Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Models should take languages into account, but also cultures
Arabic is not a culture. It includes many dialects, and many cultures

@amr-keleg.bsky.social
surveys the current practices in https://alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.15003
And finishes with a call
📈🤖
#LLMs #multiculturality #AI #RLHF

"Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) slammed Defense Secretary Pete #Hegseth, calling him a danger to the country and the United States’ military after The #Atlantic reported on Monday that its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been included on a #Signal channel that..." www.ktsm.com/hill-politic... #law

Moulton: Hegseth a danger to U...

Wow - 23andme files for bancruptcy, after the board refused a takeover bid by its current CEO. Now I wonder what will happen to the data of the 14 million samples they gathered so far. While I know that some people using 23andme don't care about their genome being available, others think it is highly private data and should not be publicly available.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/dna-testing-firm-23andme-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-sell-itself-2025-03-24/

It’s disheartening to see AI reactionism lead my community to a 180° on copyright.

Everyone is merrily attacking LibGen now. If it didn’t exist, big tech companies would still find training data, it just wouldn’t be accessible to regular people.

Intel has a new CEO and it's Lip-Bu Tan! He was such an obvious front-runner that we assumed the more time that passed, the less likely it would be him. And yet! @bcantrill and I were joined by Max Cherney to discuss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sYvYYSxz2Y

If you're a fan of Isochrone maps and US census data (and who isn't?) Dan Snow just released https://opentimes.org/ and it's spectacular - I published some notes about it here, there's some very clever data engineering going on under the hood https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/17/opentimes/

But how to get to that European cloud?
L: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43394087
posted on 2025.03.17 at 19:52:34 (c=1, p=8)

https://blog.cloudflare.com/password-reuse-rampant-half-user-logins-compromised/

the only way for cloudflare to have this data is if it is inside the ssl channel, analyzing traffic to their customers who are logging in.

ssssoooooooo i guess this makes the cloudflare logs a massive target for nation states now?

By the way, if you want some evidence design consulting for your engineering organization from someone who CAN show her work? You know where to find me.

https://www.catharsisinsight.com/

This week, we spoke to Prof. Shimon Schocken about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games among other things.

Join us on the show here: https://embedded.fm/episodes/496.

Here's Prof. Schocken on the importance of hardwork in getting to the depth of concepts:

#professor #teaching #author #software #hardware #engineering #embedded

#insomnihack 2025 - keynote from Mathias Payer. I always like if a researcher presents a slide like this in 30 seconds by going over it "something, something, something" :)

But as always very interesting and eye-opening what kind of (non-)security we're relying on daily.

As people are discussing the issues witth DDoS attacks and attribution, I’m reminded of how the US Government blamed Russia for a DDoS attack against one of their neighbors, which is more accurately (though very indirectly) blamed on me.

Many years ago I complained in an IRC channel about a small website that ripped off the design of one of my sites. A somewhat shady member of that channel happened to control a sizable botnet (with primarily RU IPs). Yep. You see where this is going. (To be clear, I was venting, and didn’t ask him or anyone else to do anything.)

He thought it would be funny to get a little revenge on my behalf. He aimed his entire botnet at that website, and hit the network with so much traffic that it didn’t take down the target server, instead it saturated the core network gear for the country’s main ISP, knocking most of the country offline for several hours.

By pure coincidence, said small Eastern European country was holding national elections the day I complained about the website, something I didn’t discover until years later.

Even the US Government, with all their resources, can’t always tell the difference between a state-backed attack and a teenager “having fun” with a botnet.

Sometimes, when you're a psychologist saying psychology kind of things about workplaces, people say well you don't know about the real world. You don't understand! How I think about the workplace is not based on a textbook. It's based on the way I've lived and what I've seen and what people have done for me and what I've done for them, failures and successes and small and large braveries and so many small and large indignities.