Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

In 2025, Republicans will gut our democracy and push anti-abortion laws into every state if they're given the chance. You know this but the stakes of the 2024 election might not be clear to everyone in your community. Speak up and help raise awareness: Our right to our own bodies and our right to our own voice are on the line in November. https://act.indivisible.org/lte/majority-over-maga-LTE?source=mastodon&medium=directpost

✨ jobs ✨ Come and work with us! We are hiring 12 new positions. All full time, all permanent. Covering many areas of research with and about the digital. Please help us share with those who might be interested. Links and details here: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/enhanced/linking/kings-college-london-digital-humanities-feb-2024/

UPDATE: Two days after we published this story, the #DOJ filed a document in federal court, reversing its previous position and conceding that Keyon Paylor’s conviction should be vacated “in the interest of justice.”

The DOJ defended its earlier use of opposing theories as “based on the government’s reasonable belief in the evidence” but stated that “public confidence cannot sustain irreconcilable versions of one event.”

#News #Law #CriminalJustice

https://www.propublica.org/article/what-happens-when-prosecutors-offer-opposing-versions-of-truth?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Because nothing will go wrong with using AI to generate subject headings and summaries for library resources.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

🙃

https://exlibrisgroup.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-blog-series-introducing-our-ai-metadata-generator/

This year, I'm acting as the Publication Chair of a conference in our university. The conference has been running for almost 20 years. In the recent years, Microsoft CMT has been the default choice of platform to manage the peer-review process. I really want to go for a free and open plaform instead.

I appreciate any directions on suitable peer-review management systems for an academic conference.
Thanks! 🙏

#academicchatter
#AcademicFedi
#openscience

At least 100 instances of malicious AI ML models were found on the Hugging Face platform, some of which can execute code on the victim's machine, giving attackers a persistent backdoor.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-ai-models-on-hugging-face-backdoor-users-machines/

Check your website on the gender selection alignment chart

Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen says she urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a letter to take steps to bolster the Palestinian economy and warned the economic crisis in the occupied West Bank could have negative consequences for Israel.

https://t.co/KEzSIdweB3

Hey! Please sign this petition - it could make a real difference:

https://www.change.org/p/urge-duke-university-to-reconsider-closing-their-herbarium

Duke University want to close its herbarium, a massive collection of 825,000 plant specimens. The Dean of Natural Sciences gives this reason: "we are a university with limited resources". But Duke has an endowment of $11.6 billion - and this is a key resource for studying biodiversity!

“There are no herbariums that could absorb something like this,” said Kathleen Pryer, the director of the herbarium. “I’m very concerned that it will end up in a warehouse somewhere and become forgotten.”

14,306 people have signed the petition to stop this. Can you help bring it up to 15,000?

Or if you want to read more first:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240224094530/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/science/duke-herbarium.html

I'll quote a bit:

"Herbariums have been a mainstay of biology for centuries. Botanists return from expeditions with dried leaves, flowers, stems and seeds, which are then stored for posterity. Some specimens have even been the basis for naming new species.

But herbariums are also valuable because they include plants collected over long stretches of time, helping scientists track the impact of humans on the environment. Some collections have shown that plants have shifted their ranges as the planet has warmed, for example.

The collections have become even more useful as technology has advanced. With improved DNA sequencing, researchers have begun to extract genetic material from dried plant specimens, tackling old scientific questions such as the origin of the world’s crops.

Botanists are far from finished documenting the diversity of plants. And every year, they identify new species that need to be stored because many are already threatened with extinction."

The Brief – The Belarus exception https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/the-brief-the-belarus-exception/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

This is a pretty interesting video on the tech industry’s #layoffs phenomenon of the last few years. There seem to be a lot of vague and hand-wavy factors, but the bottom line appears to be:

a. Profit-maximizing to satisfy investors, by reducing payroll that has grown because companies over-hired based on unrealistically rosy projections of growth during the COVID years.
b. Taking money from payroll and pouring it into AI in the hopes of making *something* out of it at some point.
c. Everyone else is doing it (and getting rewarded in the stock market).

So yeah, this is another data point that suggests that layoffs are a symptom of overly-optimistic projections that led to over-hiring when money was cheap. Now that money is costly, investors want ROI, and what easier way to do that than by cutting payroll.

AI was a wild card. Even without #AI, I think layoffs would have happened anyway. But AI certainly made it worse.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/24/why-widespread-tech-layoffs-keep-happening-despite-strong-us-economy.html

Please BOOST!
#SettlerSaturday #IndigenousMutualAid

My budget is ultra-tight right now. I'm desperate to get Turtle Island bills paid this week. If you can help donate or boost, it would be much appreciated. Mvto!

Turtle Island server expenses:
Currently 50% of goal due Mar 1

https://cash.app/$Yehuda1491
https://venmo.com/Yehuda1491
https://ko-fi.com/TurtleIsland

#DigitalLandBack #TurtleIsland

A frightening thing about spending time at my (elderly, rural) parents' place is the ads.

They're both very lefty, lifelong union members, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, LGBT* allies, etc... I get it from somewhere!

Some algorithm, probably Google Ads, has decided that since they're elderly and in a rural county, they're ripe for pitches like "NEW PANDEMIC SWEEPING THE US" and "MIGRANTS OVERWHELMING THE BORDER".

I know they won't fall for this shit, but seeing this targeting is fucking scary.

The art market has been characterized for centuries by its opacity and illiquidity. A new Liechtenstein-based stock exchange, Artex, hopes to change all that.

https://t.co/gkdLoRduEP

@GossiTheDog

Our server has one of thr highest long term (comes back within 3 months) of any server. Last i checked we had nearly 40% retention.

@axios I'd argue that today validation is a much more pressing problem than speed. But of course this does not suit the M$ marketing narrative

With his cynical comments on #Navalny that are inevitably raising eyebrows, #Salvini is trying to pull attention away from other developments: a journalistic investigation in Russia has now evidence that the famous 2018 Metropol visit was to secure funding for his #Lega from #Putin's #FSB. Italian politics today is as exciting as it was during the cold war.
https://theins.ru/en/politics/268921

OpenAI's Sora is a next-pixel-predictor. It being classed as a world simulator, reminds me of @pluralistic's comparison of the belief that a next-word-predictor would result in a conscious being, to a belief that breeding faster horses would magically result in a steam locomotive.

#QOTO is back after a long migration in the first stage of our upgrade. Now that we are on a new home we will give it 24 horus to see if the move was bug free (As it seems to be) and then we will start upgrading versions one at a time day by day.. The upgrades are prepared and ready and should be **much** quicker.

The move took a while as we keep a backlog of every message to the start of the fediverse so our media and DB stores are quite large and it took a long time. But we are back!!!

Me: Okay, so where did you get Parkville, Maryland, the location I absolutely live in?

Microsoft: It was randomly assigned to you for hypothetical situation reasons.