Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115760265788529588

Most games - including one I did AI for - use some form of what we call "classical AI": anything from planning, to pathfinding, to even having small ML models to adapt to player behavior, etc.

They've done this for *decades*.

None of these are generative models, or the product of generative models.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling generative AI.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but please don’t post direct links to the elementary OS ISO, especially on release day. This is my only form of income and I really don’t make a lot of it. I want to keep making elementary OS as my job, but when you bypass our pay-what-you-can ask it cuts directly into the revenue I rely on to pay rent and buy food. The vast majority of people already pay nothing when they download. Please don’t take away the biggest opportunity I have for folks to support my work

"I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me."

https://eiratansey.com/2025/12/20/i-announced-my-divorce-on-instagram-and-then-ai-impersonated-me/

#tech #technology #BigTech #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #MachineLearning #GenAI #generativeAI #AISlop #Meta #Google #gemini #OpenAI #ChatGPT #anthropic #claude

@Fynn @fedora big companies have had their hands in Linux and FOSS for a long time, I don't understand the horror and surprise of all the comments. The people thinking Microsoft sponsoring Fedora means they're going to ruin it or add Microsoft Accounts or something like that are really dumb and don't understand how the world works.

This was released today:

> We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB)...
>
> ... includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
>
> ... world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

1/2

“This may be the first time an ICE agent is incarcerated in his own ICE jail.” https://www.citybeat.com/news/update-cincinnati-ice-leader-charged-federally-booked-into-butler-county-jail/

Ever updated an R or Python package and had existing code break without warning?

You know something changed, but figuring out what can take hours.

That is exactly what Diffify helps with.

Diffify lets you compare different versions of R packages from CRAN and Python packages from PyPI before you upgrade.

📝 Release notes
🔗 Dependency changes
📦 Added or removed objects
🧩 Function updates
🔍 Argument level differences

See what changed before it breaks your project: https://diffify.com/

We live in the stupidest possible timeline.

https://www.404media.co/unauthorized-edit-to-ukraines-frontline-maps-point-to-polymarkets-war-betting/

“With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop.”

https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/

I've collected a set of papers and articles that discuss errors in research due to software errors, in a GitHub repo: https://github.com/danielskatz/errors-due-to-research-software. I think this could be a useful resource for many purposes, and additional contributions are welcome.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115689198997943088

I’m proud to share my first blog as @Mastodon’s Community Director. Well the first one posted under my name at least 😉

Digital social networking is one of the most important threads in the fabric of our societies. Right now, we’re letting that thread be controlled by social media platforms that let advertisements for scams stay up because they’re profitable, and that use their algorithms to run human research experiments on us without our consent. That’s not the society I want.

“By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay. If we allow these conditions to continue, we will leave behind the voices that truly matter; the people and their public institutions. It is critical that those voices not be silenced forever. The promise of the #fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms built by and for people like you, where #SocialSovereignty is a right and not a privilege.”

In this thread, we asked folks to crowdsource a list of resources so you can find your local representative. Find them, contact them, and tell them this: if you care about a free and just future, and if you care about #DigitalSovereignty, you must leave X and join the fediverse.

#ItsTimeToAbolishX #SocialWeb #Mastodon #SocialMedia

Blogs deserve love too (and interoperability) ❤️

I just learned about Rogue Scholar @rogue_scholar, a repository that makes science blogs more findable and citable: full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs, metadata...

You can register your blog and search ~200 blogs already there.

Learn more about Rogue Scholar here: https://rogue-scholar.org/

And I wrote a bit more at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alelazic_roguescholar-openscience-openinfrastructure-activity-7403810948412641281-O2TA

#openscience #openinfrastructure #scicomm

European Twitter exploded following yesterday’s rants by US and Russian hardliners calling to “abolish EU”.

Lots of voices like “we need European social media!!”

And I said, “actually, you know what, we kind of have one for years…” 😆

Some people started complaining “but nobody uses Mastodon” and I once again had no choice but to explain that if “nobody uses” then how come I’ve got 3k+ followers here and engaging in truly interesting discussions not less often than there😁

There’s two data points where Fediverse can be indeed seen as less attractive than US cortisol aggregators:

• number of engagements, but granted that up to 60-70% of these on Twitter are generated by bots who cares? Maybe media advertising agencies do, but I don’t.
• presence of public persons - this is where Fediverse actually loses, because it’s a network that grows between them and can’t be “invited”

I just had to dig this up for something I'm writing, so here's the UN's space debris database (which has mostly turned from "space debris on the ground" to "garbage SpaceX dropped on other countries"): https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/treatyimplementation/arra-art-v/unlfd.html

What I would like is a citation search tool which divides citing work into a) direct replications b) direct extensions and c) stuff that is just citing for support while they do something completely different. And then I can ignore all of c). Does such a tool exist yet? #AcademicChatter

How do you think the brain "stores" our personal memories? 🧠

This is a question for everyone out there, especially for non-neuroscientists and regardless of education level or familiarity with biology.

I'd just like to hear all your ideas and theories, however crazy they may sound. Be as specific or vague as you like. Please do not look at the answers before giving yours so you are not influenced.
More specifically:

What do you think happens (in the brain) at the time of experiencing something that we will end up remembering?
What do you think happens (in the brain) when, later, we remember that thing?

Boosts welcome but answers even more welcome!

#Neuroscience #Memory #EpisodicMemory

Twenty streets of Paris before and after in one minute