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Sad news out of the Bureau of Prisons as they confirm to the AP that the infamous ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski has passed away while serving time in prison. Kaczynski gained notoriety for sending bombs through the mail over a period of nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring many more. While his actions were […]
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The author discusses their ability to remain calm in emergencies as a contrast to their usual second-guessing and self-absorption. They argue that in emergencies, what needs to be done is usually obvious, allowing them to focus on one thing and liberating them from ambivalence and stress. The author suggests that the same narrow focus can […]
Go programming language provides a feature called executable examples to write code that can be included in the generated documentation and automatically verified behaviorally in the same way as tests. An executable example is like a test function, whose name must begin with the word Example and can test functions that print to standard output […]
The RV RISC-V CPU core is a user-level implementation written in ANSI C that passes all supported tests in riscv-tests and uses no integer types larger than 32 bits, even for multiplication. With a simple API that requires only two functions and two memory callback functions, it boasts a tiny codebase of approximately 600 lines. […]
Non-proliferation of AI, similar to nuclear weapons or human cloning, has been suggested as a way to make AI safer by limiting development to certain licensed companies and organizations. However, this approach would be difficult to enforce, and open-source AI models are already becoming more affordable and accessible. Non-proliferation could also concentrate power in a […]
In this article, the authors discuss the development of a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers. This enables large language models to be used with significantly less GPU memory, while retaining full precision performance. The authors offer a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(), using vector-wise quantization with separate normalization […]
Nature, a scientific journal, has announced that it will not be publishing any visual content created with the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI). While Nature acknowledges the potential of AI, it believes that the use of such tools is not transparent and poses issues relating to consent, privacy, and intellectual-property protection. The journal will […]
Facebook Research introduces MusicGen, a single Language Model for conditional music generation. Unlike previous systems that require cascading several models, MusicGen operates over several streams of compressed discrete music representation and uses a single-stage transformer LM with efficient token interleaving patterns. It can generate high-quality music samples while being conditioned on textual description or melodic […]
The ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD) serves as a central repository for exchanging the information necessary to authenticate electronic Machine Readable Travel Documents (eMRTDs) such as ePassports, electronic ID cards, and Visible Digital Seals. The primary identity document used in international travel, ePassports, is secured with an integrated closed circuit chip, offering security and facilitation […]
A recent review of NASA archives has shown that quarantine protocols launched during the Apollo 11 mission to secure Earth from any lunar-based microbial contamination were entirely inadequate. While NASA believed that its quarantine facilities in Houston would keep the samples and equipment brought back from the moon safe. A study in the science history […]