note that the white supremacist weirdos real obsessed with their masculine Nordic heritage never, ever dress as cool as this

My favorite aspect of the Columbus legend is him getting rejected by the Portuguese gets spun as them not recognizing the genius of his idea. No - he went into a roomful of expert navigators and made basic math mistakes, they thought he was a moron, and they wouldn't fund his idea on that basis.

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

I would like to see the 'liberal center' as it were be a bit more aware that there is a distinction between 'doing debate' and defending the concept of debating.

Liberalism isn't a call to intellectual neutrality, but an active commitment to specific principles of liberty, pluralism and rights.

When a crystal is placed near a magnet, its electrons can only have certain amounts of energy. When this phenomenon is graphed, fractal patterns called Cantor sets emerge. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...

New VST/AU Plugin! 🚨

Play with Lyria RealTime directly from inside your favorite DAW with “The Infinite Crate” 🎧🎶

With a VST plugin you can feed audio directly into your DAW for sampling, live performance, or even a practice partner to jam with.

💾 Get it here: g.co/magenta/infinite-crate

We’ve just released Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that lets you craft sounds in real time by exploring the latent space through text and audio!

🤗 Model: huggingface.co/google/magen...
🧑‍💻Code: github.com/magenta/mage...
📝Blog post: magenta.withgoogle.com/magenta-real...

Gemma 3 explained: Longer context, image support, and a new 1B model. → goo.gle/4lV8iaw

Other key enhancements:
🔸 Best model that fits in a single consumer GPU or TPU host
🔸 KV-cache memory reduction with 5-to-1 interleaved attention
🔸 And more!

Read the blog for the full details on Gemma 3.

The training data distribution has a massive impact on learning. Imbalanced distributions (some individuals appearing more frequently) accelerate the plateau phase.
This suggests exciting new data scheduling strategies for training - we show that a simple warmup works well!

Theodore Roosevelt, 1918:

Buddy I just got done writing a book covering 10,000 years of history. I've been a historian for a decade. I promise you, the evidence for idiocy in the human past and present is truly overwhelming. It's even more damaging to assume that people "with agency" are playing five-dimensional chess.

Keeping politicians (especially populists!) accountable for their promises is an essential task for healthy democracies
youtu.be/VPRaz-5nhX0

I feel like a whole bunch of the next four years is going to be something bad happening and then reminding a whole bunch of people who should know better that we already knew the bad thing was bad. Concentration camps? Bad. Ethnic cleansing? Bad. Violent anti-labor actions? Bad. Nazis? Bad.

we all thought Twitter’s collapse would be swift and sudden like the fall of the Roman Empire but instead it’s been a steady, irreversible decay like the fall of the Roman Empire

OK - time for a preprint!

Proud to share another fantastic piece of work from Gino Cassella, extending the FermiNet and neural network VMC to calculate how positrons interact with matter!

arxiv.org/abs/2310.05607