Andreas Beger

Freelance data/political scientist. Pro-democracy/NATO/US. Occasionally posting about R, data, etc.

[Railsplitter Fella 🇺🇦 🇪🇺 @Rail_splitter1]

Charapology of Shame:

I went through several hundred pages produced by the prolific mind of Samuel Charap.

My overall takes:

1. This is the kind of competence you would wish on your worst enemy.
2. It’s not just incompetence: there’s a barely concealed hatred for Ukraine.

[Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu]

"Trump isn't finished." https://t.co/C4GeOQyv5d

This is a breakout column by @Edsall. His sources — political scientists — are united in their call of alarm. There is no "both sides do it" and the political press is not spared. Sean Wilentz calls theirs "a staggering failure."

[Highmarsed @HighMarsed]

1/ I have recently been investigating why the share of T-72 losses seems to have decreased over the course of the war. The reason for this might be, that there are very few remaining T-72B (and modifications) left in storage. Further explanantion in this thread⬇️

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

The hidden mechanism behind AI regulations:

1. Claim that AI can do everything .
2. Raise tons of money from investors.
3. Tell governments that AI is very dangerous and that open source AI should be regulated out of existence.
....
4. Profits!

[Nous Research @NousResearch]

We are releasing our first step in validating and independently confirming the claims of the Bitnet paper, a 1B model trained on the first 60B tokens of the Dolma dataset.

Comparisons made on the @weights_biases charts below are between the Bitnet implementation and a full FP16 run (all hyperparameters equivalent).

Model: https://t.co/3WQPrdBbP8
Weights & Biases: https://t.co/crm5JZqHVo

[UNITED24 @U24_gov_ua]

Meet Mariliis and Külli from @pipedrive — U24 partners and donors.
Turns out, they’re also #NAFOfellas and volunteers at @69thSB — an organization that supplies trucks for🇺🇦defenders💙
We’re always happy when our friends support Ukraine in different ways.
Thank you🇪🇪🇺🇦

[. @GregTSargent]

No more paralyzing fatalism. We need a spirit of guarded and vigilant confidence, one that is fully aware of what’s at stake while drawing inspiration from the cognizance that we have thwarted Trump in the past — and will likely do so again. 7/7

https://t.co/yNkplbHaL0

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

This is a really impressive and thorough effort from Stanford, MIT, and Princeton researchers to document the (lack of) transparency of 10 major foundation models on 100 transparency indicators. 👏
https://t.co/QOpZzyAJhq
Blog https://t.co/RWCnYTnYMS
Paper https://t.co/K5Ckrv33yS

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump https://t.co/NZPwb7Us2J

[GermanForeignOffice @GermanyDiplo]

Yes. And it’s called saving lives.

[Andreas Beger @andybeega]

@alwaysadblock @CougarSpider @agraybee How do screen for a criminal record in freaking 1900?

[Tom McCoy @RTomMcCoy]

🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖

Language models are so broadly useful that it's easy to forget what they are: next-word prediction systems

Remembering this fact reveals surprising behavioral patterns: 🔥Embers of Autoregression🔥 (counterpart to "Sparks of AGI")

https://t.co/w0wl4eW1M0
1/8

[Andreas Beger @andybeega]

One paragraph that stood out, nice way to view the relationship between "black box" models and prediction on one hand, and generalizable theory or basic principles on the other

[Andreas Beger @andybeega]

Really cool and accessible article on Google Deep Mind's AlphaFold and protein folding, explaining what the problem is and why recent advances are important and impressive. Something I otherwise know nothing about.

https://t.co/bzXMjLWpcF

[Mattia Nelles @mattia_n]

This morning, I got the call I long dreaded. My wife's cousin Sasha or Sashko, with whom she was close, was killed in action in the Verbove direction in Zaporizhzhia.

Sashko was only 33 years old and already served in the army in the Donbas in 2015-16. After the full-scale invasion started, he and his father initially remained in the occupied territories in northern Luhansk. The two of them fled Svatove in early April, once the horrors of Bucha broke the news. The Russian's then had systematically began to search houses looking for veterans. They got lucky because they were not there when the Russian army raided their house.

Together Djadja Ihor and Sahshko fled with their small, ancient Zhiguli in what both described as an adventure that included a lot of dirt roads to Rivne. Days after, Sashko voluntarily enlisted to the Airborne Forces, where he had served in 2015-16. Just like many infantry men, he saw a lot of intensive fighting since April 2022. I vividly remember how happy he was when we helped him to buy decent boots, spare cloth, a modern helmet and a decent bulletproof vest...

My wife was very close with Sashko but he never wanted to speak about 'the horrors of war' as he put it. He was wounded twice. The most serious was in September last year in eastern Ukraine. When I asked him what happened, he jokingly said he fell from a tank. He left the multiple shrapnel in his legs unexplained.

While in the hospital with his second injury this spring, he got to know his wife Tetiana in the hospital. To marry her, Sashko got two days off and hurried to Kryvih Rih, the nearest place the two spontaneously got an appointment! One day after the wedding, Sasha returned to the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Back then, he already spoke of intensive fighting in March 2023, months before the Ukrainian counter offensive.

His biggest wish was to have a daughter... and just last week, he got the results from his latest medical examination. Because of the multiple injuries and a disability status he would have been allowed to return to the training grounds as an instructor. He refused as he did not want to leave his unit in the middle of intensive fighting.

The last we heard of him few weeks ago, he echoed the sentiment that so many of our Ukrainian friends and acquaintances share: as difficult as it is and despite the high cost, I want to fight this war, so that his future children would not have to. Sashko paid the ultimate price before becoming a father. We will never forget you. Rest in peace, brother!

[Andreas Umland @UmlandAndreas]

.@TheEconomist: Time for a rethink of Western approaches to Ukraine

[Andreas Beger @andybeega]

@UK_Engineer_Mat @MaxAbrahms I see. Is Russia doing just fine? And can you do me a favor and list the things we should be willing to give up because Putin has nukes?

[Михайло Подоляк @Podolyak_M]

Ukraine definitely has no illusions about a "war of attrition." Of course, we can hope for a "white swan," but we base our calculations solely on sober assessments and worst-case scenarios. That is why we consistently explain to our partners the impossibility of any form of "compromise" with Russia.

Namely, any "peace with Putin" without an unequivocal defeat of Russia and a fundamental change in the security architecture will only mean a break before a new round of war (which in this case will take place under worse conditions), and any compromise with the aggressor will have catastrophic consequences for international law.

Are the Ukrainian people happy about the prospect of a long war of attrition? Absolutely not. We are following this path only because there is no other way today. That is why our task is to hold out one day longer than the enemy. And we will do it. Because, unlike Russia, we have no choice.

[Konstantin Sonin @k_sonin]

This is most characteristic. @stephenWalt, a popular expert on the Russia-Ukraine war, knows nothing about Ukraine or Russia and is not interested. What he does know is the American audience. The demand for "tough, cold, clear-eyed analysis" is always high. Even when it sells ignorance for evenhandedness, and cruelty for impartiality.