Some observations and thoughts on ZILSwap: What went well, its impact on the $ZIL ecosystem and where we need to improve with some concrete plans that are being worked on. A thread:

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Act of 1871
This is Long but it will end with a BOOM

With no constitutional authority to do so, Congress created a separate form of government for the District of Columbia, a ten-mile square parcel of land (see, Acts of the Forty-first Congress,”

Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and 62).
The act — passed when the country was weakened and financially depleted in the aftermath of the Civil War — was a strategic move by foreign interests (international bankers) who were intent upon gaining a stranglehold on the coffers

and neck of America.
Congress cut a deal with the international bankers (specifically Rothschilds of London) to incur a DEBT to said bankers. Because the bankers were not about to lend money to a floundering nation without serious stipulations, they devised a way to get their

foot in the door of the United States.
The Act of 1871 formed a corporation called THE UNITED STATES. The corporation, OWNED by foreign interests, moved in and shoved the original Constitution into a dustbin.

With the Act of 1871, the organic Constitution was defaced — in effect vandalized and sabotage — when the title was capitalized and the word “for” was changed to “of” in the title.

Shy people are either overthinking or highly observant of the social setting.

And in many cases it can be both.

'So what do I do?'

You learn the 75/25 law.

'What is that?'

The law of charisma...👇

Let's address the over thinkers first.

Do you have any idea why you overthink?

'Yea. Because others are judging how shy I am.'

Incorrect.

Others are thinking about themselves, not you.

But the fact that you think they are thinking about you, you fuck up the interaction.

Now you stay in your head too much & avoid the present moment.

A major no no in the social world.

Your tendency to think that others are judging you for being shy, coincidentally makes you more shy.

And that's when you start giving off a strange vibration to the social setting.

This is when you begin attracting comments like 'why are you so quiet?'

(An extract from Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, Soldiering with Dignity)

The man eventually destined to be free India's first Field Marshal was born on 3rd April 1914 at Amritsar. How did a Parsi couple settle for the holy city of the Sikhs? I once asked him and was told that in+

1899, his father recently qualified as a doctor and just married, could make no professional headway in Bombay, and was advised to try his luck at Lahore in the Punjab. With his young wife, he set off by train for Lahore. The long dusty and hot journey took five days and by the+

end of it, his young wife, who had never left the comforts and civilization of Bombay, was in hysterics and cried to go back. Poor Dr Manekshaw did all he could to comfort her, but as the train steamed into Amritsar, with her first sight of the Sikhs the young bride screamed her+

lungs out and refused to go any further. So they left the train at Amritsar, and there they stayed for forty-five years.

The Manekshaws had six children, four boys and two girls, and Sam was the fifth child. Sam had his schooling at Nainital's Sherwood College.+

After completing his schooling, he should have gone to England to pursue higher studies; this was the promise made to him by his father but, fortunately for the Indian Army, Dr Manekshaw felt that this particular son was far too young to be on his own in a foreign country, even+

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.

So when it first appeared in Normandy, the Sherman Firefly and it's meaty 17 pounder represented an ideal combo of reliable chassis, great gun and devastating firepower right?

Ummm...

Truth is a bit more complex. /1
#WW2 #SWW #History

Deliveries of Firefly to units only commenced in April 1944,
just a few weeks before Overlord & left minimal time for familiarisation.

Armoured Regiments mostly utilised Fireflies on a basis of 1 per troop of 4 tanks. /2

Finally each armoured regiment troop had access to integral, meaty, anti-tank firepower capable of dealing serious damage to any German AFV likely to be encountered. /3

The dual purpose 75mm gun was quite capable of laying down a reasonable HE shell or AP round for dealing with Panzer III or IV.

Firefly's 17 Pounder had.... problems with HE, but excelled at tank killing. So Tigers and Panthers would need to be wary. /4

Firefly's design history dated back to March 1943 when the General Staff published "Policy on Tanks" which effectively stated the majority of tanks should have a good HE weapon and...

[See image below] /5