Ghazi @curiousmind@qoto.org

The #EU is finalizing new #AI regulations, but #OpenAI CEO #Sam_Altman says he has ‘many concerns’ about the law. The EU AI Act would require the company to disclose details of its training methods and data sources.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737116/openai-ai-regulation-eu-ai-act-cease-operating

A friend on Signal sent this to me, hilarious for probably anyone involved with #privacy #security :

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/introducing-four-step-authentication

Encryption rules. 💪

#Signal donne la possibilité de changer le nom et l'icône de l'application... Astucieux...

Read the inspiring story of how Eyüpsultan, Turkey switched to free software, gained independence from proprietary software, and saved money ($$$) in the process! If they did it in their city, your city can do it too! | Read more at: https://u.fsf.org/3m9

Mastodon now has over 12,000,000 users! That is more people than the total number of people who lived between the years 400 and 1790, if you believe that all historians are wrong. Incredible.

If we took out the Onion masthead, would you know this was satire?
HT @richardsever

https://www.theonion.com/florida-bans-men-from-becoming-nurses-1850448027

In which the author experiments with chatGPT as a reviewer.

"However, when asked to suggest more specific improvements, it fails and starts what is often described as hallucinating, the process by which the LLM provides a confident sounding response that is false or unsubstantiated."
#PeerReview

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00290-6/fulltext

Meme alert, not redacted.

I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon, is in fact the federated universe or as I've recently taken to calling it, the Fediverse. Mastodon is not a social network unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functional federated network made useful many other instances, such as Misskey, Pleroma, Akkoma and Peertube compromising a full federated social network as defined by the ActivityPub protocol.

Many computer users run a modified version of a Fediverse instance every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the type of Fediverse instance which is widely used today is often called "Mastodon", and many its users are not aware that it is basically part the Fediverse, developed by many other projects.

There really is a Mastodon, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Mastodon is only a single type of Fediverse instance: a program in the network that operates as a single node that interoperates with all the other types of nodes that you interact with. Mastodon is an essential part of the Fediverse, but useless by itself; it can only be functional in the context of a fully federated universe. Mastodon is normally used in combination with many other instances: the whole system is basically the federated universe with Mastodon added, or the Fediverse. All the so-called "Mastodon" distributions are really distributions of platforms that interoperate with the ActivityPub protocol.

Person who blocks everyone that disagrees with them: Everyone I see online agrees with me. Clearly I have the best opinions.

A great win for privacy: Google Analytics has been declared illegal in Europe! 🎉😀
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/is-google-analytics-illegal/

Israeli settle violence has been normalized. This is hideous and appalling. Those who commit such violence should be held accountable https://www.972mag.com/diyar-omari-shooting-sandala/ #Nakba75 #Palestine #IsraeliCrimes #Israelioccupation #humanrights

So ... I've been in IT for 20+ years, most of that time working directly in databases.

That whole thing about Twitter, FB, Reddit, Google, whoever ... "deleting" your data after you jump thru the right hoops.

That's all bullshit.

I mean, even apart from the whole "market, monetize, sell and spy on our userbase" thing.

DBAs, people who actually work with databases, we almost never *actually* delete stuff in a database.

1/