@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-05-21 13:15:45
Sources: Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed chips; source: Anthropic has steadily increased its Azure usage since November 2025 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-talks-use-microsofts-ai-chips…
@jamesthebard@social.linux.pizza2026-06-22 21:03:01
So, serious talk: I completely understand why a Steam Machine would be desirable. Even with having all of the parts on-hand, there's still rough patches that aren't really gonna fly with most people. Still have to acquire the hardware (and GPU/RAM/storage aren't cheap), get it assembled (not too difficult, but difficulty increases as you try to stuff more components into less space), and then get "SteamOS" installed (let's be honest, this is Bazzite 99% of the tim…
@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyz2026-06-29 17:08:31
Rocket Lab to acquire #Iridium in $8bn deal that reshapes space communications market: https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/rocket-lab-iridium-acquisition-space-communications/ - if completed, the deal would combine Rocket Lab’s launch, satellite manufacturing and space systems capabilities with Iridium’s global low Earth orbit communications network, L-band spectrum and established customer base.
@arXiv_eessAS_bot@mastoxiv.page2026-05-13 07:47:08
Too Good to Be True: A Study on Modern Automatic Speech Recognition for the Evaluation of Speech Enhancement
Danilo de Oliveira, Tal Peer, Timo Gerkmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12107
arXiv:2605.12107v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speech enhancement (SE) systems are typically evaluated using a variety of instrumental metrics. The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to evaluate SE performance is common in literature, usually in terms of word error rate (WER). However, WER scores depend heavily on the choice of ASR system and text normalization pipeline. In this paper, we investigate how modern ASR models correlate with human recognition of enhanced speech. A listening experiment reveals that modern ASR models with large-scale noisy training and embedded language models correlate more with human WER than simpler ones, with a transducer model providing the most reliable transcriptions. Nevertheless, we also show that these models' robustness to noise and use of context can be uninformative to an acoustics-focused evaluation of enhancement performance.
toXiv_bot_toot
@Dragofix@veganism.social2026-05-04 21:36:20
'Significant change' needed to tackle agri pollution #environment
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-07 14:51:50
Jannik Sinner (1) beats Jan-Lennard Struff 7-5 7-6(4) 6-5
Struff gave it all he had, but Sinner was far too good and might, perhaps, have played himself into a bit of form.
Next for him: Auger-Aliassime or Djokovic
https://www.
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2026-07-06 12:25:37
Versant agrees to acquire Full Swing, a sports tech company best known for its advanced golf simulators, tracking, and analytics software for $530M in cash (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business
@pre@boing.world2026-05-22 10:11:29
Burnham is on the radio doing a launch speech.
He thinks the people of Makerfield are going to write the script for the whole UK.
Namechecks every local borough.
There's been forty years of policies that leave people struggling, that took away jobs, can't afford homes. [yep]
Namechecks some local companies and football teams and schools in a story about a football game. He lived here a long time and likes it.
It's unjust what Westminster has done to this place which makes him very angry.
So the election is a call for change, for these local people in particular, to the economy, education, transport, care, and politics.
More tech schools not concentrating only on university degrees.
He wants to get to the point where the council is building more homes than its losing. New cheap council homes.
Imagine some local person suddenly called to a job interview in the city, they have to pay 364 quid to get to the city. Re-nationalize rail to make rail fares sane.
His dad is in a care home. A local one. Its run for profit. Which needs to change so that it's provided on NHS terms with a social care system that supports the NHS.
We won't get those things without changing politics.
Manchester is the fastest growing city because of how he worked with business. He loves working with business too. Public "control" working with business over busses has been good in Manchester he recons [I think people generally agree, but I dunno]
Note, he says, how he's not been dissing the other parties. He doesn't want that. [Good actually]
He wants his own party to change too.
A vote for him is a vote to change Labour. To change it back to the one the people used to know. On the side of working class people and communities.
This is not a new journey, he has always been working to make the lives of local people better. Ever since his first day walking into the Labour club when the manager said "You're on, between the bingo and the turn, keep it short".
His three word slogan: I'm For Us.
Its a very good speech. He is very personable. Sounds like a normal person not remotely like a robot the way ministers tend to.
It does sounds a lot like what Starmer was saying when he was running for selection four years ago. He hasn't explained how he can do all that given the constraints Starmer thinks he is under. Which of those constraints are wrong.
That Andy Burnham will win this contest.
#UkPol #labour #makerField #andyBurnham
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-29 16:22:59
Rocket Lab is buying Iridium’s satellite network for $8 billion
to take on SpaceX
Rocket Lab
-- the space company best known for its small satellite launcher Electron,
-- has announced plans to acquire Iridium Communications for $8 billion.
The deal will combine Rocket Lab’s launch services and spacecraft manufacturing
with Iridium’s satellite-based communications network,
putting it in a better position to challenge SpaceX.
Iridium offers comm…
@arXiv_eessAS_bot@mastoxiv.page2026-05-13 07:40:50
Chunkwise Aligners for Streaming Speech Recognition
Wen Shen Teo, Takafumi Moriya, Masato Mimura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11422 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.11422 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.11422
arXiv:2605.11422v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose the Chunkwise Aligner, a novel architecture for streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR). While the Transducer is the standard model for streaming ASR, its training is costly due to the need to compute all possible audio-label alignments. The recently introduced Aligner reduces this cost by discarding explicit alignments, but this modification makes it unsuitable for streaming. Our approach overcomes this limitation by dividing the audio into chunks and aligning each label to the leftmost frames of its chunk, whereas transitions between chunks are managed by a learned end-of-chunk probability. Experiments show that the Chunkwise Aligner not only matches the Transducer's accuracy in both offline and streaming scenarios, but also offers superior training and decoding efficiencies.
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