Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Die #Vorratsdatenspeicherung ist grundrechtswidrig.

Um die rechtsstaatliche Alternative «Quick Freeze» durchzusetzen und damit die Massenüberwachung durch den Staat nachhaltig abzuschaffen, brauchen wir 23'000 Franken.

Hilf mit, die Vorratsdatenspeicherung zu kippen: https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/quickfreeze/?s=m

#quickfreeze @init7

Rec Room was a great place to work, but they had to lay off over half their staff, so I am looking for the next opportunity.

If you are looking for a senior graphics coder to solve all your rendering problems on any platform, either remote or in the Seattle area, I'd love to hear from you.

Picture is purely for attention, but I can drive pretty well.

Ich wollte algebraische Geometrie lernen, war aber zu unbegarbt.

The internet, once hailed as a democratizing force for information, has become a primary vector for informational pathogens. Memetic contagions, engineered for maximum engagement, spread faster than well-researched, nuanced information. Our defenses are failing. (2/2)

okay but serious talk, I'm only mentioning this at all because it's a rare enough occurrence to distinguish between them. when I first got serious about mastodon during the great migration a few years ago, there were more antagonizers, but it's calmed down. I think my local @jerry must have good taste in moderation because I'm rarely bothered by randos but I also don't ever find myself unable to follow someone because their ten-thousand-user instance got defederated over a trivial drama three years ago

The Octopus thought experiment sucks. If your instinct is like "LLMs can't learn anything about the actual world from mere text" AND you are intellectually curious, here is your reading list. 1/4

Jevons' Paradox is good sometimes - Andy Masley https://andymasley.substack.com/p/jevons-paradox-isnt-always-bad #AI #climate

"auf die sheafe Bahn gekommen - wie algebraische Geometrie fast mein Leben ruinierte"

VDLM2 Message From: N211BZ / MX0579

Message: HELLO HAD A QUESTION LETS SAY YOU HAVE A LASAGNA AND THEN SOMEONE GIVES YOU SECOND LASAGNA IF YOU PUT THE 2ND LASAGNA ON TOP OF THE 1ST HOW MANY LASAGNAS

Track Aircraft

Area: Virginia, USA

#acars #vdlm2 #N211BZ #MX0579

#Apertus is out.

Fully open, multilingual and privacy-first SotA 8B and 70B LLMs from SwissAI Initiative academic consortium led by @epfl ETHZ, and CSCS, Apache 2.0.

You can:

-Try it here: https://publicai.co/

- Run it locally on HF Transformers: https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai/Apertus-70B-Instruct-2509

- Read the technical report: https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/blob/main/Apertus_Tech_Report.pdf

1/🧵

Si vous connaissez quelqu'un qui habite à #Lausanne et s'intéresse pour l'identité électronique #Swiyu, je vais participer à deux conférences:

- jeudi au SDMB - https://mobilisons.ch/events/1e42ca47-63c8-4e19-8613-6239115361ce
- vendredi au SDMB - https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/event/conference-specialisee-la-mise-en-oeuvre-technique-de-le-id-en-suisse/

Le public cible sont des gens intéressés à connaître le pourquoi et le comment de ce projet. Mais, sauf questions dans ce sens, la présentation restera très générale.

Some notes on gpt-realtime - a slightly confusing release since it appears gpt-realtime replaces gpt-4o-realtime-preview but is still accompanied by the much cheaper gpt-4o-mini-realtime-preview https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/1/introducing-gpt-realtime/

Found this figure in a discussion group on LLMs. I thought it's very interesting to plot countries on such a scale. But I would like to see 'deepseek' also somewhere on this graph.

I was interviewed in the Financial Times about "the perils of vibe coding", and it made it into the print edition! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/the-perils-of-vibe-coding/

Maybe this time we’re going to discover that language *really is* perilous and needs to be regulated. But we thought that about novels, and about rock lyrics. We had dozens of murders and suicides documentably associated with D&D. This is a topic where anecdotal evidence usually turns out worthless.

Dungeons & Dragons and Burgers...

@0xabad1dea I love the fact that French novelist Jules Verne learned the traditional Russian units of distance so that he could make use of them in his novel Michael Strogoff.

Related: A verst is made up of 500 sazhen, each of which is made up of 3 arshin. A verst is also just a hair longer than a kilometer.

Aside: The biblical tale of the 'talents' given to the wise and foolish servants gains meaning when you consider that (according to some) a talent was equivalent to the volume of a large water-urn filled to the brim with denarius coins, each of which represented an entire day's wages. At current US minimum wage, that would mean each coin would be worth $58.

Reading about the history of the Darda-Bahn (including the bizarre lawsuits around it - Darda Inc. suing Majorette on patent infringement in 1984, Life-Like getting sued for blindly copying patent numbers onto their packaging in the 90s) it’s fascinating to realize that enshittification has been going on since the 1990s.

Really tempted to study the patent drawings and try to figure out why modern chinese Darda motors suck while the 1980s German ones are still going strong today.

anyway I have a couple of keynotes I am looking forward to giving that stick a sword right into the heart of this 😇

So, again today we get another crystal clear example of how #Bluesky is not decentralized. The company just blocked all users from an entire US state and those users are completely cut off. No other way to interact with the Bluesky network.

BECAUSE BLUESKY IS A CENTRALIZED PLATFORM.

Folks on Bluesky. There is a decentralized alternative. Just create an account on any decentralized Mastodon server. You will love it here. Promise.

https://joinmastodon.org/

I just had to explain to an older lady through a language that neither of us speak natively that her phone isn’t broken and unable to charge, but she set a screenshot with an almost-drained battery as her wallpaper. I doubt I got the finer points of this across…