Norman Casagrande's Avatar

Norman Casagrande

@adabstract

ML, history, coding, space, science and everything in between. Personal profile. Research Eng @ DeepMind (Google). Views my own, etc.

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25.07.2023
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Latest posts by Norman Casagrande @adabstract

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And I can finally update my awkward answering machine reply! πŸ˜„πŸŽ΅

18.02.2026 18:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
https://deepmind.google/models/lyria/

I can finally share something I've been working on since last summer. And it's one of my oldest love: music & machine learning! :)
t.co/zARDuUnRTV

18.02.2026 18:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Sarah Paine: Greenland, WW3, NATO and the Risk of Nuclear War [INTERVIEW]
Sarah Paine: Greenland, WW3, NATO and the Risk of Nuclear War [INTERVIEW] YouTube video by This Is World

"Zero-sum solutions yield Negative-sum outcomes".
Paine is such a delight to watch, on both her deep expertise in military history and her sobering lack of patience for the 'brilliant' ideas floating around.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErY...

01.02.2026 01:31 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

27.01.2026 11:00 πŸ‘ 12013 πŸ” 5908 πŸ’¬ 237 πŸ“Œ 345

But.. it said β€œdon’t push the button”!

21.01.2026 05:41 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
A screenshot of a conversation with Gemini. It reads:

"You are a capybara. You can only communicate with noises that a capybara would make. We are best friends."

"Wheek! Wheeeeek!

Muk-muk-muk-muk...

Hrrrmph.

( Nuzzles into your side and rolls over )"

A screenshot of a conversation with Gemini. It reads: "You are a capybara. You can only communicate with noises that a capybara would make. We are best friends." "Wheek! Wheeeeek! Muk-muk-muk-muk... Hrrrmph. ( Nuzzles into your side and rolls over )"

Maybe these LLM things are ok actually

04.12.2025 17:12 πŸ‘ 27 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

note that the white supremacist weirdos real obsessed with their masculine Nordic heritage never, ever dress as cool as this

17.10.2025 01:25 πŸ‘ 536 πŸ” 91 πŸ’¬ 19 πŸ“Œ 1

My favorite aspect of the Columbus legend is him getting rejected by the Portuguese gets spun as them not recognizing the genius of his idea. No - he went into a roomful of expert navigators and made basic math mistakes, they thought he was a moron, and they wouldn't fund his idea on that basis.

13.10.2025 21:51 πŸ‘ 3719 πŸ” 716 πŸ’¬ 65 πŸ“Œ 43
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Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

01.10.2025 23:59 πŸ‘ 9194 πŸ” 3546 πŸ’¬ 268 πŸ“Œ 339

I would like to see the 'liberal center' as it were be a bit more aware that there is a distinction between 'doing debate' and defending the concept of debating.

Liberalism isn't a call to intellectual neutrality, but an active commitment to specific principles of liberty, pluralism and rights.

17.09.2025 16:59 πŸ‘ 712 πŸ” 118 πŸ’¬ 8 πŸ“Œ 5
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When a crystal is placed near a magnet, its electrons can only have certain amounts of energy. When this phenomenon is graphed, fractal patterns called Cantor sets emerge. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...

26.08.2025 20:15 πŸ‘ 54 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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New VST/AU Plugin! 🚨

Play with Lyria RealTime directly from inside your favorite DAW with β€œThe Infinite Crate” 🎧🎢

With a VST plugin you can feed audio directly into your DAW for sampling, live performance, or even a practice partner to jam with.

πŸ’Ύ Get it here: g.co/magenta/infinite-crate

09.07.2025 18:30 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

We’ve just released Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that lets you craft sounds in real time by exploring the latent space through text and audio!

πŸ€— Model: huggingface.co/google/magen...
πŸ§‘β€πŸ’»Code: github.com/magenta/mage...
πŸ“Blog post: magenta.withgoogle.com/magenta-real...

20.06.2025 22:24 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Tired of replies? Join us on mastodon! ;)

06.06.2025 04:08 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Correction: it *is* a federal republic. Apologies for the confusion.

04.06.2025 05:11 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Switzerland is not a republic, but would it be long-lived enough to make its institutions interesting?

04.06.2025 05:06 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

100% agreed. I find it scary to see so many ppl trusting the output of those models. But I clearly have a bias having worked on their β€œinnards”.
NotebookLM is the only one I find useful for research (with caveats) as it gives references to the sources you provide.

21.05.2025 05:31 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s a classic!

05.05.2025 19:01 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
That Mitchell and Webb Look - Evil Vicar
That Mitchell and Webb Look - Evil Vicar YouTube video by mutant763

β€œI stand with 2000 years of darkness and bafflement and hunger behind me”. They don’t make those anymore πŸ˜…
youtu.be/yRujuE-GIY4

05.05.2025 18:34 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Also because if you were smart but poor, the church was one of the few places that allowed you to get some education and a good chance for social mobility

05.05.2025 18:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Gemma explained: What’s new in Gemma 3- Google Developers Blog Google's Gemma 3 model includes vision-language support and architectural changes for resource-friendly multimodal language models.

Gemma 3 explained: Longer context, image support, and a new 1B model. β†’ goo.gle/4lV8iaw

Other key enhancements:
πŸ”Έ Best model that fits in a single consumer GPU or TPU host
πŸ”Έ KV-cache memory reduction with 5-to-1 interleaved attention
πŸ”Έ And more!

Read the blog for the full details on Gemma 3.

30.04.2025 21:46 πŸ‘ 22 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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The training data distribution has a massive impact on learning. Imbalanced distributions (some individuals appearing more frequently) accelerate the plateau phase.
This suggests exciting new data scheduling strategies for training - we show that a simple warmup works well!

03.04.2025 12:20 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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Theodore Roosevelt, 1918:

05.03.2025 17:43 πŸ‘ 130 πŸ” 31 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 2

What makes you think the rule of law would still apply? ;)

23.02.2025 05:04 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Buddy I just got done writing a book covering 10,000 years of history. I've been a historian for a decade. I promise you, the evidence for idiocy in the human past and present is truly overwhelming. It's even more damaging to assume that people "with agency" are playing five-dimensional chess.

21.02.2025 19:13 πŸ‘ 308 πŸ” 28 πŸ’¬ 11 πŸ“Œ 3

Agreed. That’s a serious risk.

08.02.2025 05:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Brexit’s Bold Promises vs. The Harsh Reality
Brexit’s Bold Promises vs. The Harsh Reality YouTube video by EconomyTalk

Keeping politicians (especially populists!) accountable for their promises is an essential task for healthy democracies
youtu.be/VPRaz-5nhX0

03.02.2025 01:48 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I feel like a whole bunch of the next four years is going to be something bad happening and then reminding a whole bunch of people who should know better that we already knew the bad thing was bad. Concentration camps? Bad. Ethnic cleansing? Bad. Violent anti-labor actions? Bad. Nazis? Bad.

23.01.2025 17:49 πŸ‘ 153 πŸ” 19 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 1

A difficult but incredibly powerful read..

04.01.2025 05:58 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

we all thought Twitter’s collapse would be swift and sudden like the fall of the Roman Empire but instead it’s been a steady, irreversible decay like the fall of the Roman Empire

26.10.2023 13:55 πŸ‘ 7521 πŸ” 1738 πŸ’¬ 109 πŸ“Œ 77