Virginia Woolf begins her essay on illness with a single, unbroken sentence. It is one of her most beautiful sentences: "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and awake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels in the harbors when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth, rinse the mouth with a greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us –– when we think of this as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." From my interview with Francine Prose

“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of stone.” ― O.E. Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth

🚨🇦🇱 BREAKING: Day 36 of mass protests in Tirana, Albania ✊️🇦🇱The people have stood unbroken for 36 days, not only against the luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, but against a 35-year-old political caste that has captured the country, its institutions, and its future. ✊️This is no longer resistance. This is the birth of something greater. 🇦🇱✊️NEW ALBANIA is rising, and it will not be stopped. #Albania# #SaveAlbania# #FlamingoRevolution#

🚨🇦🇱 BREAKING: Day 31 of mass protests in Tirana, Albania ✊️🇦🇱The people have stood unbroken for 31 days, not only against the luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, but against a 35-year-old political caste that has captured the country, its institutions, and its future. ✊️This is no longer resistance. This is the birth of something greater. 🇦🇱✊️NEW ALBANIA is rising, and it will not be stopped. #Albania# #SaveAlbania# #FlamingoRevolution#

Training a 100B parameter model normally means renting a block of matched, high-spec hardware and holding it unbroken for the length of the run. Orion-100B ran across five data centres instead, on single A100s at around $1.25 an hour each. That puts a full replica at roughly $20 an hour, and the entry cost about 2.5x below approaches that need high-spec nodes throughout. It ran as a viability proof rather than to a finished model, and it held. We're in Montreal on Monday talking about what that changes. @ExploitSummit