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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • As someone working and publishing in the field this is more a cyber jerk about American exceptionalism than actually true.

    Chinese universities and companies publish a shit tonne at pure machine learning conferences. They absolutely do a large amount of research into the fundamentals of machine learning as well as the applied stuff. They’re probably the closest to the US in terms of having large firms that are prepared to bank roll the training of the very large language models.

    Alibaba in particular has been constantly doing cutting edge stuff in terms of multimodal language models that are worth paying attention to.

    The actual truth is that China does both kinds of work. Broad foundational and applied work lead by independent research groups in companies and universities, and focused application driven stuff for direct application by the state.

    Google still stands out in terms of the amount of research it does, but this is because Google is different to everyone -other US research institutes don’t compare to it either.



  • It’s a consequence of parliamentary sovereignty.

    Parliament can always dissolve itself and call an election, and it’s an important mechanism for getting rid of the government.

    The problem is that the prime minister also has a majority in parliament, and that means he can make parliament dissolve itself when he likes.

    This was actually a problem for Johnson. Initially, he didn’t have enough of a majority and it wasn’t clear he could call an election without Corbyn’s support.





  • Nah. The honest truth is that the EU doesn’t care that much about the UK.

    It’s much more like someone storming out their local pub and refusing to come back. It’s a big deal to the guy that left, but a much smaller deal to everyone still drinking in the pub.

    If the UK stops acting like a dick and pays for their share they’d be eventually welcome back, once it looked like they’d actually learnt their lesson and wouldn’t do it again. The real barriers to rejoining are on the UK side. No one wants to reopen that can of worms.