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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.




  • (Swiss)Germans are completely mad about food.

    It’s their culture to complain about everything, except food. All they care about is that it’s as bland as possible and has big portions. If you manage that, they’ll give you five stars every time.

    I spent 3 years living in Germany, and not only can you not get anything spicy for love nor money, they also don’t use herbs. It just blows my mind. They’re physically so close to France and Italy, but the food is so far away.







  • Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

    I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

    Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

    Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.