Alejandro del Rey achieved his first victory on the DP World Tour this Sunday in an authentic recital of Spanish golf, where David Puig and Iván Cantero also finished among…
‘The Brutalist’, one of the premieres of the yearreaches Spanish screens with its 10 Oscar nominationsbut it does so in a very special way: from a week before, in Zaragoza, where it is also being seen in 70 mm format. An unusual decision that is usually reserved for large capitals, but in this case it has given an unusual privilege to the city. Early release. To start, the winner of three Golden Globes It was seen a week earlier in Zaragoza: it premiered on Friday, January 17, while it hits theaters in the rest of Spain on the 23rd of the same month. Furthermore, he did it that Friday with a special pass: at the Palafox Cinemas, with Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Eduardo Torres-Dulce and Inocencio Arias, members of the radio program ‘Cowboys de Medianoche’, directed by Luis Herrero, and who maintained a discussion with the spectators at the end of the screening. Only three in Spain. But not only that: the film is shot in VistaVision, a widescreen format owned by Paramount and not used since the 1961 classic western ‘The Impenetrable Face’. This means that the best format to be enjoyed is 70 mm, and that only three cinemas are equipped to project in Spain: Phenomena and two cinemas in Zaragoza, Palafox and Aragonia. Nolan went first. The format is, therefore, ideal for watching ‘The Brutalist’, a film with a very careful image, since the 70 mm. They offer up to three times the resolution than 4K (reaching a digital equivalent of 12K), and stand out for their excellent brightness and sharpness. It is not the first time that Zaragoza, along with Barcelona, has become an icon of screenings in traditional formats: Christopher Nolan films such as ‘Interstellar’ or ‘Oppenheimer’ have also been seen almost “how he would like it“. “Almost” because the format Nolan plus ultra It is the 70 mm IMAX, and for this there are no cinemas in Spain. But the 70 mm. Analogues are a good approach for which Zaragoza is prepared. The man from Zaragoza. Behind these cinemas is Francisco J. Puig, owner with his Zarafilms group of a third theater in the Aragonese capital, the Cervantes cinemas. At the Palafox they started their projections in 70 mm. in the complicated times of the pandemic, as told by ‘The Herald‘, precisely with a screening of Nolan, ‘Tenet’. A bet that, over time, has ended up configuring the city as a center of film pilgrimage from other parts of Spain. Medium-sized cities also exist. The case of this exceptionality in the Zaragoza exhibition puts the problem of the quality movie theaters outside big cities. However, the drop in collections After the pandemic (which is being noticed worldwide, but in countries like Spain it has had a special impact) it has especially affected cinemas in medium-sized cities or, of course, in rural areas. Often, entrepreneurs like Puig and his resistance to abandoning the traditional film business are a small-scale reflection of the drama of exhibition in Spain, which in 2024 was especially affected by a very little collections. In Xataka | The IMAX technology used in ‘Oppenheimer’ is overwhelming. But it depends on a 20-year-old Palm Pilot
This Monday it was announced release of ALIA language models. The initiative has been in development for years and it is now that the first fruits are beginning to be seen, still modest, but promising. To learn more details about ALIA, at Xataka we have spoken with Martha Villegas (@MartaVillegasM), head of the Language Technologies Unit of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). This has allowed us to clarify the status of the project, its objectives and its next challenges. To compete with ChatGPT, nothing The first thing we wanted to know is how ALIA had been created, and here Marta Villegas clarified that the model is based on the Llama architecture – Meta’s Open Source model –, “but the model has been trained from scratch and with zero initial weights“. This is important because ALIA is not a Llama-based model that has undergone a refinement or “fine-tuning” process. In those cases, this expert explained, “you start from a model trained with other data and with initialized weights, and you do it to adapt that model to your needs, either because you have more data and you want it to be better or because perhaps you want to adapt it to a particular domain. But here, he told us, “the vocabulary (set of tokens) is completely different.” In other models the corpus or training data set may be mostly in English, which causes the set of admissible tokens to be calculated through English. That, Villegas indicates, would make it adapt less efficiently to other languages. That is precisely what has been sought with ALIA: reduce the relevance of English to increase the number of 35 languages of the European Union and, especially, Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician. How ALIA has been trained The ALIA training process began with some experiments in April 2024. It is necessary because as Villegas explained, “training is not pressing the button after feeding the data and that’s it.” It had to be taken into account that MareNostrum 5the supercomputer located at and managed by the BSC, had just come into operation at full power and there was high demand to use it. MareNostrum 5 In this training process, the ALIA project has had gradual availability of the computing capacity of MareNostrum 5. Although for a short period of time they had access to 512 of the 1,120 specialized nodes of the supercomputer, 256 nodes were used for many months and since September They are using 128 nodes, “which is a lot,” Villegas highlights. During the training process, he told us, there are so-called “checkpoints”, in which it is possible to evaluate how the training process is going. These “pauses” also allow certain training data to be updated, as in fact happened in that process in which at a given moment they introduced a new corpus with high quality that allowed them to replace some data they had. This is just the beginning: it’s time to “instruct” and “align” ALIA Villegas explained to us that ALIA is a foundational model: it is not prepared to be an alternative to ChatGPT. The latter is based on GPT-4, a much more ambitious foundational model that involved much more investment. Here we must differentiate the foundational model from the “educated” and “aligned” models with which we usually interact. As this expert told us, “ALIA-40b is a foundational model that is not instructed or aligned. For a model to be a ChatGPT and understand the conversation and have a certain memory and be “politically correct,” the foundational model (which only learns to say the next token) is “instructed” by passing a bunch of texts.” Even so, the goal is to gradually consider these options. “In March, the instructed version of ALIA-40b is expected to be launched, with a first set of open instructions,” Villegas told us. These instructions are going to be subcontracted – the ones that allow these models to be instructed – and a million euros are going to be invested in that set of instructions from scratch. This data will also be published so that it is available to institutions and developers: if it has been paid with public money, explains Villegas, it is logical that this data will also be public, something that does not usually happen with other AI models from private companies. While training AI models provides guidance on how to respond and defines the context and purpose of those responses, alignment solves problems such as avoid discriminatory biasprevent misinformation or protect privacy. Precisely this lack of alignment means that using these models in this initial phase can produce responses with errors and biases that are precisely mitigated to a great extent with this alignment phase. ALIA and the competition: it is neither a rival of ChatGPT nor does it intend to be In fact, Villegas highlights, “the objective is not to compete with ChatGPT, for that we would need 5 billion dollars.” ALIA-40b “is a good model, and a chatbot can be made in the future because the intention is to instruct and align it, but that will take time.” Within the ALIA family we have the Salamandra models (2b and 7b), smaller and more modest but which already have first instructed versions. Its performance and capacity still have room for improvement, but they are good starting points for the future. It was inevitable to ask how ALIA then intends to compete with other models, both closed and developed by private companies and Open Source models. For her “There is a demand for intermediate models that each person can then adapt to their specific use case, not everyone can use ChatGPT for reasons such as privacy or use case.” Villegas also wanted to highlight how these smaller models can have exceptional performance in specific tasks, and can work at levels of security and not sharing important data. The objective is not to compete with ChatGPT, for that we would need 5,000 million dollars Not only that, he reveals: “we also took out the … Read more
LOS ANGELES — The use of Spanish is considered an act of rebellion and resistance in the United States. Now, more than ever, the language of Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar will be a dissonant element, a language that the spouses Ivonne Guzman and Jorge Espinosa They have decided to elevate their venture that promotes art through books and records. On his first day as president, a few hours after his inauguration, Donald Trump closed the website and social networks in Spanish from the White House. However, these entrepreneurs use their digital platform, called The thinking junkto celebrate the literature and music produced in Spanish, betting on a reunion—in some—and discovery—in others—of the delight caused by art in this fertile language. “In general it is about dignifying, showing the joy and beauty of this language,” commented Ivonne. On the digital platform, Los trastos depensa, these entrepreneurs offer alternative music and literature in the United States. (Soudi Jiménez / Los Angeles Times en Español) This Ecuadorian couple launched on April 23, 2023, within the framework of the Book Dayits platform that now has a presence on Facebook and instagram. In part, this digital initiative responds to their personal tastes, but along the way they have realized that there are more Latin people with the same preferences in literature and music. The idea of creating this website arose during the times of the pandemic, as a result of that unsatisfied need that they have been dealing with since they both settled in the United States. Jorge arrived with residency in 2011, while Ivonne did so in 2018 when she assumed her position as Consul General of Ecuador in Los Angeles. “We didn’t find a lot of things that are easily accessible in other countries,” said Jorge. If they wanted to acquire a book by the Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, the Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda, or the Spanish Irene Vallejo, they had to buy it on a trip they took to Quito, the Ecuadorian capital; or ask for any friendship that could bring them from their homeland. The same thing happened to them if they wanted to buy an Argentine rock album, or a Brazilian or Chilean artist. “There weren’t any, it was impossible to get them, it was like they didn’t exist,” he added. In their own words, they do not consider themselves experts; However, academic training and experience gives them knowledge and authority to speak about what they are doing. Ecuadorian journalist Ivonne Guzmán shows some of the books that were put on sale at the LéaLA book fair, held in September 2024 in Los Angeles. (Soudi Jiménez / Los Angeles Times en Español) For the last 31 years, Ivonne has practiced cultural journalism in her native country. She has been a reporter, editor and columnist at the newspaper The Commerce. He also has a master’s degree in research in history and is author of the book Social painting. Three women in the art world of the 1930samong other professional achievements. On the other hand, Jorge is a musician and has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with an emphasis in painting and printmaking, as well as a master’s degree in education and is currently pursuing another master’s degree in sound art. To launch this venture, in 2022 they did a market study, they visited record stores and bookstores in Southern California, they talked to different people, they asked them where they got their books and music. By receiving a grant they applied for, they enabled the platform that sells new and used books, as well as compact discs and vinyl records. “This is a bit of facing what is there and seeing what works; We got records from Mercedes Sosa, Julio Jaramillo and Astor Piazzolla, as well as Aterciopelados from Colombia and Caifanes from Mexico. We emphasize artists from Ecuador, taking into account those who are outside the city of Quito,” Jorge explained. Among the books they have for sale on their portal are those by Ecuadorian María Fernanda Ampuero and Daniela Alcívar Bellolio, Argentine Leila Guerriero and Colombian Pilar Quintana, among other authors. (Soudi Jiménez / Los Angeles Times en Español) In literature, the bet is to have books like those written by the Ecuadorian María Fernanda Ampuero and Daniela Alcívar Bellolio, the Argentine Leila Guerriero and the Colombian Pilar Quintana, to name a few examples. They are also interested in offering copies of graphic novels, essays, novels and short stories by prestigious authors. Along these same lines, the public can suggest a book or an album; If the person is patient, these entrepreneurs can get it and send it to any city in the United States. At this time, delivery takes time because only the two of them select and renew their catalog. They themselves take the orders to the postal service. “The nice thing is that we are bringing more indie, newer, smaller publishers; We have things that you can’t get easily and that Amazon doesn’t have either, that’s the difference,” Ivonne highlighted. These publishers are Ecuadorian, Spanish, Colombian and Argentine, which publish many of these books by unknown authors in the United States, but with wide recognition in Spain and Latin America. Jorge Espinosa shows a book about the Argentine musician Fito Páez. (Soudi Jiménez / Los Angeles Times en Español) Despite the position recently adopted by the White House, Spanish is moving forward at a steady pace. Currently more than 600 million people speak this language in the world. In the United States, 67.6% of the 63.7 million Latinos use Spanish at home, that is, more than 43 million people, according to the 2024 report from the Cervantes Institute. This interest in this language was noticeable at the last LéaLA book fair in Spanish, held in September 2024. These entrepreneurs sold almost half of their catalog, there they found many learners of Spanish and people who are competent or who are native speakers who seek alternative literature and music. For this reason … Read more
He Barça women’s team is already waiting for a rival in the final of the Spanish Super Cup after having defeated the Atlético de Madrid 3-0 in the single-match semi-final played at the Butarque stadium. Unlike most matches, the Barça team had a hard time finding cracks in the solid defensive approach of the red and white players. However, as the minutes passed, fatigue took its toll on a team that based its game on seeking counterattacks. Barcelona took command from the beginning, with their usual high pressure and long possessions in the opposite half, a full-fledged declaration of intentions from the Pere Romeu who bottled Atlético in the first 15 minutes. Throw of the match in the semi-final of the Spanish Super Cup. The weapons of both teams In the middle of the first half, Ajibade herself had a golden opportunity inside the area that went rubbing the sticka serious warning that encouraged her teammates to join the attack and begin to put the rival defense in trouble. Barcelona was uncomfortable and Atlético was very well planted, however on the edge of half-time (minute 45) Claudia Pina He hit a shot from outside the area after a pass from Patri Guijarro to make it 1-0 and pour cold water on Víctor Martín’s team. A great goal. The second half started with a braver Atléticowith the lines 10 meters higher and playing in the opposite field. The possible comeback involved taking risks, especially when it came to applying pressure. Aitana Bonmatí fights to get the ball during the game. Technical details of the match: FC Barcelona: Cata Coll; Paredes, Mapi León, Paralluelo (Graham, min. 64), Claudia Pina (Kika Nazareth, min. 86); Alexia Putellas, Patri Guijarro; Ewa Pajor, Walsh (Aitana, min. 64), O.Batlle (Torrejón, min. 86) and Brugts (Rolfo, min. 72). Atlético de Madrid: P.Larqué, Moraza, Lauren Leal, Xenia, Boe Risa (Ana Vitoria, min. 75), Gaby G., S.Lloris (Barth, min. 85), Ajibade, Tatiana P. (Sheila, min. 85), Gio (Luany, min. 75) and Medina. Goals: 1-0, min. 45; Pineapple. 2-0, min. 73, Pina. 3-0, min. 92, Graham. Referee: María Eugenia Gil Soriano (Committee of Galicia). He cautioned Gio Garbelini and Ajibade in the 28th minute (49th minute). Incidents: First semifinal of the Women’s Soccer Super Cup, played at the Municipal de Butarque stadium, in Leganés.
Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.
Here you'll find all collections you've created before.
