Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

I think I now know where to draw the line between "good" and "bad" #GenAI, and possibly (or rather obviously) the same for #machineLearning. It's simply whether the input data has been constructed rigorously. Put this way it's the most obvious statement ever, but somehow #BigTech have convinced us all that they advance research by recklessly scraping #twitter, #4chan and who knows what else (they keep their training data secret).

What is good science in computational linguistics? Well, open data is a step towards it. But open and crap is not a solution. We need to actually _know_ and manage the data. And nobody in their right mind would want to plough through toxic data to clean it. We've all heard the horrors of Kenyan data workers who do it for money and still suffer doing it.

But better (yes, also smaller) corpora are of interest to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Think of https://textcreationpartnership.org or https://mlat.uzh.ch. Yes, they are too big for individual researchers or even teams to handle, but we have the organisational and technological infrastructure to work on them collectively. We've been doing it for ages and we will continue doing it. We just need to do it together.

And this is the goal of the European Research Council project proposal I'm submitting in this very moment.

@CiaraNi I've tried tuta's free tier and would be curious if anyone could suggest alternatives with better usability. Thanks!

@ben what does "free to stream on Netflix" stand for? I opened the link and it told me I don't have a subscription.

@anna I've never found myself much in place with Twitter-like platforms. I enjoyed FB much more in the early days. I don't like people-centric conversations, I prefer topic-based communities. The fediverse affords this through platforms like a.gup.pe, mbin, lemmy and piefed. The best part is that it's a common experience with mastodon and its alikes. Still figuring how to use it and the experience needs to improve a lot.

Certainly never going back to a social network sustained around clickbait and scam. By now I'm convinced that any corporate social network has no other options but become exactly of that type.

@dougmerritt @lemgandi that's extremely powerful actually, but I don't think anyone has developed a strong argument yet that expert systems and LLMs are different dimensions of intelligence. As a speculation, I'd rather see the former as the discrete version and the latter as the continuous one.

@lemgandi @dougmerritt whereas GenAI is not so much, unless you consider matrix/tensor dimensions

Here's more on why Italy's idea of Piracy Shield just can't work https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/26/italys-piracy-shield-moving-from-digital-farce-to-national-tragedy/

The bureaucratic rigidness of the Italian government has taken it to a completely unnecessary conflict with US providers. With the poorly-planned Privacy Shield initiative, it entered a digital sovereignty conflict the country never prepared for. The appalling thing is that even the outspoken Mario Draghi didn't try to walk his talk. And now Cloudfare threatens to resist.

"The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-pull-servers-out-of-italy-over-order-that-it-block-pirate-sites/