Despite this conservatism, costs are very high, consistent with a factor somewhat higher than 2 on commuter rail and somewhat lower than 2 on the subway. But perhaps the conservatism is what increases costs in the first place? Perhaps the reason costs are high is that the world market has moved on and the MTA and some other American operators have not noticed. In Chicago, Metra found itself trying to order a type of gallery car that nobody makes any longer, using parts that are no longer available. Perhaps the same kind of outmoded thinking is present at the MTA, and this is why costs have exploded in the last 10 years.
Month: September 2019
Imagenet Roulette
The ImageNet researchers attribute the inclusion of offensive and insensitive categories to the overall size of the task, which ultimately involved 50K workers who evaluated 160M candidate images. They also point out that only a fraction of the “person” images were actually used in practice. That’s because references to ImageNet typically mean a smaller version of the data set used in the ImageNet Challenge
Merge
Merge unites all human languages
Because Merge recursively builds hierarchies, with each application connecting to both meaning and sound, there is no end to the complexity of the meaningful structures it builds. Merge gives us the ability to build the new worlds of ideas that have been so central to the successes and disappointments of our species. It makes language unlimited.
Apple A13
Apple’s new chip contains 8.5b transistors. Also, there are 6 CPU cores: 2 high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz, and 4 efficiency cores. It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an 8-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run 1t operations per second.
This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s 30% more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, 1 of the factors that contributes to the extra 5 hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.
Burning Man traces
Burning Man bills itself as the biggest “Leave No Trace” event in the world. This means that after revelers have dismantled the geodesic domes, giant duckies, and steampunk ships that form their temporary city in Nevada, they get down on their hands and knees to scour the white alkaline sand for every last cigarette butt and sequin. But in the end, 80k people still leave a mark. “Sure, by October, there’s no trash left on the surface of the Black Rock Desert. But boy, are there a lot of traces.”
Out of Africa 2.5 ma ago?
The general consensus for decades has been that Homo erectus—an upright, long-legged species—was among the first hominins (or species closely related to modern humans) to leave Africa. Scientists presume members of this species traveled through the natural corridor of the Levant, a region along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, around 2 ma ago. Scardia’s study suggests a far earlier exit. It proposes that hominins capable of tool creation may have been on the doorstep of Asia some 500 ka earlier.
Fine-Tuning GPT-2
We’ve demonstrated reward learning from human preferences on 2 kinds of natural language tasks, stylistic continuation and summarization. Our results are mixed: for continuation we achieve good results with very few samples, but our summarization models are only “smart copiers”: they copy from the input text but skip over irrelevant preamble. The advantage of smart copying is truthfulness: the 0-shot and supervised models produce natural, plausible-looking summaries that are often lies. We believe the limiting factor in our experiments is data quality exacerbated by the online data collection setting, and plan to use batched data collection in the future.
Earthquake Prediction
The finding had big potential implications. For decades, would-be earthquake prognosticators had keyed in on foreshocks and other isolated seismic events. The Los Alamos result suggested that everyone had been looking in the wrong place — that the key to prediction lay instead in the more subtle information broadcast during the relatively calm periods between the big seismic events.
Ad Astra Reviewed
Those practicalities get especially glorious treatment in “Ad Astra.” Gray conjures the future in grandly imaginative touches that link it giddily to the present day while signaling its alienating strangeness. As travel to the moon and to Mars have become common practices, they’ve become infected with the oppressive trivializations of train stations and airports—a Subway franchise, a Hudson News kiosk, and a host of bureaucratic annoyances and intrusions. (Natasha Lyonne does a brief and brilliant turn as one of those bureaucrats.) Spaceships have all the charm of airplanes, complete with overpriced and doled-out extras.
Amazon goes electric
Amazon orders 100K Rivian Electric Vans
Rivian will design, build and service a new electric van exclusively for Amazon. These will be dedicated electric delivery van for Amazon. Amazon plans to purchase 100K of these unnamed Rivian electric vans and the electric-car startup plans for the first to hit the road by 2021. Amazon plans to have 10K of the new electric vehicles on the road as early as 2022 and all 100K vehicles on the road by 2030 – saving 4M tons of CO2 per year by 2030.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 