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davel

@davel@lemmy.ml

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davel ,
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Making me divide by 12: that’s a paddlin’.

> console.log(`${Math.trunc(74/12)}' ${74 % 12}"`)
6' 2"
davel ,
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I noticed today the Tom’s Hardware has been keeping track of Chinese GPU developments.

They don’t have a tag for tracking Chinese GPUs in particular, but they have one for GPU news in general.

China also seems to have some interesting embargo work-arounds:

davel ,
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China files more patents than the next nine countries combined: https://www.wipo.int/en/ipfactsandfigures/patents

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/83ec576b-b536-40ac-b2f1-3dafd22b9894.png

China is first country to hold over 4 million domestic patents

The number of China's domestic valid patents does not include those held in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

davel ,
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For the moment at least. Whatever problem we had before, it seemed to get worse over time, eventually requiring a restart. So we’ll have to wait and see.

davel ,
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Presumably this is another Xinjiang embargo self-own.

Reminder: The DMV uses photos for facial recognition

This is half a decade old news, but I only found this out myself after it accidentally came up in conversation at the DMV. The worker would not have informed me if it hadn't come into conversation. Every DMV photo in the United States is being used for AI facial recognition, and nobody has talked about it for years. This is...

davel ,
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This is especially concerning given that citizens […]

Not everyone with a US driver’s license is a US citizen.

davel ,
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This comment is triggering and it should have a NSFW spoiler.

davel ,
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Added. cc @mudle

davel ,
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Added. cc @Quintus

davel ,
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tl;dr: Private equity. Quoting myself:

Private Equity colludes with the private banks (which control the Federal Reserve and have largely captured the Treasury) to acquire companies using almost no initial capital. They then strip those companies of as much value as they can and then sell the depleted companies to lower-rung PEs, which squeeze out what little value is left, and so on until the companies default from the highly-leveraged debt PE saddles them with. These are asset stripping schemes.

Part of the scheme in this case was to make Red Lobster sell off its stores and rent them back at high rates. LA Times:

If one is looking for the original sin in Red Lobster’s decline, however, a good candidate would be the deal that brought it under Golden Gate Capital’s ownership. The private equity firm bought the chain from Darden for $2.1 billion, financing the sale in part by selling the real estate underlying 500 restaurants to the real estate firm American Realty Capital for $1.5 billion.

This was a sale-leaseback transaction, in which Red Lobster was instantly converted from the owner of its property to a tenant on the same property. The leases were typically long-term — as long as 25 years — with annual rent increases of 2% baked in. They were also triple-net leases, meaning that the restaurants were responsible for paying operating costs, property taxes and insurance.

Red Lobster thus lost a great deal of flexibility for closing underperforming restaurants and cutting costs. The bankruptcy filing says that a material portion of the leases charge above-market rates. Of the company’s lease obligations of $190.5 million last year, more than $64 million was for “underperforming stores.”

This exacerbated the company’s financial problems. “Given the Company’s operational headwinds and financial position,” the filing says, “payment of lease obligations associated with non-performing leases has cause significant strains on the Company’s liquidity.” In other words, the sale-leaseback arrangement was draining the company of cash.

davel ,
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https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/ee7f0415-b592-41f6-96c7-09971e3d338e.jpeg

davel ,
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blue-check This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

davel ,
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Nazi brand wants a Lebensraum do-over.

davel ,
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Erik Prince? Who’s the target market, white suburban men who drive F-150 Raptors and play prepper games on the weekend?

davel ,
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This sounds like recycled Cold War I hysteria. How much Democratic party Kool-Aid have you drunk?

First of all, where did Russia get so many US dollars from that they were able to outbid all of their US petit bourgeois and corporate competitors in buying the US Republican Party?

davel ,
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Right?

The 14th Dali “suck my tongue” CIA asset Lama

davel ,
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This isn’t simply a matter of Biden pleasing his donors, nor is it really about Biden in particular. This is the liberal international order working as designed, namely that the US makes the rules and orders everyone else around. Israel is a settler-colonial project of the Western imperial core, and it has been the US’ unsinkable aircraft carrier in West Asia for generations. As Biden has said throughout his career, “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” The Hague Invasion Act has been on the books for over 20 years, so this is nothing new and has always been bipartisan.

davel , (edited )
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Are you serious?

davel ,
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And he will continue to do so. Maybe give “⊘ Block user” a try.

davel ,
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I don’t live in those places, so 1) they don’t affect me or anyone else in my country and 2) there’s nothing I can do about them.

davel ,
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China is no utopia and Russia much less so, but neither is nearly as bad as imperial core governments & corporate media try to convince us they are, and neither holds a candle to my own country.

davel , (edited )
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As it always has since the 1776 bourgeois revolution, the capitalist class largely runs the state, and many of them exploit immigrants:

  1. For their cheap, compliant, and politically & legally impotent labor
  2. To weaken the bargaining power of the domestic labor force and suppress its wages
  3. To pit domestic labor against immigrant labor, which distracts some of the domestic working class from its real enemy: the capitalist class

Some portion of the capitalist class publicly rails against “illegal” immigrants while privately exploiting them. It’s kayfabe.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/392da0a0-cbb7-4511-a24d-2561b7a06064.jpeg

davel ,
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The Year of the !(MacOS | Windows) Desktop.

davel ,
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bernie-chair I am once again asking you to consider hexbear-logo

davel ,
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Some will, but probably not that many. There are still plenty of millionaires in California in spite of the state’s tax law.

davel ,
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Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Spam/misinformation: Not an anti-AI licence.

This person may be confused, but still your tagline is a waste of mods’ time. And just speaking as a user I find it to be annoying visual pollution, especially since I think it’s ineffectual, unless your only goal is to “raise awareness.” Beyond that I think any effectiveness is about as plausible as that of sovereign citizenship.

davel ,
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You don’t understand: these comment footers are the only thing between us and Roko's basilisk.

~ NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE ~ PRIVATE MODE OF COMMUNICATION ~ NO STEP ON SNEK ~

davel ,
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@CerealOverdose666, please replace the Google AMP link with the original: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/5/21/whats-happening-is-not-genocide-says-biden-after-icc-seeks-warrants

davel ,
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Oh right… It’s a good thing I already knew how to drive stick before taking up motorcycling.

davel ,
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The Democrats relied on their own flattering and superficial metrics to convince themselves that ordinary Americans were doing better under Biden. In fact most became worse off, as many correctly perceive. And they kept flogging the “voters are stoopid” message, adding insult to injury.

“Bidenomics, you’re welcome” as a campaign plank in the face of most people’s lived experience was obviously going to backfire.

davel ,
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They also banned or nationalized many media outlets, censor media in general, and suspended eleven political parties during his term, which eventually became permanent bans.

Al Jazeera, Mar. 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?

Europe is no bastion for frozen peaches, either. AP, Mar. 2024: EU bans 4 more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in the bloc, citing disinformation

davel ,
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In virtually every war in these Burgerlanders’ lifetimes, their country has been on the morally & militarily losing side. They desperately, desperately want a moral & military victory for once, even moreso now that Biden has proven to be Genocider in Chief.

davel ,
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And yet he’s still locked up, which is a win for the state that wants to grind his bones as a warning to whistleblowers and journalists around the world.

Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count ( www.quantamagazine.org )

Traditionally, algorithms for counting distinct items in a stream of data would store all the items. A new algorithm, called CVM, uses randomization to estimate the number of distinct items with minimal memory usage. The trick is to keep track of items by recording them and then randomly deleting some. The probability of an item...

davel ,
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Optimize Memory and Performance with the CVM Algorithm in JavaScript: A Comprehensive Guide for Text Analysis, Big Data, and More

Final CVM Algorithm Code in a JavaScript “oneliner”

You can use this JS function by providing any text string as input, and it will simulate the described algorithm, returning the final set of unique words. This is as condensed as it can get, but if you can condese it more , please do post and Ill update it! If you are interested in seeing how this ‘oneliner’ started, before it was condensed, I have included the long form version of this same code at the bottom of the article.

const cvmAlgorithm = t => { const f = n => !(Math.random() * (1 << n) | 0); const w = t.match(/\b\w+\b/g) || []; let r = 1, u = new Set(); for (let i of w.map(x => x.toLowerCase())) u.size < 100 ? u.add(i) : f(r) && u.delete(i), u.size >= 100 && r++, u.size > 50 && (u = new Set([...u].filter(() => f(r)))); return [...u]; };

// Example usage:
const text = "To be, or not to be, that is the question..."; 
const finalWords = cvmAlgorithm(text);
console.log(finalWords);  // [ 'to', 'be', 'or', 'not', 'that', 'is', 'the', 'question' ]
davel , (edited )
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High praise indeed! waow-based Variyam co-develops innovative new data analysis algorithm

The authors presented their new algorithm at the 2022 European Symposium on Algorithms, a premier international conference on algorithm design. Since then, their discovery has been gaining recognition and praise from computer scientists across the field, including world-renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth, author of "The Art of Computer Programming," who is often referred to as "the father of the analysis of algorithms.”

In May 2023, Knuth published his own paper on the algorithm, “The CVM Algorithm for Estimating Distinct Elements in Streams [PDF],” offering extensive praise and even naming it the CVM algorithm in honor of its inventors. Knuth said in addition to “explaining the ideas to just about everybody [he] meets,” he expects the algorithm to become a foundational aspect of computer science in the near future.

"Their algorithm is not only interesting; it is extremely simple,” Knuth said in the paper. “It’s wonderfully suited to teaching students who are learning the basics of computer science. I’m pretty sure that something like this will eventually become a standard textbook topic.”

As Knuth predicted and Variyam hoped, the algorithm has already found a place in computer science courses.

From Knuth’s paper:

Algorithm D (Distinct element estimation). Given an arbitrary data stream A = (a1, a2, . . . , am) and a
buffer size s ≥ 1 as described above, this algorithm returns an unbiased estimate of |A| = |{a1, a2, . . . , am}|.
It uses a buffer B that’s capable of holding up to s ordered pairs (a, u), where a is an element of the stream
and u is a real number, 0 ≤ u < 1.

D1. [Initialize.] Set t ← 0, p ← 1, and B ← ∅.
D2. [Done?] Terminate if t = m, returning the estimate |B|/p.
D3. [Input a.] Set t ← t + 1 and a ← at, the next element of the stream.
D4. [Remove a from B.] If B contains the pair (a, u), for any u, delete it.
D5. [Maybe put a in B.] Let u be a uniform deviate, independent of all others (namely a random real number in the range 0 ≤ u < 1). If u ≥ p, go back to step D2. Otherwise, if |B| < s, insert (a, u) into B and go back to step D2.
D6. [Maybe swap a into B.] (At this point u < p and |B| = s.) Let (a', u') be the element of B for which u' is maximum. If u > u', set p ← u. Otherwise replace (a', u') in B by (a, u) and set p ← u'. Then go back to step D2.

davel OP ,
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People who actually paid attention have known; people who read The Atlantic not so much.

davel OP ,
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https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6d3bc513-44fd-4f38-850d-de3f32d80312.png

davel OP , (edited )
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I don’t understand how sarcasm applies. Not only was he a Saudi of enormous wealth and close ties to the royal family, he was a CIA asset for years.

6 December 1993: Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1413da3b-fe4f-4e39-b19f-ccea504ca8dc.jpeg

davel ,
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If I were in the average millennials’ or gen-zs’ shoes, I might be spending it on drugs.

davel ,
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Which crypto-fascists are these?

davel ,
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Joined 13 days ago

first-time

The Cold War had only a brief pause before the pivot to Asia. The US tried to foment unrest in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just last week.

We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.

Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.

The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.

Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.

Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).

Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.

davel , (edited )
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For Universal Basic Income (UBI) to work, the state would have to control the prices of universal basic needs, otherwise the capitalist class would raise prices to absorb it. But state-provided goods & services and state-imposed prices are antithetical to our current hyper-privatized, hyper-financialized neoliberal capitalism.

How Bankers Became the Top Exploiters of the Economy

Adam Simpson: […] You write about rent as it relates to land. […] I’ve seen, for instance, Thomas Paine associated with ground rent and its obvious inequality, the notion that someone has a right to a piece of land that obviously no one can really “own.” He argues for distributing that to everyone in the form of a universal basic income. That seems to be a popular idea now, particularly in Silicon Valley as well as other places. I wanted to know your perspective on universal basic income.

Michael Hudson: I think it’s a misnomer. There’s no problem with giving more people enough income to live. Even archaic societies operated on the mutual-aid principle. There’s a lot of pressure for the Federal Reserve to create a trillion dollars by giving everybody an extra $500. Why are they willing to do that? Because most people would use the $500 to pay the banks – so the banks wouldn’t have to lose money and default as a result of their reckless and unproductive lending. The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion.

You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and services outside of the market. You don’t want to give people more income simply to pay monopolistic public utilities for extortionate charges for water, sewer, electricity, cable TV and education. These are things that should be removed from the marketplace, not giving people the income to buy overpriced and monopolized real estate and infrastructure services that should be public in the first place.

Adam Simpson: I completely agree. That’s my criticism of this ongoing universal basic income debate. It might be a good idea if we solve a lot of other things first. One of them being financial parasites, because in my mind people talk about a trickle-down economy. I get a sense right now that we have what more or less amounts to a trickle-up economy. At the end of the day the rich are going to get theirs. The idea of providing universal basic income or a stimulus, eventually it’s going to work their way up to the top of the system.

Michael Hudson: The key to any such analysis is circular flow. If you give people income, what do they spend it on? As I said, people have to spend 75% of their income on things other than the goods and services they produce. You don’t want to give them services to bloat this [Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE)] sector that is sucking income upward to the 5%. You don’t want to give more people income just to pay higher rents and bank loans to the 5% at the top. You want to do the opposite.

davel , (edited )
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Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: false info and propaganda

davel ,
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How do you do, fellow memers?

davel ,
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I am in fact an admin of this instance, and that was in fact a user report and not a story I was telling.

davel ,
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Reports are sent to community mods and to the instance admins of the community, the poster/commenter, and the reporter.

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