Birchpunk's brilliant debut video is "RUSSIAN CYBERPUNK FARM // РУССКАЯ КИБЕРДЕРЕВНЯ," a 4:30 comedo-dystopian design fiction in the form of a recruiting ad for a futuristic Russian roboticized farm.
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It packs about a million gags into a very short space: not just janky, rural, Russian junkbots, but also a little robosexual romance, mutant kombucha, aerostatic domestic disputes, and terrible civil engineering.
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To say nothing of the fractal cucumber (or as a Russian friend once called it, "Banana Siberski!"), the glitched out augmented reality, and the black hole underneath the outhouse seat.
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This is the good stuff: dark Russian humor, gritty cyberpunk sight gags, and a themesong to die for. Is it wrong that I want to be a farmhand on this farm?
eof/
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Super Smash Bros. Melee is a 20-year-old Nintendo game with a huge cult following; it's considered one of the best fighting games of all time. Nintendo abandoned it years ago, but the fans have kept it alive.
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Fans used Dolphin (an emulation environment that can simulate the Gamecube and Wii) and mods from Slippi that let users play head-to-head over the internet. This combo has enabled many gamers to turn pro, winning esports contracts.
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All that was true before the pandemic. Now, with the world in lockdown, SSBM tournaments have only grown in popularity. @TheBigHouseSSB was about to host one of the largest of these tournaments when Nintendo shut them down with a copyright threat.
"Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning" is a new ML paper co-authored by 33 (!) Google researchers. It's been called a "wrecking ball" for our understanding of problems in machine learning.
There's been a lot of work on the problems of inadequate, low-quality, biased or poorly labeled training date in machine learning classifiers ("garbage in, garbage out"), but that's not what these researchers are documenting.
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They're focused on "underspecification," a well-known statistical phenomenon that has not been at the center of machine learning analysis (until now).
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