weatherby gives three reasons. The first is that in exiling structuralists to the humanities, the Chomskian revolution discouraged the focus on language as a concrete object that is essential to structuralist linguistics in favour of a more diffuse concern with culture. The second is that poststructuralism (and in particular Derrida’s interpretation of Saussure) deliberately encouraged this shift by attacking the closure of sign systems, opening natural language onto its outside (and in Derrida’s case swallowing it whole) while ignoring the relative independence and internal consistency of formal languages in mathematics […]

the violence is neither explicit enough to truly shock and the content so broadly metaphorical that Horses message about authoritarian powers and how they cow us into accepting their grosses decisions is perhaps so wide reaching that it lacks a certain bite. regardless, this is a game which has been banned from many store fronts that contain games which often render up scenes of violence that are more detailed, more graphically raw than anything that exists in Horses. is it good? bad? that might not matter considering what else you can find on Steam with a cursory glance. and yet, […]

These days I have a sense of falling from a precipice toward a torrent of algorithmically driven slop. It’s coming, whether we want it or not, and the consequences for our communal life will be devastating.

Will the metaverse make a comeback in some form? There are some reasons to be optimistic — people still crave connection in a lonely age, and AI-powered avatars could lead to personalized gaming and social experiences that a lot of people might want to use. Let’s just hope whoever takes up the mantle next learns from Meta’s mistakes.

We show that deep neural networks trained across diverse tasks exhibit remarkably similar low-dimensional parametric subspaces. We provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that demonstrates that neural networks systematically converge to shared spectral subspaces regardless of initialization, task, or domain.

If we’re going to turn over essentially all communication to the Omniwriter, it matters what kind of a writer it is. Strangely, A.I. doesn’t seem to know.

The shift has her questioning whether it’s worth publishing new reference guides at all. “In all likelihood, no one will ever discover those pages,” she said.

For the remaining twelve years of Rachel Carson’s life, it was Dorothy’s love and daily devotion that warded off the scientist’s aching loneliness and her struggles with depression, fomented her creative and intellectual imagination, and nourished her visionary spirit as she gave form to some of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century in her writing.

the SteamOS lead explained that they’re “excited” about creating potential ARM-based devices. “I think that it paves the way for a bunch of different, maybe ultraportables, maybe more powerful laptops being ARM-based and using different offerings in that segment,”

The younger generations know something is wrong on a deeper level and that the answer is to not shut up and do what those in charge say to do. Whether that is due to generations of broken promises and dead end thinking is to be seen, but the status quo will not continue on this way.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan (Research Scientist at Google DeepMind) surveys how large models have transformed robotics, from early LLM planners and RT-series transformers that treat robot actions as tokens, to diffusion policies that can do previously impossible dexterous tasks. She argues the frontier now is “generalized dexterity”

It can be the greatest pitfall of the social year. And it can be followed by a 12-month hangover. If your boss hasn't spoken to you since, it's a fair bet that you had a good time at your office Christmas party. Traditionally, it's the one night of the year when the firm's hierarchical structure, that normally so rigidly holds sway, totters towards anarchy.

My theory: "Chat" as in ChatGPT, and "Chat" as the second person omniscient pronoun in current slang, refer to the same entity, which is the howling hungry mind of the internet, with its billion camera eyes, ever scoring our behavior by its incrutable rubric – Deepfates Jan 16 2024

EA does not need to be private to achieve the above, but it’s harder to please (and appease) scores of shareholders focused on quarterly results and industry multiples than a single investor (or group) with a clearer view and firmer commitment to a long-term plan that can more reliably digest the occasional whiff and flop along the way.