Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Let's suppose you have to teach C to 7yo kids.

Where do you start from?

How do you setup their playground?

(please, don't question the goal in this thread... let's focus on solutions)

Ferocious and brilliant. I really don't know how much #election post-mortems matter at this point. But if you think they do, read this one.

https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-US-allowed-such-a-despicable-person-to-become-president-again/answer/Kate-Stoneman

Dear friends, if today is hard and what your soul needs is a comfort-motivation-distraction, if you want to listen to a thoughtful conversation about how we can value each other better and support each other more in tech, we just released a new Change, Technically episode with @sue

We discuss organizing around problems instead of sorting by tools, why education doesn't magically fix everything, and more. It's a long, gentle listen this time. ❤️

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/16081177-what-really-matters-in-software

We’ve improved private group video calls in Signal with new features, incl. call links.

Create a link that anyone on Signal can use to join a group call *without* having to join a Signal group chat first

+ raise hand, emoji reactions, calls tab, & more
https://signal.org/blog/call-links

It took me a while, but the US elections finally gave me the push to try to move here, so welcome to me!

"My principle is always, if I may say so casually: You dance with those who are in the room. And that also applies to the future president of the US," Scholz said.

"I'm never naive, but I'm also a bit unflustered," he added.

[wish I were less flustered! Digital governance just changed a lot I suspect, but maybe not.]

https://www.dw.com/en/trump-talks-ukraine-in-separate-calls-with-putin-scholz/a-70749452?

@julian @msbernst I think in practice, the small increase in upfront nerves caused by the push to post was short-lived. Because commit offered a warrant/justification for posting, people felt more comfortable in the act of posting and had the expectation of being supported/responded to by the rest of the group.

This paper argues that online spaces become ghost towns because it's too easy to lurk without contributing, and that asking people to regularly re-commit—or the incoming messages start getting muted—reverses the trend. arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267

It works! #cscw2024 paper by @lindsay

@spoltier This work derives in part from my work with Nolan McCarty, you might want to read his books on inequality & political polarisation -- one is a leading academic text (with two coauthors) the other is an effort at popular writing. A graph is here https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2016/06/robots-are-owned-owners-are-taxed.html The other part is my work on antitrust with Helena Malikova. For that I'd recommend reading Tim Wu's book "the curse of bigness," particularly on the history of antitrust.

DTrace expertise with Adam Leventhal! 🛠️
Great to see so many Rustaceans interested in observability tools and techniques. 🦀
Thanks to the speaker! 🫶

#RustLab2024 #TechConference @ahl

@foolishowl there is also significantly less agency sometimes in where you can exchange care information because it IS more tangible, local -- your local "other parents in the school" are on facebook? You can't just go make a community replacement for that out of other strangers. Women are more likely to be facilitating those tangible needs (as in https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697130/holding-it-together-by-jessica-calarco/ ) and that has compounding, cumulative effects in NEEDING the most popular choices

Other demographics as measured at least for the top used places are actually shockingly more equivalently distributed (shocking to me personally anyway) which is why I think the gender split is worth calling out as a big differentiator, possible exception being some pockets of education*

*https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/

Model merging is tricky when model weights aren’t aligned

Introducing KnOTS 🪢: a gradient-free framework to merge LoRA models.

KnOTS is plug-and-play,

boosting SoTA merging methods by up to 4.3%🚀

📜: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19735

💻: https://github.com/gstoica27/KnOTS
🧵 1/8

#NLP #NLProc #LLMs #ML #CV #machinelearning #DataScience #data

Henry Farrell: “Patrick O'Brian is a Great Conservative Writer”

“His concern is the problem of right authority”

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/patrick-obrian-is-a-great-conservative

@TomF not sure i agree with "no fun allowed on mastodon" to be honest

I mostly avoid shitposting on here. I leave that to X and Bsky. Because you are my honorable friends, not my unwilling audience.