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Deep reinforcement learning has achieved great successes inrecent years, however, one main challenge is the sample in-efficiency. In this paper, we focus on how to use action guid-ance by means of a non-expert demonstrator to improve sam-ple efficiency in a domain with sparse, delayed, and pos-sibly deceptive rewards: the recently-proposed multi-agentbenchmark of Pommerman. We propose a new frameworkwhere even a non-expert simulated demonstrator, e.g., plan-ning algorithms such as Monte Carlo tree search with a smallnumber rollouts, can be integrated within asynchronous dis-tributed deep reinforcement learning methods. Compared to avanilla deep RL algorithm, our proposed methods both learnfaster and converge to better policies on a two-player miniversion of the Pommerman game.

allow automatic downloading of latest release.
very useful since it's basically impossible to do manually at the terminal.
cleaner uninstall.

delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf

"Thank you, deleting the config file and letting xorg recreate it solved it."

The results are quite impressive! We compared against compression algorithms on MNIST, where sparse momentum outperforms most other methods. This is a pretty good result given that compression methods start from a dense network and usually retrain repetitively while we train a sparse network from scratch! Another impressive result is that we can match or even exceed the performance of dense networks by using 20% of weights (80% sparsity). On CIFAR-10, we compare against Single-shot Network Pruning which is designed for simplicity and not performance — so it is not surprising that sparse momentum does better. However, what is interesting is that we can train both VGG16-D (a version of VGG16 with two fully connected layers) and Wide Residual Network (WRN) 16-10 (16 layers deep and very wide WRN) to dense performance levels with just 5% of weights. For other networks, sparse momentum comes close to dense performance levels. Furthermore, as I will show later, with an optimized sparse convolution algorithm, we would be able to train a variety of networks to yield the same performance levels while training between 3.0-5.6x faster!

everybody on the entire Earth that ever wants to look at the sky has to look at the Starlink satellites.”

Germans often take pride in the way the country has faced up to its past, a collective struggle known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It includes a commitment to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust, and to accept Germany’s sole and permanent responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.

The death of the 34-year-old doctor marked a pivotal moment in the coronavirus outbreak, as its rapid spread presents President Xi Jinping with his gravest political and economic challenge since assuming power in 2012.

Authorities are struggling to contain public anger over the official mishandling of the outbreak that has killed more than 600 people. The crisis also threatens to undermine the central government’s narrative that it is in control of the rapidly evolving situation.

References to [Li's] passing had been viewed 270m times on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, early on Friday after being announced by a Wuhan hospital.

Another Weibo user called Ren Xuanpan wrote “we all know it’s not the bat that kills people” — a reference to suggestions that the animal was the origin of the virus.

“The government has made Wuhan a living hell,” said another post.

Many users have posted lyrics to “Do you hear the people sing”, a song from the musical Les Misérables, to commemorate Li.

The Chinese government operates one of the world’s most comprehensive online censorship programmes and is able to cleanse social media of criticism of the government. 

The hashtag “I want freedom of speech” was censored during the night and is now unsearchable on both Weibo and Douban, another social networking platform.

When dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo died in custody in 2017, internet users posted candle emojis, an expression that was eventually blocked by the government.

During the last week of January, social media experts noted that a much higher degree of anti-government commentary — mainly anger at local government mismanagement of the crisis — had been permitted. But since the start of February, censors have stepped up efforts to remove negative comments.

One doctor dies by suicide every day in the US. Stress, depression or anxiety account for 44 per cent of all work-related ill-health cases in Britain, and 57 per cent of all working days lost due to ill health, according to the government’s health and safety executive.

“This is not about buying Fitbits for employees and teaching them deep breathing so we can pile on more work,"

Studies show that burnout is a characteristic of employees who care the most about their work

Many FT survey respondents who did tell managers about their issues felt they were discriminated against or given less meaningful work in response.

The Lancet in 2018, covering 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, suggested that “The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero.” Even one drink a day raised the risk of dying.

“[the IBSR method] is guided by a simple and clear defined set of questions, allowing for a structured way of self-inquiry. As a consequence, the practice of IBSR does not require a therapeutic setting. This makes the IBSR method easily available and potentially helpful to anyone who wants to change their negative thinking.”

these triggers make a lot of sense, not just for addiction to drugs and alcohol, but really to detail ant plan of personal growth

1 - Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired
2 - perceived negative emotions, learn to cope with them (sad, angry, etc.)
3 - stress
4 - over-confident in reaching goal
5 - Depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses
6 - social isolation
7 - sex and relationships
8 - promotion or new job
9 - reminiscing about good times
10 - environment associated with relapse activity (bar for alcoholic)

DeepMind's new architecture -- MEMO -- solves novel reasoning tasks with less computation than several baseline AI models.

several are also complicit in his crimes, at a minimum for accepting foreign assistance (Russian money funneled through the NRA).

many residents say it is nearly impossible to get the health care they need to treat — or even diagnose — the coronavirus

Layers of bureaucracy stand between residents and help. And the long lines outside hospitals for testing and treatment suggest that the outbreak is spreading far beyond the official count of cases.

“The situation that we’ve seen is much worse than what has been officially reported,” Long Jian, 32, said outside a hospital where his elderly father was being treated. Mr. Long said his father had to go to six hospitals and wait seven days before he could even be tested for the coronavirus.

“Those who can get diagnosed and treated are the lucky ones,” Mr. Long said. “In our neighborhood, many who weren’t able to get diagnosed ended up dying at home.”

“I’m very dissatisfied with the government,” Ms. Hu said. “It’s like only when the patients are close to death can they be admitted to a hospital.”

Tong Yixuan, 31, said Sunday that he panicked last week when he learned that in just a few days, his father’s cold had escalated into a full-blown illness that doctors said was almost certainly the coronavirus.

But neither his father, who had a 104-degree fever and was slipping in and out of consciousness, nor his mother, who was starting to show similar symptoms, could get tested. Hospitals said that there was no space, and that their symptoms were not severe enough, Mr. Tong said. His parents were sent home to quarantine themselves.

Convolutional networks and Transformers: Tensor Cores > FLOPs > Memory Bandwidth > 16-bit capability
Recurrent networks: Memory Bandwidth > 16-bit capability > Tensor Cores > FLOPs

A simple and effective way to think about matrix multiplication AB=C is that it is memory bandwidth bound: Copying memory of A, B unto the chip is more costly than to do the computations of AB. This means memory bandwidth is the most important feature of a GPU if you want to use LSTMs and other recurrent networks that do lots of small matrix multiplications. The smaller the matrix multiplications, the more important is memory bandwidth.

On the contrary, convolution is bound by computation speed. Thus TFLOPs on a GPU is the best indicator for the performance of ResNets and other convolutional architectures. Tensor Cores can increase FLOPs dramatically.

“This was an issue of inaction,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China. “There was no action in Wuhan from the local health department to alert people to the threat.”

The first case, the details of which are limited and the specific date unknown, was in early December. By the time the authorities galvanized into action on Jan. 20, the disease had grown into a formidable threat.

It is now a global health emergency. It has triggered travel restrictions around the world, shaken financial markets and created perhaps the greatest challenge yet for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The crisis could upend Mr. Xi’s agenda for months or longer, even undermining his vision of a political system that offers security and growth in return for submission to iron-fisted authoritarianism."

...

Beijing was involved from the get-go

"The day before, on Dec. 31, national authorities had alerted the World Health Organization’s office in Beijing of an outbreak."

...

“Stressing politics is always No. 1,” the governor of Hubei, Wang Xiaodong, told officials on Jan. 17, citing Mr. Xi’s precepts of top-down obedience. “Political issues are at any time the most fundamental major issues.”

Shortly after, Wuhan went ahead with a massive annual potluck banquet for 40,000 families from a city precinct, which critics later cited as evidence that local leaders took the virus far too lightly.

...

Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, later took responsibility for the delay in reporting the scale of the epidemic, but said he was hampered by the national law on infectious diseases. That law allows provincial governments to declare an epidemic only after receiving central government approval. “After I receive information, I can only release it when I’m authorized,” he said.

Even after cases were being reported in Thailand and South Korea, Wuhan officials organized holiday shopping fairs like the one Pan visited. They held a downtown community potluck attended by as many as 40,000 families. They distributed hundreds of thousands of tickets to local attractions.

“Everything was down to not collecting cases, not letting the public know,” said Dali Yang, a prominent scholar of China’s governance system at the University of Chicago. “They were still pushing ahead, wanting to keep up appearances.”

Without clear government warnings, people kept traveling — both within and beyond China.
Yang Jun, a prominent sales executive in the photovoltaic equipment industry, traveled to a meeting in Wuhan on Jan. 6 and returned home on the train to Beijing via Shanghai a week later.

A day before he checked himself into a hospital, he attended a school event with his daughter and sat in a lecture hall with hundreds of other parents, according to a statement released later by the Beijing school that asked all parents to quarantine themselves.

Yang died this week

...

In a Jan. 27 state media interview, Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said he was not authorized by his superiors to disclose the epidemic earlier

...

The Supreme People’s Court also issued an unusual statement admonishing the Wuhan police for detaining eight scientists.

“If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors,’ and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today,” the high court said. “Rumors end when there is openness.”

in the end, it's a failure to have an informed, interested electorate

"GOP senators and aides were confident that voters were paying little attention based on a survey conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official campaign arm of Senate Republicans."

also a willingness to buy completely bogus arguments. basically: the president can do anything he wants if he thinks it's in his personal interest, because that's in the national interest (quid pro quo is not impeachable):

"Even if Bolton’s allegations of a quid pro quo were true, isn’t that still not an impeachable offense, so would his testimony add anything? Patrick Philbin, a deputy White House counsel, responded that it would not be an impeachable offense. That answer was pivotal, especially in getting Lisa’s vote,” Cruz said."

TL;DR: - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it - Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing - Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us - It's ok that people have their e-mails hosted at Big Mailer Corps as long as there's enough people outside too EDIT (2019-12-15) A practical guide to set up a mail exchanger was published on this blog.