Norman Casagrande

Norman Casagrande

@adabstract.bsky.social

ML, history, coding, space, science and everything in between. Personal profile. Research Eng @ DeepMind (Google). Views my own, etc.

1,335 Followers 90 Following 16 Posts Joined Jul 2023
3 weeks ago
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And I can finally update my awkward answering machine reply! 😄🎵

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3 weeks ago
https://deepmind.google/models/lyria/

I can finally share something I've been working on since last summer. And it's one of my oldest love: music & machine learning! :)
t.co/zARDuUnRTV

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1 month ago
YouTube
Sarah Paine: Greenland, WW3, NATO and the Risk of Nuclear War [INTERVIEW] YouTube video by This Is World

"Zero-sum solutions yield Negative-sum outcomes".
Paine is such a delight to watch, on both her deep expertise in military history and her sobering lack of patience for the 'brilliant' ideas floating around.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErY...

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1 month ago
A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

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1 month ago

But.. it said “don’t push the button”!

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3 months ago
A screenshot of a conversation with Gemini. It reads:

"You are a capybara. You can only communicate with noises that a capybara would make. We are best friends."

"Wheek! Wheeeeek!

Muk-muk-muk-muk...

Hrrrmph.

( Nuzzles into your side and rolls over )"

Maybe these LLM things are ok actually

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4 months ago

note that the white supremacist weirdos real obsessed with their masculine Nordic heritage never, ever dress as cool as this

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5 months ago

My favorite aspect of the Columbus legend is him getting rejected by the Portuguese gets spun as them not recognizing the genius of his idea. No - he went into a roomful of expert navigators and made basic math mistakes, they thought he was a moron, and they wouldn't fund his idea on that basis.

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5 months ago
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Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

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5 months ago

I would like to see the 'liberal center' as it were be a bit more aware that there is a distinction between 'doing debate' and defending the concept of debating.

Liberalism isn't a call to intellectual neutrality, but an active commitment to specific principles of liberty, pluralism and rights.

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6 months ago
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When a crystal is placed near a magnet, its electrons can only have certain amounts of energy. When this phenomenon is graphed, fractal patterns called Cantor sets emerge. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...

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8 months ago
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New VST/AU Plugin! 🚨

Play with Lyria RealTime directly from inside your favorite DAW with “The Infinite Crate” 🎧🎶

With a VST plugin you can feed audio directly into your DAW for sampling, live performance, or even a practice partner to jam with.

💾 Get it here: g.co/magenta/infinite-crate

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8 months ago

We’ve just released Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that lets you craft sounds in real time by exploring the latent space through text and audio!

🤗 Model: huggingface.co/google/magen...
🧑‍💻Code: github.com/magenta/mage...
📝Blog post: magenta.withgoogle.com/magenta-real...

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9 months ago

Tired of replies? Join us on mastodon! ;)

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9 months ago

Correction: it *is* a federal republic. Apologies for the confusion.

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9 months ago

Switzerland is not a republic, but would it be long-lived enough to make its institutions interesting?

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9 months ago

100% agreed. I find it scary to see so many ppl trusting the output of those models. But I clearly have a bias having worked on their “innards”.
NotebookLM is the only one I find useful for research (with caveats) as it gives references to the sources you provide.

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10 months ago

It’s a classic!

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10 months ago
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That Mitchell and Webb Look - Evil Vicar YouTube video by mutant763

“I stand with 2000 years of darkness and bafflement and hunger behind me”. They don’t make those anymore 😅
youtu.be/yRujuE-GIY4

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10 months ago

Also because if you were smart but poor, the church was one of the few places that allowed you to get some education and a good chance for social mobility

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10 months ago
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Gemma explained: What’s new in Gemma 3- Google Developers Blog Google's Gemma 3 model includes vision-language support and architectural changes for resource-friendly multimodal language models.

Gemma 3 explained: Longer context, image support, and a new 1B model. → goo.gle/4lV8iaw

Other key enhancements:
🔸 Best model that fits in a single consumer GPU or TPU host
🔸 KV-cache memory reduction with 5-to-1 interleaved attention
🔸 And more!

Read the blog for the full details on Gemma 3.

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11 months ago
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The training data distribution has a massive impact on learning. Imbalanced distributions (some individuals appearing more frequently) accelerate the plateau phase.
This suggests exciting new data scheduling strategies for training - we show that a simple warmup works well!

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1 year ago
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Theodore Roosevelt, 1918:

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1 year ago

What makes you think the rule of law would still apply? ;)

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1 year ago

Buddy I just got done writing a book covering 10,000 years of history. I've been a historian for a decade. I promise you, the evidence for idiocy in the human past and present is truly overwhelming. It's even more damaging to assume that people "with agency" are playing five-dimensional chess.

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1 year ago

Agreed. That’s a serious risk.

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1 year ago
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Brexit’s Bold Promises vs. The Harsh Reality YouTube video by EconomyTalk

Keeping politicians (especially populists!) accountable for their promises is an essential task for healthy democracies
youtu.be/VPRaz-5nhX0

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1 year ago

I feel like a whole bunch of the next four years is going to be something bad happening and then reminding a whole bunch of people who should know better that we already knew the bad thing was bad. Concentration camps? Bad. Ethnic cleansing? Bad. Violent anti-labor actions? Bad. Nazis? Bad.

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1 year ago

A difficult but incredibly powerful read..

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2 years ago

we all thought Twitter’s collapse would be swift and sudden like the fall of the Roman Empire but instead it’s been a steady, irreversible decay like the fall of the Roman Empire

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