#HAS A LIVIO MODEL

[revenantghost]

STOP EVERYTHING

THERE'S AN MMD OF VASH, WOLFWOOD, AND LIVIO

[mako-island-moon-pool]

Personally of the belief that live action fans who go onto animanga posts uninvited like 'I DESPERATELY NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT I THINK THE ART STYLE IS UGLY EVEN THO THIS OPINION IS IRRELEVANT TO THE POST' should be hit with a big rock. We already moved past this ten years ago, get with it or get lost. Swallow the hunger inside of you that demands everything be palatable to you. Maybe you could stand to be a little uncomfortable for a while

[lost-technology]

The Twin's Dossiers

So, something I've been thinking about a lot and something I have seen speculation about, both on tumblr and on the sketchiness that is TV Tropes: The Dossiers of the twins on the Project SEEDS computer in where the Tesla record is being stored. It has information on Kni (Nai) and Vash, with Vash's file expressly in with Tesla's folder, which alarms a lot of fans. And a lot of us are wondering how did it get there? I've wondered, was it just a computer record the ship just does automatically about whatever goes on in it? Did Rem input the data for, say, health-information reasons (presumably to delete it all later?) Was it...for sinister reasons? Or did William Conrad come along and input it? I believe that Conrad did it.

It's possible that I'm wrong and will be eating crow when the second season of Stampede comes out, but as of now, I believe that it makes the best sense. There isn't a record of them like this in the manga. There is the Tesla record, but no trace of them on the main ship's computer.

First of all, I'm not sure the ship's computer would just be tracking them and making its own record, even with advanced AI, nor would have a deliberate file-placement. Second, Rem isn't stupid. She tells Nai to eat and drink like a human and to hide his powers. She does this for a reason. It is doubtful that she would keep records that the rest of the crew could be in danger of discovering should an emergency happen with the ship that would cause them to wake up. Third, the idea that Rem would have something sinister in mind for them is grossly out of character. I've seen that idea fronted. I think those people haven't read the manga. That leaves... The bastard, himself. In the manga, Conrad had opposed the experiments on Tesla along with Rem (according to her). He met Vash and Knives briefly when he'd not gone back to sleep right after the emergency situation on the ship and had snuck around. He was accepting of them, found them quite a wonderment and agreed with Rem to keep them a secret. He later wound up being recruited by Knives, but was more of his personal doctor / Plant-scientist and wasn't involved with the Gung Ho Guns / was just another recruit, held at literal knife-point and looking for atonement. In Stampede, he took a level in Asshole. He wasn't the greatest of guys in the manga, but he took a real hit in Stampede, doing gruesome human experimentation on Wolfwood and Livio personally, as well as on Rollo (who is sort of a new, Stampede-only character given how much he differs from the original Monev's origins). In Stampede, much like the recruitment meeting in the manga - Knives knew Conrad. He sought him out. While Knives *could* have found out Conrad purely from records, I think they'd met before, on the ship, just like in the manga. So.... since these suspicious dossiers exist, since Knives knew Conrad on sight and since Conrad is much more of a bastard in Stampede, (I think he was more involved with Tesla, too) I'm going to wager a guess that an incident happened like what happened in the manga with the crew waking up, Rem putting them back to beddy-bye, Conrad staying awake to meet the twins... And then at some point, putting their data into his research-computer. In other words, I think in the reboot, he gave Rem false assurances, convinced her of his remorse over Tesla when he probably wasn't as remorseful as he let on. Or perhaps something more complicated is afoot. Nai he saw as a "perfect being" - untouchable, the perfect bridge between Plants and Humans. Meanwhile, Vash is in the same folder as Tesla - perhaps, as a Plant with some human needs (food / water / sleep) and no apparent powers (until the push-pull thing comes into play), Conrad sees him as "the expendable twin," and thus a good test subject model, just like Tesla. He certainly treated Vash as such in the Soup.

[the-music-maniac]

So this is a random thing, but I was sitting there contemplating the sand steamer episode of Trigun Stampede, thinking about how it acts like a ship, and why exactly did they model it in the shape of a ship, why not give it wheels, etc etc.

And it's very probably not this, just because Legato was still able to drive across the stretches and plus Livio fully fell onto the sand and he didn't sink - BUT I feel like it would be SUPER cool

If the stretches of area the sand steamer travels is fluidized sand:

Maybe NoMan's land has pockets of spaces, oceans??? Where there are gas pockets, a constant stream of air flowing underneath. And tbh I know in the 98 anime there's quick sand - which is sand with water around it, and occurs more often around bodies of water like lakes and rivers etc., In deserts it's possible but not common - which could explain why the sand steamer moves like that, but that explanation doesn't make sense to me, just because if there was an entire ocean of quick sand for the sand steamer to travel across - then why would they need water Plants at all??

Anyways, just a minor thought that I wanted to share.

[novemberfyshenuke]

Trigun AU

I was crying over my exams, so I went ahead and doodled a little more on the dentist au to cope. Here are the headcanons I came up with lol

Livio

Originally, Livio was meant to be a coworker or even an assistant to Knives in his clinic but I had a revelation. I think there's two things he is most likely to be: A dancer and self defense trainer. No one really expects a bulky guy like him to be so free flowing like that. I think it brings such a fun vibe to him.

He has a space above Knives' clinic and can often be seen picking up children from the ground floor.

He grew up in the church with Nico so he's someone who values God.

He slouches as if to make him smaller. The guy struggles to be stern with his students.

Razlo

Razlo is most likely a prosecutor. Livio grew up in a dangerous and terrible environment before he was brought to the church, so Razlo can be fiercely protective over him. That doesn't mean he hasn't hurt him at some point.

Razlo is musically skilled. I like to think the two of them have a thing going on where Razlo starts playing a random tune out loud and Livio's starts vibing to that.

Meryl

She's a journalist. Well, more like a blogger. Milly and her grew up in the same neighborhood and that's how she met Roberto. In her mind, she admires him and his job. As she grew older though, she did come to realize Roberto isn't the flawless role model she always thought of.

She's very perceptive and quite the smart cookie, but tends to get ahead of herself when she's too excited.

Loud unintentionally. It does benefit her with her work at times, but hanging out with friends? Just bury her six feet under, won't you?

She's studying accountancy because. Just because. I see her being stressed out at the data she's had to recompute for the past hour because Vash is being too loud.

Milly

MY GIRLLLLL

She works part time in a cafe/ restaurant her family owns

Roberto is her uncle (DON'T ARGUE WITH ME)

She's really strong from the amount of groceries and stocks she's asked to carry by her family

Also studying accountancy because she saw how determine Meryl was with her studies.

I guarantee you she finishes the homework first and Meryl asks to doublecheck her answers to see if she (Meryl) got it correct.

Many would call her naive but really, she just likes seeing the good in people. Her parents raised their kids that way afterall.

Her family's restaurant is where the gang hangs out most days.

She's really into motocross and that's how she and Nico bonded over.

Isn't really sporty but will definitely join and demolish you in basically any sport. Basketball? Just try dunking that ball when she's guarding. Hockey? Bro those bruises are going to hurt.

She's got really good luck and she's also really good at board games.

She does tend to get overly emotional though and acts before thinking. Meryl is always quick to swoop in and steady her in these situations.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood

He's an actual priest. I know he has a lot of repressed feelings because of his duties. I mean. His entire inner monologue is just, "You shine so unbelievably bright. You create hope for the people around you like the very god I worship. But it's not like I'd kiss you on the lips or anything or...or whatever."

He's definitely looks older than he actually is.

Weak lungs when he was a child and he's still on medication. That doesn't stop him from smoking though. Everyone around him is always telling him to stop but his response is always, "They didn't fix my lungs just so I don't make use of them."

He can't grow a beard. The best he can get is his stubble and so he is so envious of Roberto's.

He's always dropping bible verses and then gets corrected by Knives about certain facts from the book. He hates him for it.

Legato

He's a fashion designer. He loves being in the field just not as the main focus anymore.

Elegant af in public and yet so unhinged with his crew.

He's got a wonderful voice; probs does voice acting on the side for animated shows/movies.

I like to think everyone takes a look at his work and then research him only to be jumpscared by his alt lifestyle on instagram.

He's cringe as hell to his friend group ngl. He'd sing his early 2000s Avril Lavigne in that overtly cartoonish emo voice.

He's a little obsessed with getting Knives to model for him after they shared one class in college.

Elindira

An influencer and Livio's business partner.

Much stricter on lessons and I think that's why they're compatible.

She's also a lawyer, because I can see her fighting an argument for Livio and winning.

She's very mature...when's not with Legato. Then they immediately link and start bickering like siblings.

She's the type to use a number of pet names for everyone.

Red sportscar. Red lipstick. In her pajamas and wearing cat-eyed shades while holding her head because of the hang-over she has but she still has to pick up the tiny menace from middle school. (Zazie)

She's a wine aunt and you can't convince me otherwise.

Never had a bad hair day in her life

Terrible blunt about things it honestly causes more harm than good but she won't ever lie to your face.

Vash

He likes collecting happy meal toys and displaying them in a glass cabinet in the family house dining room. This has translated to him collecting every single mascot figurine from business partners and local businesses around the area.

In high school, he worked part-time promoting Milly's family restaurant by spinning a sign around in a beat up rented mascot suit. No one will ever know who the kid behind that giant dog head was.

Mama's boy...cough

He dresses like an 80s rockstar or a biker but he's never actually approached a bike because of Mama Rem's constant helicopter parenting.

People just assume he's a 'bad boy' because he has a piercing and is a little full of himself at times.

When he's not interning at Knives' clinic, he's an emergency medical volunteer.

He's always been more of an 'I excel in theory but not in practice' guy.

He once made a patient's gums bleed and had them sobbing because he was too focused on getting on with the procedure he messed up the prep work.

Sneaks candies from the jar on top of Knives' desk

He has a prosthetic because I think it's funny for boyfailure no.1 to randomly have the batteries die or it doesn't function correctly.

Dyslexic and was quite sensitive as a child so he often got picked on.

Knives

Boyfailure no. 2 is a well-known specialist who's always rebelled against his mom but still ended up following her footsteps in the field.

He's lazy. He really feels disgusted having to stick his hands in someone's mouth cavity, but dang does his morbid curiosity always win.

I like to think he's mellowed out here because Vash and him watched My Little Pony and at the same time Superbook. He's like super confused and yet enlightened by all these moral stories and going, "Yeah, you're right, Jesus. Twilight Sparkle did deserve better!" or something...

His older cousin, Tesla, always picks on him for going by Knives rather than the name their mom picked out for him.

Do I think Knives is a kid who decided to pick a chosen name when he was 12? Yes. Yes I do.

He excels objectively and fails miserably when it comes to subjective things.

He wears sandals. Rem always got him and Vash those Velcro strap shoes so he, although he doesn't want to admit it, doesn't know how to tied his laces. He also refuses to search it up because he's convinced himself that Vash has this wagered war of who learns from the youtube video first.

He has difficulty accepting affection despite having Vash and Rem around because as a child, Vash came first. He needed to be prioritized.

Imma get to the others another time.

[ruporas]

I don't know if this is a heavy question to ask- it may be. Feel free to ignore it.

But I was questioning myself if it was even an okay thing to ship Tristamp! vash x tristamp! wolfwood due to the age gap???

In the manga it was proven ww was of age (since the treatments went over a course of years) but it wasn't so clear in tristamp, especially with the whole forced growth sequence being more cut short than the manga. He may be in the body of a man but, isn't he still a child? is what I mean to ask.

At the end of the day I know they are all fictional and to block if I don't like but it still has me wondering.

I've seen a lot of people simultaneously pull "dni pedos" (which is more than okay and I agree) but then also go and ship what they ship.

I'm just genuinely confused I think. Is there something I am missing? or is he still a child in a man's body?

I don't know who else to ask, because I also know at the end of the day you're just an artist on the other end of the line. I'm sorry 😭

yeah, it's confusing because stampede never states it directly, but i'm certain that wolfwood is an adult from the brief glimpses of time shown in stampede itself and in trusting the studio themselves.

as we saw with rollo, he was experimented on for 5 years before ending up like this

and then we see him again in this same state 20 years later in episode 5. we get concrete numbers for rollo who we can estimate to be in his 20s when he dies. see here too that elendira, 20 years ago, also still looks like that, the same in the present. i'm saying all of this to dissuade any arguments that might be like "wolfwood should look older and not the same as he did in the flashback of ep 6" because there are only so many 3d models orange studio can make and design. i also think that ep 5 itself is meant to exemplify the quick years that can go by when in reference to a flashback.

the mention of wolfwood aging "in just a few months" shouldn't be an indicator of his age because narrative-wise, they only brought that up to emphasize him being a s+ grade and unique and to highlight how much he's suffered in just a short period of time. wolfwood's flashback is put together in one(1) episode, much of it is used to highlight the bond between him and livio in their childhood because that's the point of his arc. because of that, any scenes that shows him working under the eye of michael are all cut because it isn't important at this time of the show. there's a huge time gap missing in wolfwood's history because studio orange chose specific years to give weight to the arc they wanted to present to us first.

this is like the only scene we get of him doing his job under the eom, at the beginning of ep 6

and him here is different from how he is here.

so from the show itself, i think those are the obvious points that suggests wolfwood is not Still 10 years old when he gets sent to retrieve vash.

in reference to my second point of believing in the studio -- because they heavily based stampede off of maximum, i find it Hard to believe they'd randomly make wolfwood a minor because it genuinely serves no benefit to his story to make that change. there would be less weight to his bond with vash because wolfwood has always been the character to challenge vash, they're meant to be equals. much of maximum and 98, Even Badlands Rumble, play up the significance of vash and wolfwood's relationship and how the two can argue and depend on each other as people with similar life experiences. orange studio pour love into stampede and respects nightow and his craft and as a result, i think they'd keep vash and wolfwood on the same level in this adaption too.

all and all, they're both adults in previous versions and they're both adults in this version. final phase will probably give room for more of wolfwood's past experiences now that we know most of vash's story, maybe that would resolve any confusion.

hope that helps!

[kaelsleftverdantsphere]

Trigun modern AU rambles because I am impossible

Vash is a doctor, very successful, vibing, doing well, we love to see it

Wolfwood is a mortician, guess how the two met

Milly and Meryl own a little book shop together, Meryl has aspirations of making it big in writing while Milly is content with the store and seeing her girlfriend happy

TESLA is the older-sister-studying-abroad™, she calls the brothers often to make sure they’re doing alright

Knives doesn’t leave the house and spends most of his time on the computer chatting with his discord buddies. He has a doomer mentality, thinks humans sucks but is otherwise very harmless. Very depressed also.

Legato originally lived abroad, grew up in an abusive household that Knives helped him get out of somehow. The two have an interesting situationship because neither of them knows what they actually are to one another. At this point, are they friends or partners? Legato is also trans, his new name was brought up to him by Knives and he took it

Livio works as a bartender and does a shit ton of charity work in his free time, primarily helping out at orphanages, dressing up and performing at kids hospitals and so on. Over all just doing the most for the community.

Elendira is a style icon, probably a stylist if not a model herself. She doesn’t have much time to spend with the gung hoes but when she does, she is always the coolest most fun person to hang out with amongst the doomer gang.

Midvalley is a musician, a soundcloud one, he doesn’t get deals but he says that it’s just because people don’t like indie artists, in truth it’s because his music is just not good. (Says all this right after thirsting for the man) He complains about not having money like daily.

Zazie is that one neighbourhood kid that goes “open the noooooor” in the middle of the night that’s about all that I can tell you. Also strong Angelica from Daybreak vibes? You know that show that got canceled after one season? Yeah

[volaenii]

| Trigun Stampede Episode 6 Ramble

Before writing this whole thing I’m about to go on, I just want to say that i will be talking about major trimax spoilers, specifically for volume 10 as well as spoilers for tristamp (obviously)! so if you haven’t read trimax, maybe skip this post! Anyways, onto the ramble!

I’ve had this thought for a while now — since I’ve first watch stampede — but I’m dumb and don’t know how to out my thoughts into words. Along with this, I’m sure there are others who have made posts talking about this exact thing but I don’t care, I just want to brainrot and cry over this.

So, episode 6 of tristamp — “Once Upon a Time in Hopeland” — is the episode in which we as the audience are finally given a glimpse into Wolfwood and Livio’s childhood at the orphanage. And immediately, something stands out about this entire scene — the artstyle changes.

Instead of the typical CG/3D models that we the audience are used to, we are given this sketchy, simplistic, 2D animation style instead — almost similar to that of which you’d find in a children’s book. This of course, is completely different in comparison to what Tristamp had shown us previously. All the other flashbacks we had been shown thus far had still been rendered in CG. But this. This scene in particular is the only one with this art style. With that being said, it’s safe to assume that Studio Orange did this with the specific purpose of making this scene feel special and distinct. To make it stand out and to signal it’s importance.

Now, with that being said, why would studio orange go out of there way to make a distinct artistic style just for this moment? Not to mention, why make it only geared towards Wolfwood and Livio? Well… I think studio orange is going to use it in relation to Wolfwoods death.

Like, okay hear me out, I’ve seen some people say that there worried wolfwood won’t die next season (for whatever reason) but like THE DEATH FLAGS ARE ALREADY THERE!

LIKE!! THE FUCKING BELL?? HELLO?? JUST THROW IN SOME CONFETTI WHILE YOUR AT IT! (IM SOBBING SO LOUDLY)

But anyways, back on topic. I think they’ll use this 2D artstyle in a way to make wolfwoods death hit like a fucking train. Like… after rewatching tristamp for the second time, I couldn’t help but feeling like this whole artstyle choice is going to bite us in the ass later.

Like…y’all… I can see the fucking confetti falling in this artstyle…

Now, this last segment of this ramble is just gonna be me speaking in “what if’s” and just spewing out made up scenes based on this idea since obviously we have no clue what studio orange plans on doing. But anyways, here it goes.

So like…imagine studio orange finally adapting the couch scene, with Vash and Wolfwood having their last drink. Now obviously, the scene would prolly go similarly to the manga, with Wolfwood saying that he’s sorry for saying his smiles were empty and vash telling him to not say stupid things. Cue in the confetti beginning to fall, and in Wolfwoods perspective it shifts art style. And to make it even more fucked up, they could do the thing were it flashes between this and then back to the normal CG models; between Wolfwoods contentment of his death and being at peace with it — depicted like a children book — versus the CG — the true reality of it… the one vash is experiencing as he begs god for just one thing.

On a side note, I’m so so so fucking scared and excited for what Orange has in store, considering the fact that they’ve already paralleled the one fucking confetti frame from the manga (which I will not show cuz I cant look at those panels but if you know, you know) and like, I don’t know, I think I’m just gonna be a mess when that arc gets adapted.

Anyways, UH, I KNOW THERES PROLLY A POST THAT HAS SAID THE SAME SHIT BEFORE BUT BETTER BUT I JUST HAVE HAD IT IN MY BRAIN FOREVER SO UH YEAH!

Take these screenshots as a gift! 💕

Thanks for reading my dumb thoughts!

[offerupmybones]

my dumbass didn't share all my trigun ocs augh!! I've been so busy with life stuff that i forgot things like this website :'3

my art has improved a little while drawing all these guys and it's so cool to see with my own eyes honestly (left to right)

snails and slugs <3

they both have a sibling like dynamic due to me headcannoning the idea of sand worms making groups with each other (often 2 to 4 or even more) when going out since so many people on the plant like to use their meat as a way to live and sell, it makes them feel safer when there's more around them.

they both end up getting taken to one of the many sand worm markets by a man named voss (i pray on his downfall everyday <3) before getting rescued by voss' wife that left him for being narcissistic.

Macsen (crowd boo's)

i hate him so much but god is he fun to draw-

he worked with eye of michael up until Gale had gotten out multiple times, that ended up him being 'fired' to go out and look for Gale (loser never finds him).. he only worked for eye of michael just so he could have some sort of control over someone who he knows can't do anything about it.

(Macsen and Gale <3) ⤴

(left to right)

Gale and pandora!!

my babies!! I love them both so much like it's insane

Gale comes from a troubled home life, his mom couldn't financially keep so he ended up in the same orphanage as wolfwood and livio but never really seemed to talk to many of the other kids before going to eom after wolfwood and livio had - ending up in Macsen's care for his time there before planning to get out by and run off (dummy went back out of guilt after like a day-) when he found pandora, an android that's just been in the back of some storage closet due to the reason they didn't work like the other androids their model.

(some of this art is a little old and i've messed around with their designs a bit over time)

they all have playlists that I update whenever i find music that fits them!!

all the first song choices are what i'd think they sound like X3c

slugs

snails

funk (voss' wife)

pandora

gale

macsen

voss

[approxtwelveangrybees]

@merryandrewsworld this is for you 😘

SOME TRIGUN AUS

“Paradise” AU

The fundamental premise is that when the ships crash, rather than cackling like a maniac, Nai keeps his shit together just long enough to see the horror in Vash’s eyes

I don’t know what exactly nai was thinking in canon, but here he realizes that he might genuinely be at risk of losing vash, even if the crash was all for him in the first place

He did it for vash and vash, he realized, can never, ever know

He spins a story about other humans trying to steal the plants on Ship 5, or trying to take the twins away from Rem to do what they did to Tesla

Vash is devastated and scared and all he really has to cling to is Nai, so even if some things don’t quite add up, he believes him

They “grieve” together and then Nai starts building a “paradise,” same as in canon

(The rest is more tentative)

At the start of season one, Vash is wanted for stealing plants still—he and Nai have been looking for some way to bring the plants back to life (or at least, vash thinks so)

Vash is still a pacifist to the extreme but he does not have the sense of needing to atone for his brother’s crimes. He tries to convince people to give over their red plants for healing but is not above heists when need be—again, in this world he doesn’t blame himself or Nai for the harsh conditions humanity faces, and so he’s a bit more inclined to take a dead or dying plant’s side, especially since they’re no longer providing a town with resources or won’t be for long

Nai probably also frames this as benefitting humanity, like once the plants are healed they can be brought back

The eye of Michael still does it’s thing but vash is MUCH less aware of the extent of it. Nai has been trying to keep this deception going for over a century, he’s good at it by now

He’s not sure how to unlock vash’s gate though.

Vash is looking for more dead or dying plants in Jeanora Rock when he meets Meryl and Roberto

Domesticated Nai AU

The crash was genuinely an accident

Nai loves his brother more than anything else, even his sisters, so reluctantly, he lets vash take the lead

You know what’s worse than one accident prone idiot? TWO.

The main antagonist would probably be the scientist, trying to create more plants or graft together humans and independents somehow

This is just a Nai is a Lil Dude AU

(I think this could go knives x Meryl pretty easily)

Wolf’s Rain AU (tentative details)

Nai and Vash are made of moon flowers, allegedly destined to lead the way to paradise

They were created when a lot of desperate scientists decided to seek out a legendary utopia as the planet became increasingly ravaged by war and pollution

The issue is that the legend also said wolves would be the ones led to paradise, not humans—So there’s also been some gene splicing going on there to resolve that

That’s how you get wolfwood and livio. Wolfwood on paper is a perfect success, able to assume a wolf guise and having their strength, speed, and senses. Livio is…less so in some way and more so in others. He has all the same enhancements, but can’t quite go all the way human or wolf.

Nai breaks out, killing everyone he can find to reach Vash, and the two are on the run from there. Wolfwood and Livio get sent after them

They meet Meryl and Roberto, two “true” wolves, and vash wants to keep traveling with them, while Nai thinks every being is unworthy of paradise but he and vash. They fight and part ways

So vash, Meryl, and Roberto—later joined by an excitable wolf named milly—are trying to find paradise and hopefully from there, either get as many wolves in or try to model the rest of the planet on what they find there

Wolfwood and Livio are hunting them for the lab at first, but Nai does??? Something??? Idk Nai might return to the lab and take over all the research at knives-point—but in any case, that shifts to ww and Livio hunting the pack on behalf of Nai

[kudosmyhero]

Transformers: Monstrosity #6: Underworld

Read Date: May 09, 2023 Cover Date: May 2013 ● Story: Chris Metzen ◦ Flint Dille ● Art: Livio Ramondelli ● Letterer: Tom B. Long ● Editor: John Barber ●

**HERE BE SPOILERS: Skip ahead to the fan art/podcast to avoid spoilers

Reactions As I Read: ● (cover) I went through a few seconds of the following: is that Jetfire on the cover? nah, he won’t be created for millions of years yet, on Earth. …except that’s Marvel’s continuity, not IDW. it is Jetfire! ● whoa! they’ve struck oil energon! ● yikes! Ratchet got scary!

● a temporary madness ● well, now everyone knows your password, Optimus… ● Jetfire is so tiny next to that thing! ● 👏👏👏👏

Synopsis: While exploring the caverns beneath Toraxxis, Jetfire's science team find ancient writing on a wall depicting Transformers fighting a large monster. As they discuss what it might mean, believing it to be a warning of some sort, an earthquake strikes and send the team falling to a lower level where they find a pool of raw energon predating the destroyed refinery by millions of cycles.

At Metroplex, Optimus Prime is looking up info about the Dynobots, curious about their recent reemergence and Grimlock's strange alt-mode. Wanting to hear the team's story from the viewpoint of one of their fellow soldiers, he brings in Kup, who tells him that the Dynobots were once model soldiers in Nominus Prime's Primal Vanguard specializing in heavy weaponry, demolitions and sabotage, but vanished one day after completing a mysterious mission. Having heard his side of the story, Prime proceeds to open up the top secret files regarding the Dynobots' final mission.

Studying the energon pool, the Autobot scientists find that it's seemingly self-replenishing, but Perceptor believes there to be something odd about it. His observance is confirmed when another earthquake sends Ratchet falling into the energon, causing him to temporarily regress into a mindless beast and attack his own comrades. The others calm him down, but before they can study the energon further they are attacked by strange monsters.

Meanwhile, Optimus Prime finds that the Dynobots, or the Vanguard Covert Strike Force as they were formally known, had been sent to the Toraxxis Plains prior to the refinery's construction to investigate rumors of underground terrorist bases, but were instead attacked by vicious "cyber-morphic predators" living in the caves. Their field medic, Skar, had the team use "dynamic alt-mode adaption"—a method of scanning new alt-modes in the field—to take on new modes based on the monsters and escape, though he himself was killed in the process. On returning home, the remaining Dynobots were placed in quarantine so that their new alt-modes and Skar's dynamic adaption theory could be studied. Their grief over the loss of a comrade and callous treatment by their superiors caused the team to snap and run away, disappearing off the radar until recently. Having heard all this, Kup believes the Dynobots must be put down before their alt-modes cause them to go berserk, but Prime has faith that they can be saved.

Overwhelmed by the predators, the science team escape by blowing a hole into another cavern containing what appears to be a large structure. Noting that the creatures refuse to enter the cave out of fear, Jetfire goes to have a closer look and finds that it's not a building at all: it's the dormant form of an ancient, monstrous Transformer.

(https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Underworld_(IDW))

Fan Art: Dinobots by J-Rayner

Accompanying Podcast: ● Swerve's Bar Podcast - episode 03

[wander-wren]

let me go through this one line by line rq. i did talk more about wolfwood and rollo in a different branch of this post, but it was less well-written/thought out bc i did it more on the fly so let’s not worry too much about it. also, disclaimer, i love all of these guys, especially vash, and that’s why i’m being a little mean to him right now. dude’s complicated. ALSO this is only based on stampede, i do not know enough about the original story yet to comment.

i will also acknowledge that this steps pretty close to some real-world issues/debates/etc that are very important to me, so i care perhaps more than i should.

anyway! let’s break this down.

“rollo didnt want to die though. yeah i know wolfwood says it was mercy. wolfwood is projecting”

maybe, and also yes. crucially, we don’t KNOW what rollo wants. wolfwood IS projecting onto him, but equally vash is imposing what he wants, not what rollo wants, because rollo literally does not speak except to say vash’s name and once, his own. his younger self seems pretty attached to the idea of living, yes, but it’s been more than a decade since then (i’m not sure how old rollo is meant to be, but i wouldn’t say more than 8).

he has been modified and turned into a monster, he apparently drove out or killed his entire town, and it’s unclear if he’s been isolated in the village for a while or if he only arrived recently—my headcanon is the former, especially since the success of wolfwood, livio, and elendira would’ve rendered him an outdated model, but they could have still used him. regardless, he’s hardly living a normal or happy life. given his limited speech, it’s not even clear if he has the same level of cognitive function he used to—he definitely doesn’t have the education or socialization of you average 20-year-old.

i’m not advocating for killing rollo at all. i’m just saying we don’t KNOW what he wants. in an ideal world he would have been taken somewhere safe, treated like a person, and made as comfortable as possible while they worked out how to communicate with him and figure out what he actually wants. but they do not have the resources or the time for that, wolfwood and vash are both very biased, and rollo is semi-invulnerable and trying really hard to kill them.

i’m not really sure there’s another way for that story to end, honestly. and that’s the tragedy of it.

“i do agree vash does impose his will on other people, to a degree that’s not a million miles off from knives’s bullshit. and yes vash is also a hypocrite - he can forgive anyone but himself.”

cool! 👍 again, i’m not saying vash is bad and evil, or even that he’s not good. he’s just a guy with 150 years of trauma doing his best, but the thing about unresolved trauma is you don’t always make the best decisions.

“but vash does not want to use people. he wants them to have autonomy so they can choose for the better. and death is a denial of autonomy.”

okay, this is the one where i’m a little less nice. i agree that vash doesn’t consciously want to use people, objectify them, put his needs above theirs—that’s his brother’s deal. i do, however, think he’s so desperate to not have anymore blood on his hands that he is willing to “use” people to get to that end, and he isn’t even aware of that. hurt people do this all the time, when their pain and fear and suffering is so great that all they can focus on is trying to mitigate it, and they completely steamroll “the right thing to do.”

we haven’t seen vash do this yet, really, at least in stampede. i’m being purely hypothetical. i’m saying i see this instinct in him, in his actions, and it only hasn’t happened yet because this is a fictional story and he’s the protagonist and there isn’t really time to explore this yet. vash is also very willing to use himself, his health, and his wellbeing in the exact same way, which also separates him from knives.

i agree that vash wants people to have autonomy. sort of. he never says this that i remember, he’s a lot more focused on their right to be alive (also very necessary), but it’s in line with his belief system so yeah, for sure.

here’s the thing, though: so they can choose for the better? where is this coming from? the only thing i can think of is luida and the “flora” project, but it’s meryl and roberto who learn about that. vash presumably knows, but i don’t think he ever mentions it. meryl is the one who argues (with zazie and conrad) that humanity can be better, with time.

vash doesn’t want people to be free and safe so they can choose to be better. he wants people to be free and safe because they are people. and also because he can’t stand the idea of having more blood on his hands. he also does want them to be better, true (see: nebraska, rollo, nai, wolfwood), but that’s not his primary motive.

because really, “better?” who is vash, who are any of us, to decide what’s “better,” or that the only people who deserve to live are those who are working towards it? vash’s whole fuckin’ deal is that he doesn’t kill anyone, no matter how bad they are. he’s not out here weighing their goddamn ability to redeem themselves. ironically, this is a deeply (culturally) christian way of thinking, in a story where vash is allegory jesus, one of the most misinterpreted guys of all time.

finally, death as a denial of autonomy? mm, no. here’s the thing about autonomy: it allows people to do “bad things” to themselves. assisted suicide, regular suicide—that is autonomy at work. keeping someone alive against their will is a denial of autonomy. that’s not to say you shouldn’t try to help a suicidal person, because damn, please do that, but also: people have just as much a right to die as a right to live.

we’re not even talking about vash anymore, i got sidetracked. my point here is that we never actually see vash in this situation, due to the nature of the story. we never see him forcing someone to be alive that no longer wants to, etc (except himself, potentially). what i’m saying is, based on what we are shown, i think there’s a good chance he would in the right circumstances.

vash is a good guy. he’s not out here running around thinking that other people’s wants and needs are less than his own. but he’s got a big gaping hole in him and he’s very good at justifying the ways he tries to fill it. just because it hasn’t gone badly so far doesn’t mean it can’t in the future.

was talking last night about nai’s obsessive tendencies and the way he views everyone, even vash and tesla, as an object. he keeps tesla alive, in pieces, immediately after the fall and presumably for the next 150 years given all the technology he has, despite the fact that killing her would be kinder, just because he wants her. he nearly leaves vash a hollow shell of a creature just because he would rather that than a vash he can’t keep close.

he’s selfish and cruel and so isolated from the world that what he wants is more important than what anyone else wants.

but also…

vash has a little bit of that tendency in him, too. we saw it with rollo especially, and a bit with livio and the sand steamer—though those ones worked out for him in the end. vash is so full of guilt over the idea of killing anyone, even indirectly, that he will keep them alive to spare himself the grief.

and that’s a nobler pursuit, and i think a lot of people also instinctively don’t want to think about death being a mercy sometimes, but it’s still going to get vash in trouble if it hasn’t already in the last century.

i think it’s interesting, too, in light of the fact that vash himself is sort of passively suicidal at times. he’s pretty close to immortal, but he has no sense of care for his own wellbeing. vash doesn’t believe he deserves to live, but i don’t think he believes he deserves to die yet, either. which implies a double standard in his belief system—death is too good for him, but a tragedy for other people.

“an independent must fix what an independent has done. this is my atonement.”

[hearingcentre]

Starkey vs. Signia Hearing Aids: Which One is for You?

Comparing Starkey vs Signia hearing aids is a good way to find out which brand suits your hearing needs and preferences better. Both brands offer a range of models and features that can help you improve your hearing and communication. However, there are also some differences that you should be aware of. Here are some of the main aspects that you can compare between Starkey and Signia hearing aids:

• Artificial Intelligence: Starkey is the first hearing aid brand to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) in its devices, such as the Livio Edge AI and the Genesis AI. These hearing aids use AI to track your body and brain health, translate languages, detect falls, and adjust to different environments. Signia also uses AI in its Pure Charge&Go AX model, which uses Augmented Xperience technology to process sounds in two separate layers and create a more natural and realistic sound quality.

• Rechargeability: Both Starkey and Signia offer rechargeable options for some of their models, which can save you the hassle and cost of replacing batteries. Starkey's rechargeable models include the Livio Edge AI, the Genesis AI, and the Evolve AI, which use lithium-ion batteries and can last up to 24 hours on a single charge. Signia's rechargeable models include the Pure Charge & Go AX and the Styletto AX, which use inductive charging and can last up to 36 hours on a single charge.

• Style and Design: Both Starkey and Signia offer a variety of styles and designs for their hearing aids, such as behind-the-ear (BTE), receiver-in-canal (RIC), in-the-ear (ITE), and completely-in-canal (CIC). However, Signia has a unique style called the Styletto, which is a slim and sleek RIC hearing aid that looks like a fashion accessory. Starkey also has a unique design called the Picasso, which is a custom-made ITE hearing aid that can fit any ear shape and size.

• Accessories and Apps: Both Starkey and Signia offer a range of accessories and apps that can enhance your hearing experience and connect your hearing aids to other devices. Starkey's accessories include the Thrive Care app, which allows you to share your health and hearing data with your loved ones, the Thrive Hearing Control app, which allows you to adjust your hearing settings and access various features, and the Starkey TV, which allows you to stream audio from your TV to your hearing aids. Signia's accessories include the Signia app, which allows you to control your hearing settings and access various features, the Signia Assistant, which uses AI to provide personalized support and feedback, and the StreamLine TV, which allows you to stream audio from your TV to your hearing aids.

These are some of the main aspects that you can compare between Starkey and Signia hearing aids. You can also read more about these brands and their models from these sources

https://www.bravohearing.com/starkey-vs-signia-hearing-aids-comparison/

https://www.hearingchoices.com.au/hearing-aids/signia-vs-starkey/

[jcmarchi]

Google at EMNLP 2023

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/google-at-emnlp-2023/

Google at EMNLP 2023

Google is proud to be a Diamond Sponsor of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023), a premier annual conference, which is being held this week in Sentosa, Singapore. Google has a strong presence at this year’s conference with over 65 accepted papers and active involvement in 11 workshops and tutorials. Google is also happy to be a Major Sponsor for the Widening NLP workshop (WiNLP), which aims to highlight global representations of people, perspectives, and cultures in AI and ML. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive NLP research and expanding our partnership with the broader research community.

We hope you’ll visit the Google booth to chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in NLP, and check out some of the scheduled booth activities (e.g., demos and Q&A sessions listed below). Visit the @GoogleAI X (Twitter) and LinkedIn accounts to find out more about the Google booth activities at EMNLP 2023.

Take a look below to learn more about the Google research being presented at EMNLP 2023 (Google affiliations in bold).

This schedule is subject to change. Please visit the Google booth for more information.

Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs Jiefeng Chen*, Jinsung Yoon, Sayna Ebrahimi, Sercan O Arik, Tomas Pfister, Somesh Jha

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies Alon Jacovi*, Avi Caciularu, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Bernd Bohnet, Mor Geva

1-PAGER: One Pass Answer Generation and Evidence Retrieval Palak Jain, Livio Baldini Soares, Tom Kwiatkowski

MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish V. Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut

SDOH-NLI: A Dataset for Inferring Social Determinants of Health from Clinical Notes Adam D. Lelkes, Eric Loreaux*, Tal Schuster, Ming-Jun Chen, Alvin Rajkomar

Machine Reading Comprehension Using Case-based Reasoning Dung Ngoc Thai, Dhruv Agarwal, Mudit Chaudhary, Wenlong Zhao, Rajarshi Das, Jay-Yoon Lee, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles HACHEME, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Sonia Adhiambo

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study Polina Zablotskaia, Du Phan, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Jie Ren, Jeremiah Zhe Liu

Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation Markus Freitag, Behrooz Ghorbani*, Patrick Fernandes*

Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference Tasks Nick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Mark Johnson, Mark Steedman

Don’t Add, Don’t Miss: Effective Content Preserving Generation from Pre-selected Text Spans Aviv Slobodkin, Avi Caciularu, Eran Hirsch, Ido Dagan

What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study Aman Madaan*, Katherine Hermann, Amir Yazdanbakhsh

Understanding HTML with Large Language Models Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust

Improving the Robustness of Summarization Models by Detecting and Removing Input Noise Kundan Krishna*, Yao Zhao, Jie Ren, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jiaming Luo, Mohammad Saleh, Peter J. Liu

In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors Roee Hendel, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

Pre-training Without Attention Junxiong Wang, Jing Nathan Yan, Albert Gu, Alexander M Rush

MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-Throughput Language Models Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E Jimenez, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Karthik R Narasimhan

PaRaDe: Passage Ranking Using Demonstrations with LLMs Andrew Drozdov*, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler*, Kai Hui

Long-Form Speech Translation Through Segmentation with Finite-State Decoding Constraints on Large Language Models Arya D. McCarthy, Hao Zhang, Shankar Kumar, Felix Stahlberg, Ke Wu

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization Using Approximate Geodesics Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury*, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Avinava Dubey, Amr Ahmed, Snigdha Chaturvedi

SQLPrompt: In-Context Text-to-SQL with Minimal Labeled Data Ruoxi Sun, Sercan O. Arik, Rajarishi Sinha, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Pengcheng Yin, Tomas Pfister

Retrieval-Augmented Parsing for Complex Graphs by Exploiting Structure and Uncertainty Zi Lin, Quan Yuan, Panupong Pasupat, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jingbo Shang

A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang*, Yang Li

Pragmatics in Language Grounding: Phenomena, Tasks, and Modeling Approaches Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Patel, Aida Nematzadeh

Improving Classifier Robustness Through Active Generation of Pairwise Counterfactuals Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Yao Qin, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Jilin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Alex Beutel

mmT5: Modular Multilingual Pre-training Solves Source Language Hallucinations Jonas Pfeiffer, Francesco Piccinno, Massimo Nicosia, Xinyi Wang, Machel Reid, Sebastian Ruder

Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How Does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling? Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Won Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Q. Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler

TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages Sebastian Gehrmann, Sebastian Ruder, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jan A. Botha, Michael Chavinda, Ankur P Parikh, Clara E. Rivera

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H. Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean Michel Amath Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Frederick Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana L Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Rayburn Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar

q2d: Turning Questions into Dialogs to Teach Models How to Search Yonatan Bitton, Shlomi Cohen-Ganor, Ido Hakimi, Yoad Lewenberg, Roee Aharoni, Enav Weinreb

Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling Tian Yun*, Zilai Zeng, Kunal Handa, Ashish V Thapliyal, Bo Pang, Ellie Pavlick, Chen Sun

Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering Benjamin Muller*, John Wieting, Jonathan H. Clark, Tom Kwiatkowski, Sebastian Ruder, Livio Baldini Soares, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Xinyi Wang

Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pre-training Emanuele Bugliarello, Aida Nematzadeh, Lisa Anne Hendricks

How Do Languages Influence Each Other? Studying Cross-Lingual Data Sharing During LM Fine-Tuning Rochelle Choenni, Dan Garrette, Ekaterina Shutova

CompoundPiece: Evaluating and Improving Decompounding Performance of Language Models Benjamin Minixhofer, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus David Chan, Austin Myers, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, David A Ross, John Canny

The Curious Case of Hallucinatory (Un)answerability: Finding Truths in the Hidden States of Over-Confident Large Language Models Aviv Slobodkin, Omer Goldman, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Shauli Ravfogel

Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma

Ties Matter: Meta-Evaluating Modern Metrics with Pairwise Accuracy and Tie Calibration Daniel Deutsch, George Foster, Markus Freitag

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute Yi Tay*, Jason Wei*, Hyung Won Chung*, Vinh Q. Tran, David R. So*, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc V. Le, Mostafa Dehghani

Data Similarity is Not Enough to Explain Language Model Performance Gregory Yauney*, Emily Reif, David Mimno

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training Megh Thakkar*, Tolga Bolukbasi, Sriram Ganapathy, Shikhar Vashishth, Sarath Chandar, Partha Talukdar

ReTAG: Reasoning Aware Table to Analytic Text Generation Deepanway Ghosal, Preksha Nema, Aravindan Raghuveer

GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-Resource Machine Translation Alex Jones*, Isaac Caswell, Ishank Saxena

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation Yihang Li, Shuichiro Shimizu, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi, Wei Li

Symbol Tuning Improves In-Context Learning in Language Models Jerry Wei*, Le Hou, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Xiangning Chen*, Da Huang, Yi Tay*, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma*, Quoc V Le

“Don’t Take This Out of Context!” On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting Akhila Yerukola, Xuhui Zhou, Elizabeth Clark, Maarten Sap

QAmeleon: Multilingual QA with Only 5 Examples Priyanka Agrawal, Chris Alberti, Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Ji Ma, Sebastian Ruder, Kuzman Ganchev, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata

Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision Eugene Kharitonov, Damien Vincent, Zalán Borsos, Raphaël Marinier, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Pietquin, Matt Sharifi, Marco Tagliasacchi, Neil Zeghidour

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions Jeremy R. Cole, Michael JQ Zhang, Daniel Gillick, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Bhuwan Dhingra, Jacob Eisenstein

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (see blog post) Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani*, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu

LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination Roi Cohen, May Hamri, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage Understanding Andrea Burns*, Krishna Srinivasan, Joshua Ainslie, Geoff Brown, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Jianmo Ni, Mandy Guo

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Seid Muhie Yimam, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif M. Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Wendimu Baye Messelle, Hailu Beshada Balcha, Sisay Adugna Chala, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur

Optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Reader Models via Token Elimination Moshe Berchansky, Peter Izsak, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Moshe Wasserblat

SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation Elizabeth Clark, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Gehrmann, Joshua Maynez, Roee Aharoni, Vitaly Nikolaev, Thibault Sellam, Aditya Siddhant, Dipanjan Das, Ankur P Parikh

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong*, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, Sumit Sanghai

CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai

Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting Preethi Lahoti, Nicholas Blumm, Xiao Ma, Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, Sahitya Potluri, Qijun Tan, Hansa Srinivasan, Ben Packer, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (see blog post) Xingchen Wan*, Ruoxi Sun, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, Idan Szpektor

Hierarchical Pre-training on Multimodal Electronic Health Records Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang, Ziyi Yin, Suhan Cui, Yuan Zhong, Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma

NAIL: Lexical Retrieval Indices with Efficient Non-Autoregressive Decoders Livio Baldini Soares, Daniel Gillick, Jeremy R. Cole, Tom Kwiatkowski

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? Ronak Pradeep*, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran

Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasets Irina Bejan*, Artem Sokolov, Katja Filippova

[deathpacito]

wldrose​:

What would she have done without someone that knew a lot about gardening? More than herself? Gardening was never in Kugisaki’s interest, really. In fact there were so many things in life that she didn’t even think about wanting to do until she got here. Modeling, gardening…The more she spend time in Spirale, the more she began to allow herself to explore more. She can be more than a Jujutsu Sorcerer, and while that is SOMETHING she will always carry close to her, a jujutsu sorcerer meant nothing here.

Not really at least.

“Like this?” She asks, carefully planting her choice of seed into the soil.

“I have vague memory of doing this when I was in Pre-school.”

He doesn't know who keeps telling people to come to him instead of say Vash for this, but to compensate and not have people regret it, Livio has been reading up on the whole plant things.

"Yeah, like that. Make sure you don't pat it too firmly over the seeds, or they'll suffocate basically."

That sounds about right. His own hands are dirty, dirt beneath his nails, on the knees of his pants.

"What didja plant, back then?" What do Kids Do these days?"

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE MADE OF?? Pt.2

Blog# 141

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

Welcome back,

The discovery of dark energy came about because scientists wondered if there was enough dark matter in the universe to cause expansion to sputter out or reverse direction, causing the universe to collapse inward on itself. 

Lo and behold, when a team of researchers investigated this in the late 1990s, they found that not only was the universe not collapsing in on itself, it was expanding outward at an ever faster rate.

The group determined that an unknown force — dubbed dark energy — was pushing against the universe in the apparent void of space and accelerating its momentum; the scientists' findings earned physicists Adam Riess, Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.

Models of the force required to explain the universe's accelerating expansion rate suggest that dark energy must make up between 70% and 75% of the universe. Dark matter, meanwhile, accounts for about 20% to 25%, while so-called ordinary matter — the stuff we can actually see — is estimated to make up less than 5% of the universe, Bahcall said. 

Considering that dark energy makes up about three-quarters of the universe, understanding it is arguably the biggest challenge facing scientists today, astrophysicist Mario Livio, then with the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told Live Science sister site Space.com in 2018. 

"While dark energy has not played a huge role in the evolution of the universe in the past, it will play the dominant role in the evolution in the future," Livio said. "The fate of the universe depends on the nature of dark energy."

Originally published on livescience.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, November 20th, 2021)

“BLACK HOLES MAY BE GROWING AS THE UNIVERSE EXPANDS??”