Brenner

While Stranger Things season five is still in the far future—but finally back in production, at least, with the Duffer Brothers and company—the Netflix series’ official theater spin-off prequel is now in previews. What Song Would Matthew Modine Use to Escape Vecna? Here’s the first official look at performance imagery from Stranger Things: The First Shadow directed by Stephen Daldry with co-director Justin Martin. Written by Kate Trefry, the play explores more of Henry Creel’s origins before he ultimately becomes Vecna;…

These basic insights can be connected to the hottest models on the market right now: large language models.A standard task for a large language model is the translation of a sentence between two languages, say between English and German:“I am reading an article about the importance of the dot product in AI.”“Ich lese einen Artikel über die Bedeutung des Skalarproduktes für die KI.”Both sentences carry approximately the same meaning but are significantly different in their representation.The translation task can be framed…

A still from the new documentary Accidental Truth: The UFO Revelations.Image: 1091 PicturesA lot was happening in 2020 so there’s a chance you may have missed something—like the fact the New York Times published a story basically saying aliens are real. The claim was based on a document stating that the government has found unexplained objects that were “not made on this earth.” You read that right. So yeah, that happened. And it’s a huge part of an upcoming documentary from director Ron James called Accidental Truth: The…

“The ability to generalize to unseen data is at the core of machine learning.”At the heart of much of current AI research is the question of how to make algorithms generalize to unseen data.In the context of machine learning, most models are trained and evaluated on data following an i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) assumption, which implies that training data and test data for a given task are sampled from the same distribution. Generalization then means extracting this shared underlying distribution from…

Photo: Cheryl Eddy/io9This thing ain’t cheap (tickets start at $54 per person; for info on booking in San Francisco, check out this link), and it lasts about an hour—longer if you stick around to play the free arcade games in the “Mix-Tape” lounge area. However, if you’re a big fan of the show with a few extra bucks burning a hole in your Members Only jacket pocket, it’s a reasonably fun way to spend an evening. The set-up is that you’re a willing participant in a “sleep study”—really an excuse to get you into Hawkins…

Screenshot: NetflixAfter three years, the wait is finally over! There’s no better way to kick off summer this Memorial Day weekend than binging Stranger Things 4 Vol. 1. The Netflix series returns to deliver some long-awaited answers about what happened in the aftermath of last season’s Battle of Starcourt and how evil just won’t leave Hawkins alone. The Duffer Brothers, creators of the series, opted to release the mega-sized season in two chunks, with Vol. 2 due out July 1. So as a new horror reaches out from the Upside…