Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

HOMOSEXUALS PLEASE DEPOSIT WITH US ALL OF YOUR PRECIOUS GAY SO WE MAY SEAL IT AWAY IN OUR VAULTS

@mcc *hurrying up to the ceo* sir- there's been a containment leak in the gay vault. at this rate of leakage... the whole midwest will be gay by tomorrow

@kellogh If we're being extremely pedantic, Free Software started as a movement because somebody had a printer but no printer drivers. They did not have a *per se* problem with the fact that a printer is capital nor with the capitalist system that produced the printer.

This suggests to me that we need some sort of further movement to tackle LLMs. I'm thinking about Open Access (share the docs and data), Open Hardware (share the low-level implementation details), and various open-dataset efforts.

Also, it's worth pondering whether the cost of training an LLM is innately expensive. It could be the case that only one pass is needed through the training data, and that the current system is set up as a data laundry to avoid paying license fees. The VCs funding this research are used to the idea of laundering resources through startups. Shalizi has an exploration of the implicated components: http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.html

But you know, as long as software journals don't even want to allow the reporting of participant demographics, we cannot possibly begin to scratch the surface on any of this. I think it is important to consider the selection effects of what we hear about, the long chains of pipe we've laid down that dictate who is heard in this moment, and what complexity is compressed into legible summaries that treat all "developers" like a neutral blank slate, interchangeable "personas."

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Clock ticks (†Horoixodidae; A. A. Koch, 2144) are a now-extinct family of family of parasitic arachnids of the order Ixodida. Adult ticks are approximately 1 to 8 nanoseconds long, although their larvae may reach as much as 1 microseconds in duration. Since the widespread adoption of asynchronous logic in the Third Industrial Revolution, habitat destruction and loss of reproductive capability have caused the loss of this once-widespread group of animals.

All-terrain power wheelchairs are now available at state parks in Georgia, opening up hiking trails to wheelchair users. #ShareGoodNewsToo https://gastateparks.org/Accessibility/TrackChairs

Honestly I don't think "gaining adoption" is that important in a truly diverse ecosystem.

The reason concepts like adoption become useful is when it drives compatibility. We do want different servers to be able to participate in the larger society. But I think compatibility emerges because people *want* to participate. You have to add the value first. Then people will do the work to be compatible so they can get to the value.

And of course, the army wouldn't land the aircraft on the highway without paying for the highway tax sticker.
#vignette #AlphaUno

@gdupont @0x5DA @mozilla I would argue that providing free and on demand descriptions directly to a screen reader is a better use of time, energy, and utility than allowing writers' use. There is also absolutely no reliable way to determine if a description was AI generated.

@0x5DA @mozilla It can be useful for a person using a screen reader to have access to an AI description, but crucial there is that said user needs to know that that's the source of said description. There are repeated patterns of those who feel pressured to include descriptions but don't actually care about accessibility doing the absolute minimum, manifesting here as using the direct AI output without examination or editing.

So yes, a lack of inline alt text is better than AI gen inline.

Streisand effect in effect https://drive.google.com/file/d/16rbaGNH9J-brtmc4T4jZsnjjA9c_eItZ/view (see https://theintercept.com/2024/06/03/columbia-law-review-palestine-board-website/ )

I've proposed the idea to the Signal community that if tools like Recall go out of their way to recognize and ignore DRM'ed content, then messenger programs that want to avoid being recorded should have a small always-on DRM'ed image on display at all times as a defensive measure.

If the tools are there, we might as well put them to good use.

Ich glaube die "Paywallisierung" der Medien macht langsam alles kaputt an Vertrauen. Wichtige Informationen sind nicht mehr zugänglich für Bürger:innen. Ich weiss Qualitätsjournalismus hat seinen Preis. Es MUSS aber anders gehen.

@mkarliner reminds me of the money quote from a podcast I listened to recently:

"If you’re searching for comparative advantage in doing creative work, you want to know where status is, but mostly so you can avoid it."

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/michael-nielsen/

There has been a remarkable breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis (though still very far from fully resolving this conjecture) by Guth and Maynard making the first substantial improvement to a classical 1940 bound of Ingham regarding the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function (and more generally, controlling the large values of various Dirichlet series): https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20552

Let 𝑁(σ,𝑇) denote the number of zeroes of the Riemann zeta function with real part at least σ and imaginary part at most 𝑇 in magnitude. The Riemann hypothesis tells us that 𝑁(σ,𝑇) vanishes for any σ>1/2. We of course can't prove this unconditionally. But as the next best thing, we can prove zero density estimates, which are non-trivial upper bounds on 𝑁(σ,𝑇). It turns out that the value σ=3/4 is a key value. In 1940, Ingham obtained the bound \(N(\sigma,T) \ll T^{3/5+o(1)}\). Over the next eighty years, the only improvement to this bound has been small refinements to the 𝑜(1) error. This has limited us from doing many things in analytic number theory: for instance, to get a good prime number theorem in almost all short intervals of the form \((x,x+x^\theta)\), we have long been limited to the range \(\theta>1/6\), with the main obstacle being the lack of improvement to the Ingham bound. (1/2)

Looking back on  #emfcamp, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but as far as I could see there were no LLM or GenAI demos, and I didn't have any conversations about AI/ML with anyone.
Actually, I take it back, there was a really cool video GenAI in the Null Sector. But still...

#emf #ai

*scratching head* is… renting a car way cheaper in France than it is in North America for some reason? Because I just reserved a car rental out of Charles De Gaulle, which is where I'd expect gouging, and it was shockingly cheap to me

Recorded a podcast interview with Robby Peralta at mnemonic last week! Very much enjoyed our conversation about security for high-risk people, executives, and civil society in general. Even snuck in a brief mention of indoor skydiving, just because. https://mnemonic.buzzsprout.com/652378/15179615

It's kind of amazing how much people disparage work that's really intentionally about helping people. I don't even think people know they're doing it. Even when people emphasize the care aspect it's almost always at the cost of acting like you're less intelligent