John L. Taylor @johnnylogic@qoto.org
- Home
- Portland, OR
- Website
- http://www.johnnylogic.org/
Data scientist, fraud researcher, bibliophile, humanist.
Joined Nov 2022
John L. Taylor
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A 20-year-long Indigenous-led movement to undam the Klamath River just won the largest river restoration project in history! FERC unanimously voted Thursday to remove the four lower Klamath dams starting next year! The salmon are coming home for the first time since 1918.
John L. Taylor
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Meet Eugen Rotchko (@Gargron), founder of @Mastodon, who just got a profile in TIME magazine. I encourage you to really read the entire excellent interview, bc not only will you learn more about the ethos behind Mastodon, but you can also hear what it’s like for an intelligent human being to talk about social media.
“Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands. Its Founder Has a Vision for Democratizing Social Media.”
“You are what you leave behind.”
― Greg Bear, City at the End of Time
Science fiction author and San Diego Comi-Con founder [Greg Bear](https://gizmodo.com/obituary-greg-bear-sci-fi-author-1849806303) has passed.
John L. Taylor
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John L. Taylor
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Let's take a look. Galactica can generate wikipedia articles, supposedly.
So let's see what they look like. Here's one for Brandolini's law, the principle that bullshit takes another of magnitude less effort create than to clean up.
Left: Galactica's attempt at creating a wikipedia entry
https://galactica.org/?prompt=wiki+article+on+brandolini%27s+law
Right: The actual wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
John L. Taylor
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@reido @atomicpoet I put it this way. Someone walks past you and says “hi.” Someone else walks past you and strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and feathers and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which maximizes engagement? Understand that and you understand the last decade of civic discourse and how the algorithm distorted it. Mediated speech like this is not even really speech. It’s crowdsourced unpaid filler content.
John L. Taylor
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"If you’ve ever wondered how social media is changing our society, we’re finally seeing a debate that’s not just a bunch of hot takes. Professors from the world’s leading universities are now weighing in, taking into account a vast body of studies to draw conclusions about the actual impact of Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc. on the way we live."
#socialmedia #twitter #facebook #tiktok
https://getpocket.com/collections/is-social-media-making-us-stupid?utm_source=pocket-newtab
"Each dot is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars... The galaxies seen in this image are all in the distant Universe and appear as they did 10-12 billion years ago. They are colour coded in blue, green, and red to represent the three wavebands used for Herschels observation. Those appearing in white have equal intensity in all three bands and are the ones forming the most stars. The galaxies shown in red are likely to be the most distant, appearing as they did around 12 billion years ago." ([Source](https://www.herschel.caltech.edu/image/nhsc2010-008a ))
And, yes, the image does look like a picture of a 1970's brown carpet.
John L. Taylor
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Years ago, Pew Research Center identified 6 types of Twitter conversation networks. How many are common on Mastodon?
Definitely #2 (unified, tight networks), maybe #3 (fragmented networks united by hashtags on popular topics).
https://pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/20/the-six-types-of-twitter-conversations/
"This video is taken from a 16-mm movie made in the 1950s by the late David Rogers at Vanderbilt University... It depicts a human polymorphonuclear leukocyte (neutrophil) [a type of white blood cell] on a blood film, crawling among red blood cells... The neutrophil is 'chasing' Staphylococcus aureus microorganisms, added to the film." ([Source](https://goopenva.org/authoring/459-white-blood-cell-chases-bacteria/view))
John L. Taylor
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🏳️🌈🖖🏽
Today is #TransDayofRemembrance when we honor and remember trans lives taken by violence. How horrifying that a deadly attack upon the LGBTQ+ community in Colorado Springs should occur right before this solemn day.
Hate isn’t born in us. It is taught. It must end.
This starts with our political leaders, who must cease their cynical attacks against our community before another attack occurs.
Call out the hate. Remind them of its consequences. Hold them to account.
John L. Taylor
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Ayeeee I'm starting to see #BlackTwitter come through with #BlackMastodon 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. Keep coming through, because we ain't bout to have this joint looking like 90s-2000s internet.
It's time to see just how accepting and inclusive this place is.
John L. Taylor
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“The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.” — Stephen Batchelor, _Buddhism Without Beliefs_.
John L. Taylor
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Grant Sanderson has released another excellent video, this time on the subject of [convolution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuXjwB4LzSA).
I am regularly impressed with the lucidity of his explanations. If you are interested in mathematics at all, you are probably already aware of his videos, but it doesn't hurt to highlight his work again and again.
Ze Frank has dropped another informative and amusing zoology video-- the subject, tarantulas.
John L. Taylor
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Do you know Judea Pearl?
He bootstrapped the probabilistic approach to IA in his 1988 book
📘 "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"
He also invented Bayesian Networks and contributed greatly to causality.
Most famous for Pearl's Calculus and the do operator.
🏆 Turing award "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning"
#uncertainty #bayes #bayesianism #IA #ML #MachineLearning #researcher
John L. Taylor
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Since people are checking out #Mastodon, where the lack of a recommendation algorithm is a feature, not a bug, it might be a good time to return to rss readers. I've been using The Old Reader off and on, as my google reader replacement. Mastodon has some rss features too.
Thinking about FTX and its entanglement with effective altruism, I have long had misgivings about both the philosophical position and its adoption by corporations.
In addition to the usual problems with utilitarianism, I am particularly concerned by its epistemic naïveity (esp. in longtermism), use as corporate whitewash, and emptiness in addressing meaningful structural change. [Amia Srinivasan's review](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse) of _Doing Good Better_ captures this well:
"[E]ffective altruism, so far at least, has been a conservative movement, calling us back to where we already are: the world as it is, our institutions as they are. MacAskill does not address the deep sources of global misery – international trade and finance, debt, nationalism, imperialism, racial and gender-based subordination, war, environmental degradation, corruption, exploitation of labour – or the forces that ensure its reproduction. Effective altruism doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it. In this sense it leaves everything just as it is. This is no doubt comforting to those who enjoy the status quo – and may in part account for the movement’s success."
The entire review is well worth a read if you are interested in EA and ethics.
- Home
- Portland, OR
- Website
- http://www.johnnylogic.org/
Data scientist, fraud researcher, bibliophile, humanist.
Joined Nov 2022
