Thing is, I've been trying to find a moment to write down what happened to Bennett and me for a while now, but the demands of my audience rarely abate. I've hardly time to jot down a grocery list, let alone compose a personal chronicle. Bennett says I'm practically the Charles (as in Dickens) of scribblers devoted to mining the rich vein of a certain underappreciated sitcom of the nineteen-eighties, but I will leave that for history to judge. Besides, what does Bennett know? Just before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and do my "C: FB" conjuring, and I struck up a conversation with a young woman who confessed to being a creative-writing student. She told me that in her workshop they talk about the "occasion" of the story. Why is the narrator telling this tale now? What pressures or conditions have coalesced to move a person to speak? I feigned ignorance of the concept, though I'd heard it often in my own writing classes long ago. Instead, I told her that, if the installment I was presently crafting flowed from any occasion, it was this: Charles is anxious about the imminent disintegration of the universe via the ever-increasing tug of dark matter. Moreover, he's ticked off that his best buddy, Buddy, doesn't seem perturbed by the prospect. "How imminent?" the woman said, and sipped her Balkan, a new offering at Amok. When I informed her that he was the titular hero of "Charles in Charge," the most criminally uncelebrated television program of the Reagan era, the woman pursed her lips. "We all write fan fiction," I told her. "Some of us are just more honest about it." The young woman gathered up her belongings, moved to another table. Did she think I was being facetious? Still, if there is an occasion for the story I'm relating now, it's a bit nearer on the space-time continuum. My best buddy, Bennett, is in a vegetative state induced by an anoxic brain injury, and, if he doesn't wake up soon and vouch for me, I could be kicked out of our apartment.

It's been instructive to see "Ballerina," which opens this week, so soon after the new "Mission: Impossible" installment. In the latter, it's hard to top Tom Cruise's intrepid stunt work, which reaches its zenith in a pair of extended sequences (one in a submarine, the other on biplanes), but the story, involving a diabolical scheme using A.I. to commandeer and launch the world's nuclear weaponry, is a mere pretext. Going to "Mission: Impossible" for the story is like going to Casablanca for the waters. In contrast, "Ballerina"--like the four John Wick films that it's spun off from--is, strangely, far better at story than at action. The first John Wick film is the weakest, because the framework for the franchise was still unformed: a retired hit man (Keanu Reeves) gets back into action to respond to a mobster's attacks.

For months rumors have circulated that developer Bethesda was about to release a remastered version of its timeless classic action RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion–now one has finally arrived and it looks so good I can barely believe my eyes. The remaster boasts the complete Oblivion world–Cyrodiil and all–beautifully remade with high-resolution textures and new lighting. The graphical conversion comes courtesy of the game development engine Unreal Engine 5, with a little input from Bethesda's in-house gaming engine to keep it looking as true to the original version as possible. Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, players will now be able to play Oblivion in 4K at up to 60 FPS, enjoying a level of detail they could otherwise only dream of in the original. They can forget about wandering past trees and shrubs that seemingly appear in 2D, for example, because they'll now be rendered in mind-blowing 3D, like everything else in the game. In addition to a graphics overhaul, the remaster boasts an updated UI as well as updated sound and visual effects.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Lots of people are going to be reminiscing about their childhood after EA Sports announced its College Football video game will return after an 11-year hiatus. The series began in 1993 with the release of Bill Walsh College Football, and the game was released under the legendary coach's name for two years. The name changed to College Football USA for the 1996 and 1997 seasons before changing to NCAA Football from 1998 to 2014.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP) downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188 examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve stateof-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with the similar size models, respectively. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the natural language processing (NLP) landscape Kenton & Toutanova (2019); Brown et al. (2020), where scaling up model size and the amount of data is one of the key ingredients Rae et al. (2021); Chowdhery et al. (2022); Anil et al. (2023); Touvron et al. (2023a;b). Surprisingly, recent progress suggests that LLMs also have the potential to solve reasoning problems Clark et al. (2020); Talmor et al. (2020); Suzgun et al. (2022); Wei et al. (2022b). In this report, we focus on how to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLM through an alignment process that includes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Specifically, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which is finetuned with human alignment techniques from KwaiYiiBase to tackle mathematical problems. Experimental results show that KwaiYiiMath outperforms many open-source models in similar sizes by a large margin and is approaching GPT-4 on three mathematical benchmarks including both English and Chinese, i.e., GSM8k Cobbe et al. (2021), CMath Wei et al. (2023), and a small-scale in-house dataset KMath. KwaiYiiBase is a large language model developed by Kuaishou https://github.com/kwai/KwaiYii/. Section 3 introduces the methodology of KwaiYiiMath including the process of supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Additionally, it also describes details about the efforts in collecting large amounts of mathematical high-quality training data.

Whether we're living in the age of Peak TV or Trough TV, one thing is clear: There's too much TV. Thankfully, not every show has to be watched in its entirety. One of the best things about television is its serialized nature, the continuous thread that strings viewers along from one episode to the next. It's a cliché that prestige television is the new novel precisely because of the way that many dramas develop their characters and plots over many hours of storytelling. But an older virtue of TV is its brevity--the way a scenario can be introduced and resolved within the space of an hour, or half that--and some of the best episodes are less like chapters in a long-running novel than like short stories or short films. There's been no shortage of debate about this question, but for our purposes, we're defining it simply as an episode that stands up on its own, whether or not you've seen the rest of the show. Some are "bottle episodes," which typically confine a small cast to one location to save money. Some are "departure episodes," in which a show abandons its usual format or style to suddenly become, say, silent, animated, a musical, or about a minor character it was never about before. But not all bottle episodes and departure episodes are stand-alones, and vice versa. It's for this reason that you won't find Breaking Bad's celebrated "Fly" on this list: It may be a bottle episode, but it doesn't stand alone, because the best thing about it--how the housefly is a metaphor for everything else going on in the series--is comprehensible only to those who have watched the show. These are English-language selections, and, out of fairness, we have limited ourselves to one episode per series, although some shows are full of stellar contenders. Use these picks--arranged in chronological order, with an admitted bias toward our most recent, and best, era of television--to populate your streaming queue with a feast of bite-sized morsels, each of which could double as either a snackable introduction to a new show or a satisfying meal in itself. If movies made Alfred Hitchcock a name, TV made him a brand. The master of suspense embraced the burgeoning medium in 1955 with Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), an anthology series whose entries began and ended the same way: the titular celebrity providing context to a unique half-hour thriller, typically an adaption of a short story by an esteemed author (John Cheever, Ray Bradbury, many others).

A year after saving the summer box office with the smash hit Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise is back for another round of speedy-motorcycle riding, choppy-handed running, and look-Ma-no-CGI stuntwork in Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh and supposedly penultimate entry in the now 27-year-old action franchise. In the able hands of Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed the past three M:I movies in addition to writing or co-writing the past four, Dead Reckoning displays the serene if at times demented confidence of a series that's found its voice. Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller. To be clear, there is some nonsense involved: Dead Reckoning's plot hinges on an espionage-related MacGuffin so technologically advanced it might as well be magical. And there are several of the franchise's time-honored and much-memed "mask reveals," in which a character suddenly rips off their own face to reveal another cast member underneath.

The latest Final Fantasy video game is being scorched for not catering to diversity and identity politics. Final Fantasy XVI is the latest installment of one of the most popular video game series going back to 1987. Despite largely being made by Japanese game developers, many installments of this series, especially in its early days, were influenced by Western European fantasy settings and tropes. While some more recent Final Fantasy games have leaned toward science-fiction, Final Fantasy XVI is a return to form. But being set in a European medieval fantasy setting does not protect it from woke critique.

Meta announced a slate of upcoming games today for its standalone VR headsets (including the upcoming Meta Quest 3). Apple is expected to enter the virtual headset space next week, so Meta is hoping to make a lasting impression with its lineup of upcoming VR titles from beloved franchises, including Assassin's Creed, Stranger Things, Ghostbusters and Attack on Titan -- along with some VR remakes of old-school classics. In addition to Asgard's Wrath 2, the most enticing game may be the one we know the least about. Although it was little more than a tease, Meta confirmed that Assassin's Creed Nexus VR isn't vaporware after all: The next VR installment in the long-running series will launch in the Meta Quest Store later this year. Unfortunately, further details must wait for its official reveal at Ubisoft Forward on June 12th.

About 30 minutes into Fast X, the 10th installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, there is a moment of exposition so self-aware it seems all but designed to make longtime fans snicker in the aisles. Aimes (Alan Ritchson), the new hotshot head of the secretive organization known as The Agency, is recounting to Tess (Brie Larson) a series of heists, messes, and, of course, massively destructive car chases pulled off by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew. He also notes that at every turn, the group's enemies--be they cops or revenge-seekers--end up being a part of the team. "Everyone becomes family," he scowls. Of every knowing wink made at a franchise's fanbase, this might be the most blatant--because, yes, it's a jab at the series' countless references to "family," but it's also a nod to the fans themselves.