4est_4est_Gump
Run Forrest! RUN!
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2011
- Posts
- 89,007
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Taliban jihadists generated $15 million for terrorist activities in 2016 from harvesting Afghanistan’s “green gold,” pistachios, over 32,000 hectares in the Kushki Kuhna district of the country’s western Herat province.
“They are being collected by the Taliban and armed locals,” lamented the head of the Badghis governor’s office, Sharafuddin Madjeedi, referring to the pistachios, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP) last year.
Syed Mohammad Chishti Modudi, the Kushki Kuhna district’s administrative chief, told Pajhwok Afghan News that “an investigation by agriculture experts showed $15 million in annual income from [the] pistachio crop in the district lined [the] Taliban’s pockets.”
“He said two pistachio forests spread over 32,000 hectares of land existed in the district,” notes Pajhwok, adding that “the forests had been partially destroyed by local powerful individuals and Taliban.”
However, the Taliban managed to illegally harvest up to 40 percent of the country’s crop after it raided the pistachio forests in Herat last year.
I took my potshots at you this morning!
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IGOR MORDATCH IS working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. He spent time at Pixar and worked on Toy Story 3, in between stints as an academic at places like Stanford and the University of Washington, where he taught robots to move like humans. “Creating movement from scratch is what I was always interested in,” he says. Now, all this expertise is coming together in an unexpected way.
Born in Ukraine and raised in Toronto, the 31-year-old is now a visiting researcher at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab started by Tesla founder Elon Musk and Y combinator president Sam Altman. There, Mordatch is exploring a new path to machines that can not only converse with humans, but with each other. He’s building virtual worlds where software bots learn to create their own language out of necessity.
As detailed in a research paper published by OpenAI this week, Mordatch and his collaborators created a world where bots are charged with completing certain tasks, like moving themselves to a particular landmark. The world is simple, just a big white square—all of two dimensions—and the bots are colored shapes: a green, red, or blue circle. But the point of this universe is more complex. The world allows the bots to create their own language as a way collaborating, helping each other complete those tasks.
Link?
It's the thread about who are you...
It's on my front page, but I have a huge-ass ignore list.
*chuckle*
Who says they don't want to impose their values on us?
https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1...ok-Twitter-help-to-remove-blasphemous-content
They're going to make us play by the rules of the snowflake nation...
I turned it into a fun thread.
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Dude needs a chin strap for that bad rug on his head.
So it seems. The usual suspects will be active therein, from all perspectives.... it would appear that I'm worthy of "ink"... why I have no FAWWWWKING clue.
Oh, wait... is it cuz I'm a clueless furriner?
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