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Blackstone Raises $10.7 Billion for European Property Fund (Yahoo Finance)
Vulture capitalist Blackstone Group Inc. has finished raising a €9.8 billion fund that will target European real estate. The fund swells the firm’s uninvested capital for opportunistic property bets to about $30 billion just as the coronavirus roils markets worldwide. It’s also the largest private equity capital raising to complete since the pandemic’s outbreak, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
#Comment: A totally predicable and equally horrific and idiotic development. The permanent revolution from above keeps seizing the means of production across the global. Insane bullshit.
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systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective
"Despite the age of the homesteading hobbyist making a substantial difference long being over, the image still persists. The communitarian ethos of free software can never be fully wiped from the DNA of GNU/Linux, but it can be increasingly relegated to an irrelevant curiosity. The likes of Richard Stallman, GNU and the FSF are seen more and more as an embarrassment to be overcome in favor of a more “professional” and “inclusive” scene, which will in all likelihood mean professionally showing the user their place as a data entry within the panopticon, not a free and independent yeoman as the admittedly utopian pipe dream envisioned."
"The professionals are doomed in all their vainglory to be perpetually embarking on the Sisyphean task of a unified and integrated Linux ecosystem, even if it means turning the kernel into a runtime for the BPF virtual machine, or making a Rube Goldberg machine of build and deployment pipelines, as appears to be the most recent trend. The hobbyists are doomed to shout in the void with no one to hear them. In this tragedy the only victor is chaos and discord itself, which disguises itself as “progress.” All that is guaranteed is permanent revolution through constant reinvention, where by revolution we mean running around in circles. The suits and ties have forgotten what it was to be Yippies, and for their part the Yippies are fools who are had by ideas, rather than having ideas."
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Famous Martian Meteorite Contains 4-Billion-Year-Old Organic Compounds (newsweek)
Scientists have identified 4-billion-year-old nitrogen-containing organic molecules in a Martian meteorite, a discovery that may shed light on whether or not the Red Planet once hosted life. According to a study published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers found the organic molecules, those that contain carbon atoms, in a famous Martian meteorite dubbed Allan Hills 84001, which was uncovered in Antarctica in 1984. This object once formed part of the Red Planet's surface, but it was blasted into space by a meteor impact around 15 million years ago before eventually falling to Earth.
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“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
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Humans fundamentally misunderstood Evolution
"700,000 Years Of Progress" - Art by Alfred Frueh (1880-1968) The evolution of species is not going always "upwards" as commonly understood, but it is arguably even going "downwards" in recent times. Perceiving humans as more "advanced" as Trees, Worms or Dolphins is a very arrogant, reductionist, stupid joke. In the bigger picture, there is no discernible "objective function" or "arrow of progress" at all, only temporary patterns and habits in time. Evolution is not going anywhere at all. There is no "answer" or "destination" at the end of the rainbow - contrary to the gospel of the religion du jour (science), which keeps preaching visions of a "mathematically beautiful end state which we are racing towards" (which is essentially the science version of God).
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OpenAI’s Jukebox Opens the Pandora’s Box of AI-Generated Music (waxy) - OpenAI’s Jukebox AI produces music in any style from scratch — complete with lyrics (venturebeat)
Today, research laboratory OpenAI announced Jukebox, a sophisticated neural network trained on 1.2 million songs with lyrics and metadata, capable of generated original music in the style of various artists and genres, complete with rudimentary singing and vocal mannerisms.
"In this example, the Jukebox AI is fed the lyrics from Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and told to generate an entirely new song in the style of Kanye West.":
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Is Space-Time Quantized Or Analog? (space.com)
"What are the implications if 'space-time' (as conceived of in the Einstein Theory of General Relativity) is quantized like all other aspects of matter and energy?" Space.com reports of a new study that tried to find out.
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Innovation Management Software
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Happy Walpurgis Night!
„Nim den Hexen Besen raus und los gehts! Schön ist wüst, und wüst ist schön. Wirbelt durch Nebel und Wolkenhöhn!“ — William Shakespeare
„Die Fee Morgana, wie würde sie erschrecken, wenn sie etwa einer deutschen Hexe begegnete, die nackt, mit Salben beschmiert, und auf einem Besenstiel, nach dem Brocken reitet.“ — Heinrich Heine
Die Deutschen müssen unbedingt ihre magischen wurzeln neu entdecken. Die nächste Bundeskanzlerin soll doch lieber eine BundesHexe werden. — Samim
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Scientists Create Glowing Plants Using Mushroom Genes (Guardian)
Emitting an eerie green glow, they look like foliage from a retro computer game, but in fact they are light-emitting plants produced in a laboratory. Researchers say the glowing greenery could not only add an unusual dimension to home decor but also open up a fresh way for scientists to explore the inner workings of plants.
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TITAN-XIII : Sprawling-type Quadruped Robot
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Design Methods: Or how to augment group creativity.
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ByteSing: A Chinese Singing Voice Synthesis System Using Duration Allocated Encoder-Decoder Acoustic Models and WaveRNN Vocoders (Audio Samples)
This paper presents ByteSing, a Chinese singing voice synthesis (SVS) system based on duration allocated Tacotron-like acoustic models and WaveRNN neural vocoders. Different fromthe conventional SVS models, the proposed ByteSing employs Tacotron-like encoder-decoder structures as the acoustic models, in which the CBHG models and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are explored as encoders and decoders respectively.
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With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake audio parodies off YouTube
On Friday, I linked to several videos by Vocal Synthesis, a new YouTube channel dedicated to audio deepfakes — AI-generated speech that mimics human voices, synthesized from text by training a state-of-the-art neural network on a large corpus of audio.
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Buzzwords for a new Industrial Revolution - from the book "A Circular Economy Handbook for Business and Supply Chains: Repair, Remake"
