Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that NATO is responsible for his February 24 invasion of Ukraine—that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing Putin to lash out. This argument has two key flaws. First, NATO has been a variable and not a constant source of tension between Russia and the West. Moscow has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO; the Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance spike in a clear pattern after democratic breakthroughs in the post-Soviet space. This highlights a second flaw: Since Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime, and not expanded NATO membership, taking the latter off the table will not quell his insecurity. His declared goal of the invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine, is a code for his real aim: antidemocratic regime change.

Abstract We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

Liters of this petroleum-derived product, the colorless 2,4-dithiapentane liquid, are sourced for a few euros from Italy, Germany, or China, and then they end on your plates and refrigerators, in pasta, tartufata, oils, cheeses, and sausages, but also in expensive delicacies with a prostituted label "truffles."

If you find the smell of restaurants' truffle dishes foul, it does not mean that you do not like truffles; it could indicate that you have good taste and do not like petroleum on your plate. Unlike that intense gas-like smell, the aroma of real truffles is mild and complex.

Some will compare the difference between the natural flavor of truffles and the artificial truffle flavor with the difference between sex and sniffing dirty panties. Martha Stewart says: "Many studies have been done with truffle oil. It is fake, synthetic, and awful. Truffle oil should not be in anyone's kitchen." Bourdain was the most direct: "Let's say this once and for all. Truffle oil is not food at all."

For many decades, everyone had been asking if Germans in 1939 really didn’t understand what was going on. We’ve wondered how an entire nation, all of those regular people, decided to go along with total insanity. It occurred to me that today, we’re in a position to answer this question.

My friend Alisa, a sociologist whose name has been changed, and I started walking around Moscow and asking random people how they felt about the war in Ukraine. We thought that what was going on was so insane, everyone must have questions about it. Half of the people we asked refused to talk to us. The other half were usually open to fairly in-depth conversations. Later, I talked to people in the Kaluga and Kostroma regions. We conducted over 50 interviews in total. They are not intended to be representative. We just wanted to get some sense of what was going through people’s heads. To enter into the darkness and feel around for something human.

The world’s most widely used web app scanner. Free and open source. Actively maintained by a dedicated international team of volunteers.

The list below is updated continuously by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team of experts, research fellows, and students at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute to reflect new announcements from companies in as close to real time as possible.

Also: sortable, searchable, filterable database interface.

Melrose is both a language and a tool to create and listen to music interactively, The language uses musical primitives (note, sequence, chord) and many functions (map, group, transpose) that can be used to create more complex patterns, loops and tracks. Melrose uses MIDI output to produce sound by any (hard or software) device attached. Melrose can also react on MIDI inputs to start, record and stop playing musical objects. A plugin is available for Microsoft Visual Studio for the best usage experience. For a quickstart, without any installation, you can use the Melrose playground.

The basic insight behind Levenshtein automata is that it's possible to construct a Finite state automaton that recognizes exactly the set of strings within a given Levenshtein distance of a target word. We can then feed in any word, and the automaton will accept or reject it based on whether the Levenshtein distance to the target word is at most the distance specified when we constructed the automaton. Further, due to the nature of FSAs, it will do so in O(n) time with the length of the string being tested. Compare this to the standard Dynamic Programming Levenshtein algorithm, which takes O(mn) time, where m and n are the lengths of the two input words! It's thus immediately apparrent that Levenshtein automaton provide, at a minimum, a faster way for us to check many words against a single target word and maximum distance - not a bad improvement to start with!

Of course, if that were the only benefit of Levenshtein automata, this would be a short article. There's much more to come, but first let's see what a Levenshtein automaton looks like, and how we can build one.

Daemon application able to fetch messages from supported websites and send them by mail. It can also be used to send a reply to a message (on a module which supports this feature), by piping an email to it.

Looks like it should be possible to read (perhaps even write) private messages on Reddit without having to deal with Reddit's own, pretty terrible, web interface. Worth looking into.

But while there are many tools to automatically renew certificates for publicly available webservers (certbot, simp_le, I wrote about how to do that 3 years back), it's hard to find any useful information about how to issue certificates for internal non Internet facing servers and/or devices with Let's Encrypt.