Month: September 2016

Sunni club to Saudis: Drop dead.

Sunni club to Saudis: Drop dead.

Originally shared by Jeff Zahari

“If their final communique was any indicator, the group of distinguished scholars had a very particular message for the Muslim world: Wahhabism – and its associated takfirism – are no longer welcome within the Sunni fold.”

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/359409-religion-politics-saudi-isolation/

Things are overheating as the US starts to Brexit from itself. I blame Ralph Nader.

Things are overheating as the US starts to Brexit from itself. I blame Ralph Nader.

Originally shared by Jeff Zahari

“I’m curled up in the fetal position watching The West Wing and drinking a basketful of deplorable liquor.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/republicans-privately-panic-at-terrifying-prospect-of-trump?utm_term=.pt3NNkzBEo#.cmKPPpvzgb

Shared for a bit of balance in the coverage of the Canadian PM’s rock star persona.

Shared for a bit of balance in the coverage of the Canadian PM’s rock star persona.

A lot of this criticism I would expect to hear levelled at any centre left politician. For every public expression of a progressive stance there will probably be a less well-known regressive one. One that might even be more regressive than a widely condemned conservative policy.

As I said, none of this should be surprising. In a liberal capitalist democracy there are limits to how far left a government is willing to go. Given a choice however between a centre left and centre right government, I’ll always favour a left one even if its leaders are in reality cynical centrists.

That’s as far as my illusions will go however. Liberals are not your friends, they’re your government.

Originally shared by Murray J Brown

Justin Trudeau Is Not Your Friend

Justin Trudeau represents everything wrong with politics in advanced capitalist countries right now. He is the future of center-left politics, a spectrum that ruling classes would like to see as cosmopolitan versus nativist, not socialist versus capitalist.

… Trudeau manufactures consent more skillfully than Obama, and has at least as much charisma. He outshines Hillary Clinton in both departments. Justin Trudeau is the personification of Vox. He thinks like Ezra Klein, but talks like a weird fusion of Malcolm Gladwell, Bono, and Richard Branson.

… Enormously popular for his stance on marijuana, he placed former Toronto police chief Bill Blair in charge of the marijuana file; enforcement of pot laws has skyrocketed. Declaring himself an environmentalist, he’s joined Sarah Palin in a chorus of “drill, baby, drill” and called for more oil extraction in Alberta’s tar sands. Ostensibly working to “restore Canada’s good standing in the world,” he has embarked on a foreign policy substantively more aggressive than Obama’s second term.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/justin-trudeau-unions-environment-arms-saudi-arabia/

This is pretty amazing.

This is pretty amazing.

Via Emlyn O’Regan​

Originally shared by Vincent Vanhoucke

File under ‘Big Deals’.

Neal Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age’ has a funky premise: in a future where technology had pretty much solved everything, one unsolved problem remains: generating human-sounding speech, and people called ‘ractors’ are hired to act out lectures delivered in spoken form.

For a while, it seemed actually believable that delivering human-sounding speech would be very hard, as synthesis technology consistently failed to deliver anything that would fool anyone for more than a few words.

Today the work from our colleagues at DeepMind feels like it’s leaped over the Uncanny Valley, and then some. The examples they provide sound fantastic. This is very exciting. I am really interested to hear what very long-form text sounds like, because that remains the ultimate challenge for TTS.

https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/